Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis: Bran IV, ASOS

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Political Analysis:

All too soon, we’ve reached the final Bran chapter of ASOS. It’s been a very brief arc indeed, especially compared to his ACOK storyline, but thankfully we’re going out on one hell of a diva soprano high note, with Bran and company bodily transported from the political narrative into the mythological narrative, by way of literal storybook tropes.

Bran and company have picked an appropriate place to undergo such a “translation,” because the location that is the main character of this chapter is a liminal one, belonging both to the realms of history and mythology. On the one hand, it is asserted that:

“It is only another empty castle,” Meera Reed said as she gazed across the desolation of rubble, ruins, and weeds.

No, thought Bran, it is the Nightfort, and this is the end of the world. In the mountains, all he could think of was reaching the Wall and finding the three-eyed crow, but now that they were here he was filled with fears. The dream he’d had…the dream Summer had had ….No, I mustn’t think about that dream. He had not even told the Reeds, though Meera at least seemed to sense that something was wrong. If he never talked of it maybe he could forget he ever dreamed it, and then it wouldn’t have happened and Robb and Grey Wind would still be…

Jojen gazed up at him with his dark green eyes. “There’s nothing here to hurt us, Your Grace.”

Bran’s not having any of it, and not just because the wolf dream of Robb’s first and final deaths have left him so unsettled. Far more than any of the Stark children, Bran was first and foremost a student of Old Nan and he knows better than to assume that the Nightfort is just “another empty castle.” Because the Nightfort is a place that belongs to stories:

Bran wasn’t so certain. The Nightfort had figured in some of Old Nan’s scariest stories. It was here that Night’s King had reigned, before his name was wiped from the memory of man. This was where the Rat Cook had served the Andal king his prince-and-bacon pie, where the seventy-nine sentinels stood their watch, where brave young Danny Flint had been raped and murdered. This was the castle where King Sherrit had called down his curse on the Andals of old, where the ‘prentice boys had faced the thing that came in the night, where blind Symeon Star-Eyes had seen the hellhounds fighting. Mad Axe had once walked these yards and climbed these towers, butchering his brothers in the dark.

All that had happened hundreds and thousands of years ago, to be sure, and some maybe never happened at all. Maester Luwin always said that Old Nan’s stories shouldn’t be swallowed whole. But once his uncle came to see Father, and Bran asked about the Nightfort. Benjen Stark never said the tales were true, but he never said they weren’t; he only shrugged and said, “We left the Nightfort two hundred years ago,” as if that was an answer.

Indeed, one could argue that the Nighfort is the northermost home of stories, serving both as stage and setting for a thousand narratives of revenge, tragedy, horror, and heroism. I say “northernmost,” because you don’t actually get fiction beyond the Wall – you get legends of past Kings Beyond the Wall or the tragedy of Hardhome, but it’s all stuff that either happened or was built on top of what was happened, but not fiction because in the imaginary of GRRM, Beyond-the-Wall is where fiction comes from. It’s where the White Walkers and the Night Kings bride came from, it’s where Coldhands and the Three-Eyed Crow lurk, and that makes it a not entirely real place in the same way that the more settled realms of men are real places, which then have to make up stories of the uncanny and the bizarre.

This is another way of saying that Bran IV is a chapter-long excuse for George R.R Martin to flex his ghost story muscles, to play in another genre after the heavy lifting of the Red Wedding. In the process, it becomes a good learning opportunity, a chance to examine what GRRM thinks works best about horror. And right away, we get a nice hint in the way that Benjen chooses to neither confirm nor deny the truth of Old Nan’s stories, leaving a gap where the fiction could be true, because the past is a foreign country where they do things differently.

What Happened Last Time

But before we can have our fun, we need to eat our vegetables; in this case, doing some housekeeping as to what happened in Bran’s half of Jon V:

“We are four. You helped your brother, if that was him in truth, but it almost cost you Summer.”

“I know,” said Bran miserably. The direwolf had killed three of them, maybe more, but there had been too many. When they formed a tight ring around the tall earless man, he had tried to slip away through the rain, but one of their arrows had come flashing after him, and the sudden stab of pain had driven Bran out of the wolf’s skin and back into his own. After the storm finally died, they had huddled in the dark without a fire, talking in whispers if they talked at all, listening to Hodor’s heavy breathing and wondering if the wildlings might try and cross the lake in the morning. Bran had reached out for Summer time and time again, but the pain he found drove him back, the way a red-hot kettle makes you pull your hand back even when you mean to grab it. Only Hodor slept that night, muttering “Hodor, hodor,” as he tossed and turned. Bran was terrified that Summer was off dying in the darkness. Please, you old gods, he prayed, you took Winterfell, and my father, and my legs, please don’t take Summer too. And watch over Jon Snow too, and make the wildlings go away.

…The wildlings took their sweet time about departing the next morning, stripping the bodies of their dead and the old man they’d killed, even pulling a few fish from the lake, and there was a scary moment when three of them found the causeway and started to walk out…but the path turned and they didn’t, and two of them nearly drowned before the others pulled them out…Late that afternoon Summer returned from wherever he’d been hiding, dragging his back leg. He ate parts of the bodies in the inn, driving off the crows, then swam out to the island. Meera had drawn the broken arrow from his leg and rubbed the wound with the juice of some plants she found growing around the base of the tower. The direwolf was still limping, but a little less each day, it seemed to Bran. The gods had heard.

On the face of it, it’s rather anti-climactic. The wildlings were there, they almost found the path to Queenscrown, but they didn’t, so they went away. Bran’s wolf got shot with an arrow during the fighting, and could have been badly injured or died, but it didn’t, and it’s getting better. However, there is a couple of interesting threads lurking within: the first is that, between Bran choosing to fight for his brother and then being terrified of losing Summer, there’s something reminiscent of the very first Bran chapter’s discussion of the dialectical relationship between bravery and fear. The second is that, following GRRM’s long-running interest in the ineffable, is the fact that Bran’s prayer to the Old Gods is seemingly answered in a way that few such appeals to the divine are in ASOIAF.

No Way Through

In the wake of that near-miss with the wildlings, Meera and Jojen are consumed with the material difficulties of getting their small party – not least of whom, their parapalegic prince – to pass from the south side of a seven-hundred-foot-tall Wall to the north side of a seven-hundred-foot-tall Wall. This is not as easy as it would be if they had followed Jon to Castle Black:

And there was no way through.

Bran had told them there wouldn’t be. He had told them and told them, but Jojen Reed had insisted on seeing for himself. He had had a green dream, he said, and his green dreams did not lie. They don’t open any gates either, thought Bran.

The gate the Nightfort guarded had been sealed since the day the black brothers had loaded up their mules and garrons and departed for Deep Lake; its iron portcullis lowered, the chains that raised it carried off, the tunnel packed with stone and rubble all frozen together until they were as impenetrable as the Wall itself.

“…Maybe we should try another castle,” Meera said to her brother. “Maybe we could get through the gate somewhere else. I could go scout if you wanted, I’d make better time by myself.”

Bran shook his head. “If you go east there’s Deep Lake, then Queensgate. West is Icemark. But they’ll be the same, only smaller. All the gates are sealed except the ones at Castle Black, Eastwatch, and the Shadow Tower.”

Following the theme of realism vs. romanticism that binds the chapter as a whole together, we see different modes of knowledge being brought to bear on the situation. As befits a Stark of Winterfell, Bran has been comprehensively educated on the Night’s Watch and its different castles (which we saw when it came to Queenscrown), so he knows the history of the Nightfort’s abandonment and the measures taken to ensure that the abandoned castle couldn’t be used by the wildlings to get an army through the Wall. As befits a green-eyed son of Greywater Watch, though, Jojen appeals to a higher authority – and he’s not wrong to, as we’ll learn by the end of the chapter – but the difficulty with prophetic visions is that they don’t tend to offer much in the way of practical advice as to how to deal with thousands of pounds of “stone and rubble all frozen together until they were as impenetrable as the Wall Itself.”

…He had climbed the walls of Winterfell when he was little, and all the towers too, but none of them had been so high, and they were only stone. The Wall could look like stone, all grey and pitted, but then the clouds would break and the sun would hit it differently, and all at once it would transform, and stand there white and blue and glittering. It was the end of the world, Old Nan always said. On the other side were monsters and giants and ghouls, but they could not pass so long as the Wall stood strong.

…the Nightfort was the only castle where the steps had been cut from the ice of the Wall itself. Or maybe it had been Uncle Benjen. The newer castles had wooden steps, or stone ones, or long ramps of earth and gravel. Ice is too treacherous. It was his uncle who’d told him that. He said that the outer surface of the Wall wept icy tears sometimes, though the core inside stayed frozen hard as rock. The steps must have melted and refrozen a thousand times since the last black brothers left the castle, and every time they did they shrunk a little and got smoother and rounder and more treacherous.

In the case of the Nightfort, for example, the problem of ascent and descent is made complicated by the fact that, as the oldest structure on the Wall, the castle lacks a lot of the “mod cons” that would make it possible for Bran to climb up to the top. (The problem of what to do once Bran gets to the top has not been addressed, but it’s likely that if the Nightfort didn’t have a wooden staircase, it also didn’t have the elevator that could presumably be swung out and over the Wall to allow Bran to make the 700-foot descent safely.) Hence why Meera is making the climb to the top of the Wall instead of Bran, who has to wait on the ground.

At the same time, as Old Nan points out, the Wall isn’t just a physical object – it’s an idea, an expression of the concept of separation and division, hence it being “the end of the world,” or rather the end of one world and the beginning of another. On one side of the Wall are the realms of men, where the rules of “modernity” hold sway; “on the other side were monsters and giants and ghouls” and all the other creatures of Fairyland. While Bran is attempting to, like the Last Hero, cross that liminal boundary in search of supernatural aid in the cause of humanity, Old Nan is also an important voice reminding us that these two worlds are only going to be kept separate “so long as the Wall stood strong.” Once whatever elemental violation, whether it be Jon Snow’s assassination or something darker, takes place that violates the Night’s Watch’s duty so severely that the spells fail, the Wall is going to come tumbling down. (I think the show is right that the Wall will fall, just wildly off-piste about how and why it’s going to happen.

Speaking of getting off-piste, Meera’s trip up the Wall speaks to some of the difficulty of actually operating beyond-the-Wall:

…By the time Meera returned, the sun was only a sword’s breath above the western hills. “What did you see?” her brother Jojen asked her.

“I saw the haunted forest,” she said in a wistful tone. “Hills rising wild as far as the eye can see, covered with trees that no axe has ever touched. I saw the sunlight glinting off a lake, and clouds sweeping in from the west. I saw patches of old snow, and icicles long as pikes. I even saw an eagle circling. I think he saw me too. I waved at him.”

“Did you see a way down?” asked Jojen.

…”No,” his sister agreed. “Are you sure this is the place you saw in your dream? Maybe we have the wrong castle.”

“No. This is the castle. There is a gate here.”

Yes, thought Bran, but it’s blocked by stone and ice.

In addition to the difficulty of travelling through an old growth alpine forest with a disabled person, Meera’s story is also a sign of how Bran and Co. aren’t entirely free from outside dangers. The eagle that Meera is waving at is Orell’s eagle, now bound to Varamyr Sixskins and soon to be incinerated by Melisandre, and tasked with scouting the Wall on behalf of Mance Rayder and the hundred thousand-strong wildling army that Bran and Co. could have easily run into on the other side of the Wall if they’d not run into Coldhands, who can use Bloodraven’s greenseer abilities to move through the wilderness without coming into contact with wildling forces.

An Old Place

Because they are currently stuck at the Nightfort without a path through, this means that Bran and company have to deal with the Nightfort as it is, as a real place with real structures:

“This seems an old place,” Jojen said as they walked down a gallery where the sunlight fell in dusty shafts through empty windows.

“Twice as old as Castle Black,” Bran said, remembering. “It was the first castle on the Wall, and the largest.” But it had also been the first abandoned, all the way back in the time of the Old King. Even then it had been three-quarters empty and too costly to maintain. Good Queen Alysanne had suggested that the Watch replace it with a smaller, newer castle at a spot only seven miles east, where the Wall curved along the shore of a beautiful green lake. Deep Lake had been paid for by the queen’s jewels and built by the men the Old King had sent north, and the black brothers had abandoned the Nightfort to the rats.

…They spent half the day poking through the castle. Some of the towers had fallen down and others looked unsafe, but they climbed the bell tower (the bells were gone) and the rookery (the birds were gone). Beneath the brewhouse they found a vault of huge oaken casks that boomed hollowly when Hodor knocked on them. They found a library (the shelves and bins had collapsed, the books were gone, and rats were everywhere). They found a dank and dim-lit dungeon with cells enough to hold five hundred captives, but when Bran grabbed hold of one of the rusted bars it broke off in his hand. Only one crumbling wall remained of the great hall, the bathhouse seemed to be sinking into the ground, and a huge thornbush had conquered the practice yard outside the armory where black brothers had once labored with spear and shield and sword. The armory and the forge still stood, however, though cobwebs, rats, and dust had taken the places of blades, bellows, and anvil. Sometimes Summer would hear sounds that Bran seemed deaf to, or bare his teeth at nothing, the fur on the back of his neck bristling . . . but the Rat Cook never put in an appearance, nor the seventy-nine sentinels, nor Mad Axe. Bran was much relieved. Maybe it is only a ruined empty castle.

It turns out is that, rather than a story of the Night’s Watch abandoning the place due to the Night’s King or hauntings or something equally baroque, the Nightfort is a bit like Harrenhal: old, overly large, and overly difficult to maintain relative to a “smaller, newer castle at a spot only seven miles east.” We also learn that the Night’s Watch abandoned the Nightfort at the behest of Queen Alysanne, another example of how the most influential of Targaryen queens influenced this institution despite her rather brief contact with it.

While some of the buildings are in better shape than others, one thematic throughline connecting these structures is the way that their initial purposes have been lost – the “bell tower” has lost its bell, the birds have flown from the “rookery,” the beer is gone from the brewery, and most ominous of all for the purposes of this particular chapter, the books have disappeared from the library. It’s all got the somewhat defeatingly boring nature of real world ruins, all romanticism stripped away by the ravages of time. Or is that just what Bran would like to believe, given how nervous it makes Summer (and thus, Bran’s unconscious mind) to “hear sounds that Bran seemed deaf to, or bare his teeth at nothing“? After all, Bran’s skepticism doesn’t fare that well when put to the test.

The well was the thing he liked the least, though. It was a good twelve feet across, all stone, with steps built into its side, circling down and down into darkness. The walls were damp and covered with niter, but none of them could see the water at the bottom, not even Meera with her sharp hunter’s eyes. “Maybe it doesn’t have a bottom,” Bran said uncertainly.

Hodor peered over the knee-high lip of the well and said, “HODOR!” The word echoed down the well, “Hodorhodorhodorhodor,” fainter and fainter, “hodorhodorhodorhodor,” until it was less than a whisper. Hodor looked startled. Then he laughed, and bent to scoop a broken piece of slate off the floor.

“Hodor, don’t!” said Bran, but too late. Hodor tossed the slate over the edge. “You shouldn’t have done that. You don’t know what’s down there. You might have hurt something, or . . . or woken something up.”

For his own part, GRRM knows that he’s making a big leap by having Bran make the jump to the up until now carefully relegated-to-the-margins metaphysical plot, so he’s borrowing from Tolkien as a way of a shibboleth to the fantasy genre fandom. It’s his own way of saying that he knows that here ASOIAF is really treading quite close to Lord of the Rings, so he might as well announce that’s what he’s doing by quoting from the mines of Moria – and then zagging on his audience. After all, something will be coming up from the well by the end of the chapter, but it’s not going to be actually threatening like the orcs and cave trolls of Khazad-dûm, only initially appearing to be threatening.

A Castle In Five Stories

Now that we’ve gotten the formalities out of the way, it’s time for some fun, as GRRM takes the opportunity with Bran IV to flex his horror muscles in the same way that Bran II let him have fun with fantasies of knightly tourneys a la Ivanhoe. Here we get five spine-tingling stories, that each traffic in a different subgenre of horror. GRRM makes it clear from the beginning of the chapter that these are only a subset of ghost stories set in the Nightfort – hence why he doesn’t follow through with the story of brave Danny Flint until ADWD, and has yet to follow through with Symeon Star-Eyes or King Sherrit – but all of them tell a different side of the Night’s Watch as an institution. The first story that is told is that of the seventy-nine sentinels:

“There are ghosts here,” Bran said. Hodor had heard all the stories before, but Jojen might not have. “Old ghosts, from before the Old King, even before Aegon the Dragon, seventy-nine deserters who went south to be outlaws. One was Lord Ryswell’s youngest son, so when they reached the barrowlands they sought shelter at his castle, but Lord Ryswell took them captive and returned them to the Nightfort. The Lord Commander had holes hewn in the top of the Wall and he put the deserters in them and sealed them up alive in the ice. They have spears and horns and they all face north. The seventy-nine sentinels, they’re called. They left their posts in life, so in death their watch goes on forever. Years later, when Lord Ryswell was old and dying, he had himself carried to the Nightfort so he could take the black and stand beside his son. He’d sent him back to the Wall for honor’s sake, but he loved him still, so he came to share his watch.”

This one is interesting for all sorts of reasons. First, it’s probably the most recent of the stories, taking place sometime “before Aegon the Dragon,” but reasonably close to that time that things like the Andal/First Men divide aren’t mentioned. The story revolves around “seventy-nine deserters who went south to be outlaws,” further emphasizing why Ned Stark was right to believe that deserters from the Night’s Watch had to be executed, because in their desperation they were fully beyond the boundaries of the law and thus had no fear of it. In the process of setting themselves up as outlaws in the barrowlands, they force Lord Ryswell of the Rills to make a choice (again familiar to Ned Stark) between love and honor – and this time Ryswell chooses honor over love, and “returned them to the Nightfort.” There, the Lord Commander decides to go for a very Japanese horror-inflected form of karmic justice, having them “sealed up alive in the ice,” so that “they left their posts in life, so in death their watch goes on forever.” This is both an appropriately horrific fate and also potentially a hint at a future reveal, if it turns out that the hint about Joramun’s horn waking giants from the earth and bringing down the Wall being related is correct (because there were giants buried inside the Wall during the process of construction). Concluding the story, it turns out that Lord Ryswell repents of his choice between honor and love, and in something out of a Child Ballad decides to join the Night’s Watch so that he could “share his watch” with his dead son.

By contrast, the story of the Rat Cook is something out of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedies, namely his earliest and most grand guignol play Titus Andronicus, or out of the darker bits of the curse of the House of Atreus:

That was the only thing he liked about the kitchens, though. The roof was mostly there, so they’d be dry if it rained again, but he didn’t think they would ever get warm here. You could feel the cold seeping up through the slate floor. Bran did not like the shadows either, or the huge brick ovens that surrounded them like open mouths, or the rusted meat hooks, or the scars and stains he saw in the butcher’s block along one wall. That was where the Rat Cook chopped the prince to pieces, he knew, and he baked the pie in one of these ovens.

…At least it’s not a meat pie. The Rat Cook had cooked the son of the Andal king in a big pie with onions, carrots, mushrooms, lots of pepper and salt, a rasher of bacon, and a dark red Dornish wine. Then he served him to his father, who praised the taste and had a second slice. Afterward the gods transformed the cook into a monstrous white rat who could only eat his own young. He had roamed the Nightfort ever since, devouring his children, but still his hunger was not sated. “It was not for murder that the gods cursed him,” Old Nan said, “nor for serving the Andal king his son in a pie. A man has a right to vengeance. But he slew a guest beneath his roof, and that the gods cannot forgive.”

In this case, the Rat Cook gets his revenge on the Andal King – a sign that the Andal conquest was recent enough that kings would be distinguished between Andal and First Men – presumably for killing his son, by killing the Andal prince and baking him into a pie and serving him to his father. As with the seventy-nine sentinels, we get a case of karmic justice – in this case, a very Dante-esque contrapasso of being forced into cannibalism and infanticide. Where the sentinels was more implicit about the need to hold true to the Night’s Watch oath, here the moral of the story is even more emphatic: “a man has a right to vengeance,” we are told, but guest right trumps all other considerations. More interestingly, this is a story that seemingly argues in favor of Jon’s actions in ADWD: the Rat Cook did not leave behind his grudges and grievances when he joined the Night’s Watch and it’s not suggested that he was punished for taking vengeance for something that happened in his old life; instead, hospitality (which Jon raises as a defense of both his actions with Stannis and with the false Arya) is held as the guiding virtue.

Next, we have a couple of shorter, more fragmentary ghost stories – Mad Axe and the thing the ‘prentice boys saw:

He remembered what Old Nan had said of Mad Axe, how he took his boots off and prowled the castle halls barefoot in the dark, with never a sound to tell you where he was except for the drops of blood that fell from his axe and his elbows and the end of his wet red beard. Or maybe it wasn’t Mad Axe at all, maybe it was the thing that came in the night. The ‘prentice boys all saw it, Old Nan said, but afterward when they told their Lord Commander every description had been different. And three died within the year, and the fourth went mad, and a hundred years later when the thing had come again, the ‘prentice boys were seen shambling along behind it, all in chains.

The story of Mad Axe is a workplace rampage story, half red cap and half hook hand – but other than the nice detail of him taking off his shows to ambush his victims in the dark, there’s not a lot to his story. Compared to the stories we’ve read earlier, it lacks any kind of revenge, karmic justice, or moral, and there’s not a lot we can learn about the Night’s Watch since we don’t know who Mad Axe was or why he turned on his black brothers. By contrast, the “thing that came in the night” – a straight up ghost story of the classic variety – is equally brief, but it has much more of a narrative structure that’s similar to the sentinels or the Rat Cook. There was a monster that appeared in the night, a number of apprentice boys (which in turn suggests an earlier, more functional Night’s Watch that had apprentices as part of its class and age structure) saw it, “but afterward when they told their Lord Commander every description had been different.” Either because of the thing’s protean nature or their failure to tell the truth, the ‘prentice boys suffer early deaths and madness, and then find themselves eternally bound to the figure they had failed to identify in practice.

But the pièce de résistance is the story of the Night’s King, which is not only much more central to the plot and themes of ASOIAF than the rest of the stories, but more central to the Nightfort itself:

The gathering gloom put Bran in mind of another of Old Nan’s stories, the tale of Night’s King. He had been the thirteenth man to lead the Night’s Watch, she said; a warrior who knew no fear. “And that was the fault in him,” she would add, “for all men must know fear.” A woman was his downfall; a woman glimpsed from atop the Wall, with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars. Fearing nothing, he chased her and caught her and loved her, though her skin was cold as ice, and when he gave his seed to her he gave his soul as well.

He brought her back to the Nightfort and proclaimed her a queen and himself her king, and with strange sorceries he bound his Sworn Brothers to his will. For thirteen years they had ruled, Night’s King and his corpse queen, till finally the Stark of Winterfell and Joramun of the wildlings had joined to free the Watch from bondage. After his fall, when it was found he had been sacrificing to the Others, all records of Night’s King had been destroyed, his very name forbidden.

“Some say he was a Bolton,” Old Nan would always end. “Some say a Magnar out of Skagos, some say Umber, Flint, or Norrey. Some would have you think he was a Woodfoot, from them who ruled Bear Island before the ironmen came. He never was. He was a Stark, the brother of the man who brought him down.” She always pinched Bran on the nose then, he would never forget it. “He was a Stark of Winterfell, and who can say? Mayhaps his name was Brandon. Mayhaps he slept in this very bed in this very room.”

No, Bran thought, but he walked in this castle, where we’ll sleep tonight. He did not like that notion very much at all. Night’s King was only a man by light of day, Old Nan would always say, but the night was his to rule. And it’s getting dark.

As a fully-told story, there’s a lot of detail that we can draw from the legend of the Night’s King: firstly, there’s a very clear moral to the story, that “all men must know fear.” A “warrior who knows no fear,” the Night’s King’s bravery undoes him because he doesn’t shrink from a woman with “skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars” or from the thought of violating his oath as a Night’s Watchman. Secondly, there’s a very clear beginning, middle, and end to the story: the Night’s King meets his “corpse queen,” he enslaves the Night’s Watch in a symbolic thirteen-year reign, and then at last he’s brought down by an alliance of “the Stark of Winterfell and Joramun of the wildlings.”

Beyond the plot mechanics, there’s some interesting details to be mined from this story. For example, it’s unclear whether the “corpse queen” is a White Walker or a wight, since both can have “skin as white as the moon” and both definitely have “eyes like blue stars.” More importantly, the Night’s King violation of his oath is pretty comprehensive – not only does he violate the oath against taking a wife (albeit in the wildling fashion), but he also takes titles for himself and his bride, and he even violates his commandment to guard the realms of men by “sacrificing to the Others.”

However, I don’t see it as a story that speaks to a pact between the white walkers and humans. Not only does it clearly take place after the Long Night – the Night’s King is the thirteenth Lord Commander, the Wall is already built, and there have been wildlings long enough for them to have already developed Kings-beyond-the-Wall – but the structure of his encounter with the “corpse queen” is way closer to a vampiric seduction than, say, a marriage alliance with the White Walkers. Moreover, given the way that the wildlings are so often presented as the preservers of ancient knowledge, the fact that it was humans on both sides of the Wall who joined forces against the Night’s King pretty much rules out his ouster being the result of bigoted humans from south of the Wall breaking the pact. Instead, I think it speaks to a pact between both realms of humanity against the Others being necessary to take down the Army of the Dead, similar to what Jon was trying to achieve in ADWD.

Finally, there’s the matter of damnatio memoriae. The fact that “all records of Night’s King had been destroyed, his very name forbidden” means that we don’t know the lineage of the Night’s King. Bolt-On aficionados make much of his possible Bolton heritage as proof of some vampiric lineage, although there’s no evidence of the Night’s King ever having had children, much less surviving children. Moreover, I think a Bolton ancestry fails the same thematic test that the Night’s King being a “Magnar out of Skagos, some say Umber, Flint, or Norrey. Some would have you think he was a Woodfoot” or some other obscure lineage. The point of the Night’s King’s heritage is that he was a Stark, which makes him representative of temptation for Bran (and Jon): will they follow the true, more difficult path of heroism or fall prey to the allure of villainy, especially when villainy offers them new legs or Ygritte brought back to life or something along those lines?

The Thing That Came from the Well

At this point in the chapter, GRRM goes from telling ghost stories to writing horror in the main text, determined to show that he hasn’t missed any steps since 1982’s Fevre Dream. It helps that the stories have already primed Bran into thinking like a horror protagonist:

It’s coming from the well, he realized. That made him even more afraid. Something was coming up from under the ground, coming up out of the dark. Hodor woke it up. He woke it up with that stupid piece of slate, and now it’s coming. It was hard to hear over Hodor’s snores and the thumping of his own heart. Was that the sound blood made dripping from an axe? Or was it the faint, far-off rattling of ghostly chains? Bran listened harder. Footsteps.

…The footfalls sounded heavy to Bran, slow, ponderous, scraping against the stone. It must be huge. Mad Axe had been a big man in Old Nan’s story, and the thing that came in the night had been monstrous. Back in Winterfell, Sansa had told him that the demons of the dark couldn’t touch him if he hid beneath his blanket. He almost did that now, before he remembered that he was a prince, and almost a man grown.

Bran wriggled across the floor, dragging his dead legs behind him until he could reach out and touch Meera on the foot. She woke at once. He had never known anyone to wake as quick as Meera Reed, or to be so alert so fast. Bran pressed a finger to his mouth so she’d know not to speak. She heard the sound at once, he could see that on her face; the echoing footfalls, the faint whimpering, the heavy breathing.

Like the best of Stephen King’s oevre, it starts with an irrational thought made rational by a mundane detail; in this case, the idea that something’s coming up the well made more reasonable by the familiar sound of footsteps rather than something more exotic. Bran then has to choose between hiding underneath the covers – a well-worn childhood strategy for things lurking underneath – and confronting his fears, which is arguably the point at which horror and heroic fantasy converge. He decides to act cautiously but cleverly, waking up the most viable combatant but in such a way that they don’t lose the element of surprise.

And then he does something else, something much darker:

. . . he slipped his skin, and reached for Hodor.

It was not like sliding into Summer. That was so easy now that Bran hardly thought about it. This was harder, like trying to pull a left boot on your right foot. It fit all wrong, and the boot was scared too, the boot didn’t know what was happening, the boot was pushing the foot away. He tasted vomit in the back of Hodor’s throat, and that was almost enough to make him flee. Instead he squirmed and shoved, sat up, gathered his legs under him—his huge strong legs—and rose. I’m standing. He took a step. I’m walking.

This is horror of a different sort. In the past, Bran warging into Hodor was done out of reflex and desperation; this is a conscious decision made from a cold calculation of necessity, turning a man into one more sword to be brought to bear against the enemy. It’s a very Bloodraven sort of move, but that doesn’t make it any less a violation. And it’s all the worse, because it’s done for no good reason.

From the well came a wail, a piercing creech that went through him like a knife. A huge black shape heaved itself up into the darkness and lurched toward the moonlight, and the fear rose up in Bran so thick that before he could even think of drawing Hodor’s sword the way he’d meant to, he found himself back on the floor again with Hodor roaring “Hodor hodor HODOR,” the way he had in the lake tower whenever the lightning flashed. But the thing that came in the night was screaming too, and thrashing wildly in the folds of Meera’s net. Bran saw her spear dart out of the darkness to snap at it, and the thing staggered and fell, struggling with the net. The wailing was still coming from the well, even louder now. On the floor the black thing flopped and fought, screeching, “No, no, don’t, please, DON’T . . .”

Meera stood over him, the moonlight shining silver off the prongs of her frog spear. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“I’m SAM,” the black thing sobbed. “Sam, Sam, I’m Sam, let me out, you stabbed me . . .” He rolled through the puddle of moonlight, flailing and flopping in the tangles of Meera’s net. Hodor was still shouting, “Hodor hodor hodor.”

…The thing on the floor was pushing an arm through the net to reach his knife, but the loops wouldn’t let him. He wasn’t any monster beast, or even Mad Axe drenched in gore; only a big fat man dressed up in black wool, black fur, black leather, and black mail. “He’s a black brother,” said Bran. “Meera, he’s from the Night’s Watch.”

Martin has zagged instead of zigged; the creature from the well turns out to be not a nightmare but a friend, and a rather pathetic one at that. In the moment, Sam is way more scared of Meera and Hodor than they are of him, and proves completely incapable of dealing with net and frog spear, let alone Hodor’s blade.

In the Hands of a Threshold Guardian

However, Sam brings with him something more important than fighting ability – namely, peerless intelligence of the figure without whom Bran and Company will not be able to make it to the cave of the three-eyed crow. Given the Tolkien references in this chapter, Coldhands takes on even more Campbellian symbolism, acting as a preserence endowed with precognitive wisdom:

“Are you the one?”

Jojen turned to look at her. “The one?”

“He said that Sam wasn’t the one,” she explained. “There was someone else, he said. The one he was sent to find.”

“Who said?” Bran demanded.

“Coldhands,” Gilly answered softly.

Meera peeled back one end of her net, and the fat man managed to sit up. He was shaking, Bran saw, and still struggling to catch his breath. “He said there would be people,” he huffed. “People in the castle. I didn’t know you’d be right at the top of the steps, though. I didn’t know you’d throw a net on me or stab me in the stomach.”

“…You won’t find it. If you did it wouldn’t open. Not for you. It’s the Black Gate.” Sam plucked at the faded black wool of his sleeve. “Only a man of the Night’s Watch can open it, he said. A Sworn Brother who has said his words.”

Bran et al. don’t know that Coldhands’ clairvoyance is likely borrowed from Bloodraven, but that doesn’t really change the impact of him knowing that Bran would be there, and that they would be stuck without Sam’s help to open “the Black Gate.” Incidentally, the Black Gate is, IMO, further proof that there was no pact; if there was such a pact, why would the White Walkers design a gate that only humans of the Night’s Watch could access? (More on this in a second)

There’s also a (slight) misdirection that Coldhands is a warg or greenseer, because of his connection to elks and ravens:

“He said.” Jojen frowned. “This . . . Coldhands?”

“That wasn’t his true name,” said Gilly, rocking. “We only called him that, Sam and me. His hands were cold as ice, but he saved us from the dead men, him and his ravens, and he brought us here on his elk.”

“His elk?” said Bran, wonderstruck.

“His elk?” said Meera, startled.

“His ravens?” said Jojen.

While in retrospect the fact that Coldhands “wasn’t his true name” is rather obvious, but it does raise an interesting question as to whether his true name would be significant to the reader. I would still count myself among the ranks of people who don’t think Coldhands is Benjen, but it’s possible that Coldhands (despite having been dead for many, many years) has a familiar last name, whether that’s Stark or something else. The reality is that we don’t have much information about Coldhands:

“He wasn’t a green man. He wore blacks, like a brother of the Watch, but he was pale as a wight, with hands so cold that at first I was afraid. The wights have blue eyes, though, and they don’t have tongues, or they’ve forgotten how to use them.” The fat man turned to Jojen. “He’ll be waiting. We should go. Do you have anything warmer to wear? The Black Gate is cold, and the other side of the Wall is even colder. You—”

“Why didn’t he come with you?” Meera gestured toward Gilly and her babe. “They came with you, why not him? Why didn’t you bring him through this Black Gate too?”

“He . . . he can’t.”

“Why not?”

“The Wall. The Wall is more than just ice and stone, he said. There are spells woven into it . . . old ones, and strong. He cannot pass beyond the Wall.”

Coldhands is overwhelmingly likely to be a (former?) member of the Night’s Watch, but more significant is the fact that while he’s absolutely a wight (being, you know, a walking dead man), he doesn’t have much in common with the wights we’ve seen before. Most significantly, he doesn’t have the “blue eyes” of one of the Others’ wights. It’s equally unlikely that he’s one of the fire wights of R’hllor, both because we don’t have any plausible mechanism for how he would have been brought back, and because he doesn’t have any of the memory problems we saw with Beric Dondarrion. If we were to borrow from the elemental schema of Avatar (or Pokemon, for that matter), I would guess that Coldhands is an earth wight raised with the magic of the Children of the Forest, which is why he retains his individual consciousness and his capacity for language, which Sam notes none of the ice wights have.

At the same time, being a wight, Coldhand can’t cross the Wall, because “the Wall is more than just ice and stone…There are spells woven into it.” To me, this is the most significant piece of evidence to why a pact between White Walkers and men never existed – if the point of the pact was co-existence (to the point of intermarriage, no less, according to the theory), why would the White Walkers design spells that specifically bar them and their servants from crossing south, while allowing humanity (at least, those humans who are members of the Night’s Watch) to pass to the north? It seems more likely to me that the magical wards in the Wall were put in place by Children of the Forest and human greenseers, working together in the wake of the first Battle for the Dawn, to ensure that a recurrence of the Long Night could never happen again.

Sharing Secrets

Before Bran and Company can pass through the Black Gate, however, there is the important task of sharing information (or not). In a series that often involves characters failing to share information with one another – especially about the survival and location of other characters they’ve intersected with – for once GRRM decides to have them stop and share information:

Sam was staring at him. “You’re Jon Snow’s brother. The one who fell…”

“No,” said Jojen. “That boy is dead.”

“Don’t tell,” Bran warned. “Please.”

Sam looked confused for a moment, but finally he said, “I…I can keep a secret. Gilly too.” When he looked at her, the girl nodded. “Jon…Jon was my brother too. He was the best friend I ever had, but he went off with Qhorin Halfhand to scout the Frostfangs and never came back. We were waiting for him on the Fist when…when…”

“Jon’s here,” Bran said. “Summer saw him. He was with some wildlings, but they killed a man and Jon took his horse and escaped. I bet he went to Castle Black.”

Bran’s decision to share information with Sam is pretty straightforwardly explicable: Sam’s about to go back to Castle Black and intersect with Jon Snow anyway, so sharing information that Jon survived his mission “with Qhorin Halfhand to scout the Frostfangs” is pretty low-impact. The only thing that Bran really adds is a bit of information that lends weight to Jon’s claims that he was working undercover, ensuring that Sam will be even more motivated to fight Jon Snow’s corner than he would on his own.

More significant, however, is Bran and Jojen’s plea to Sam not to share the information that Bran is alive with Jon. Not only do we see Sam wrestling with the decision to keep silent in AFFC, but this lack of information seems designed with endgame plot mechanics in mind. If Jon knew that Bran (and Rickon) were alive, he would be much less willing to accept the title of King in the North despite his legitimation at Robb’s hands. By allowing him to labor in ignorance, not only does GRRM set up a scenario in which Jon would become a reluctant monarch in Winterfell, but also one in which he would feel appropriately conflicted once Bran and Rickon reappear, feeling that he’s taken their birthright from them. Thus we get the human heart at war with itself, as per spec.

Crossing the Black Gate

Having completed his necessary “pre-flight” tasks, Bran is now free to actively cross the threshold, and it’s as weird and surreal as one might expect from a portal between the realms of reality and story:

A turn or two later Sam stopped suddenly. He was a quarter of the way around the well from Bran and Hodor and six feet farther down, yet Bran could barely see him. He could see the door, though. The Black Gate, Sam had called it, but it wasn’t black at all.

It was white weirwood, and there was a face on it.

A glow came from the wood, like milk and moonlight, so faint it scarcely seemed to touch anything beyond the door itself, not even Sam standing right before it. The face was old and pale, wrinkled and shrunken. It looks dead. Its mouth was closed, and its eyes; its cheeks were sunken, its brow withered, its chin sagging. If a man could live for a thousand years and never die but just grow older, his face might come to look like that.

The door opened its eyes.

They were white too, and blind. “Who are you?” the door asked, and the well whispered, “Who-who-who-who-who-who-who.”

“I am the sword in the darkness,” Samwell Tarly said. “I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers. I am the shield that guards the realms of men.”

“Then pass,” the door said. Its lips opened, wide and wider and wider still, until nothing at all remained but a great gaping mouth in a ring of wrinkles. Sam stepped aside and waved Jojen through ahead of him. Summer followed, sniffing as he went, and then it was Bran’s turn. Hodor ducked, but not low enough. The door’s upper lip brushed softly against the top of Bran’s head, and a drop of water fell on him and ran slowly down his nose. It was strangely warm, and salty as a tear.

To begin with, GRRM is playing language games with colors – the Black Gate “wasn’t black at all,” but rather “white weirwood” that glows “like milk and moonlight.” It’s called the Black Gate because it only opens for a black brother of the Night’s Watch who can recite the oath, presumably with some supernatural conviction behind his words. Going back to the Tolkien references, this is the Night’s Watch oath turned into “speak, friend, and enter” (in front of a magic door, no less) to round out GRRM’s Moria references in this chapter.

That the Black Gate is made of weirwood is also a strong hint as to the source of the magic: “If a man could live for a thousand years and never die but just grow older, his face might come to look like that.” The Black Gate has a human face, but whereas heart trees often have faces that are more archetypal or notional, this is a very specific and individual human face, suggesting strongly that it’s either Bloodraven’s face, since he has lived for one hundred and twenty five years without dying, or it’s the face of one of his predecessor greenseers who gave their lives to the weirwood net to empower this gate that would allow safe passage north of the Wall.

Finally, there is something almost out of a medieval play to the chapter’s conclusion, where the old man’s “great gaping mouth in a ring of wrinkles” resembles the maws of hell so often depicted in those morality or mystery plays, whereby the unlucky sinner is condemned to be dragged into hell by the allegorical figure of Justice for their sins and their lack of good works.

Historical Analysis:

In part because they’re very old and tend to be a focus of romantic imagination, castles tend to collect more than their share of ghost stories. For those of that inclination, ghost tours involving major castles abound European tourist destinations, and more than a few ghost-spotting tv shows have shot episodes in various landmarks. The difficulty is that it’s rare to find examples of castles that were contemporaneously believed to be haunted, and the genesis of a lot of these ghost stories often coincides with transitions of ownership and increased commercialization of the structures in question, which renders questionable the motives of people who bring in replica torture devices to stock up the dungeons, for example.

Despite that problem, there are some castles that do have widely-enough attributed ghost stories to them that I thought it would be fun to share a few examples with you. Edinburgh Castle, for example, has a number of “hidden tunnels that run from the castle to the Royal Mile.” Supposedly, when the tunnels were discovered, a bagpipe player was sent down to explore them, so that the sound of the piping would allow people in the castle and below to mark his passage. The piper disappeared halfway through the tunnels, and now supposedly his forlorn piping can be heard throughout the area, although that would be rather difficult to distinguish from other ambient music, given how often bagpipe music is performed at the castle as part of the Edinburgh Military Tatoo, or in the streets around the Royal Mile for tourists.

Leap Castle in Coolderry, Ireland, is another castle known for its ghost stories. In addition to a “Red Lady” ghost and two little girls who supposedly fell from the battlements, the castle is known for its “Bloody Chapel.” Supposedly, in the mid-16th century, the O’Carroll clan bitterly divided over who would lead the clan and own the castle. One of the younger brothers of the O’Carroll clan was a priest who was leading a mass for his family, when one of his other brothers armed with a sword broke into the chapel and cut him down on the altar itself. You can imagine why, as a result, no less than four televised ghost-hunting shows have shot episodes in Leap Castle.

Chillingham Castle in Northumberland, is supposedly the most haunted castle in Britain, having been featured on no less than eight television ghost-hunting programs, with the most famous of which being the “blue boy” who haunted one particular bedroom in the castle and would disturb guests until renovation work supposedly uncovered his bones inside a wall. This is somewhat undercut by a long tradition of local ghost boosterism; not only do the current owners run ghost tours of the establishment and have a vested interest in talking up the hauntedness of the castle, but many of the ghosts that supposedly flock to the castle were described in a 1925 pamphlet by a member of the Bennett family that previously owned the castle.

Finally, we have Predjama Castle in Slovenia, which is one of the few castles with a contemporaneous legend associated with its ghost stories. In the 15th century, the castle belonged to the Burgrave Erasmus of Lueg, the son of the imperial governor of Triest, who was a notorious robber baron. As the story goes, Erasmus fell into a feud with the Hapsburgs after he killed the Marshall Pappenheim (no, not that Pappenheim, this one lived about a century earlier) at the imperial court in Vienna. Fearing retribution from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, Erasmus fled to his castle and began raiding estates of the Hapsburgs in the region. When an imperial army was brought to try to put Predjama under siege, Erasmus used a series of secret tunnels connected to caves to smuggle food into the castle and prevent himself from being starved out. According to legend, Erasmus was betrayed by one of his men, who told the Hapsburgs where and when a cannon shot could take out the garderobe which Erasmus was using – and ever since, supposedly Erasmus has haunted the tunnels underneath Predjama, hunting for his disloyal vassal.

What If?

Surprisingly, there’s not a lot of room for hypotheticals in this chapter. Sam and Bran acting as ships passing in the night isn’t really possible, because Sam has specifically been told to look for them here in the castle by Coldhands, and because without Sam, Bran has no way of passing through the Black Gate and actually leaving the castle.

The one hypothetical that remains is what would happen if Sam told Jon about Bran, but I’m going to leave that one for the relevant Samwell chapter, so you’ll need to come back to it later.

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