“In the Seven Kingdoms it was said that the Wall marked the end of the world. That is true for them as well. It was all in where you stood.”

Synopsis: Jon Snow and Ygritte climb the Wall.

SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.

Political Analysis:

Jon IV is a bit of an odd chapter in that its mostly one compact action sequence – the wildlings climbing the Wall – rather than multiple scenes as in previous Jon chapters. And because that sequence involves climbing, it’s worth reading in parallel with Catelyn VI of AGOT (making the ascent of the Giant’s Lance to the Eyrie) or Jon VI of ACOK (climbing the Skirling Pass through the Frostfangs). In contrast to previous chapters (and the show), the emphasis is not on the protagonist’s Man vs. Nature heroics; Jon makes the climb in a couple of paragraphs and spends most of the chapter as a passive observer to the heroics of others.

Rather, I would argue that Jon IV owes less to Jack London-style adventure yarns and more to a specific trope of Cold War spy fiction: crossing the Iron Curtain. While there’s plenty of spy fiction that finds drama in any contested border crossing, the most dramatic examples are always of crossing the Berlin Wall, whether we’re talking about Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, or Ian Fleming’s The Living Daylights.

The mood is set right at the beginning of the chapter, when Jon sends Ghost off to try and warn the Night’s Watch:

“Ghost was gone when the wildings led their horses from the cave. Did he understand about Castle Black? Jon took a breath of the crisp morning air and allowed himself to hope.”

As so often happens in spy fiction, an undercover agent is forced to cross the line between handing over “chicken feed” to establish their bona fides and committing outright treason, all the while in existential uncertainy as to whether the intelligence they’ve collected, and the proof that they’re not actually traitors, will ever reach their masters back at home. The stakes ramp up, the tension between their divided loyalties increases, and the agent is pushed ever closer to making a split decision that will make or break them.

Military Strategy and the Wall

Speaking of surveillance and information-gathering, much of the early part of Jon IV revolves around Jon acting as an active observer of the wildling’s strategy, and the way that the Wall has shaped their planning (and those of their opponents’). As both a double agent and an oathbreaking turncloak, Jon Snow has something of an outsider’s perspectives on both sides:

The Magnar sent a dozen men riding west and a dozen more east, to climb the highest hills they could find and watch for any sign of rangers in the wood or riders on the high ice. The Thenns carried bronze-banded warhorns to give warning should the Watch be sighted. The other wildlings fell in behind Jarl, Jon and Ygritte with the rest. This was to be the young raider’s hour of glory. The Wall was often said to stand seven hundred feet high, but Jarl had found a place where it was both higher and lower. Before them, the ice rose sheer from out of the trees like some immense cliff, crowned by wind-carved battlements that loomed at least eight hundred feet high, perhaps nine hundred in spots. But that was deceptive, Jon realized as they drew closer. Brandon the Builder had laid his huge foundation blocks along the heights wherever feasible, and hereabouts the hills rose wild and rugged. He had once heard his uncle Benjen say that the Wall was a sword east of Castle Black, but a snake to the west. It was true. Sweeping in over one huge humped hill, the ice dipped down into a valley, climbed the knife edge of a long granite ridgeline for a league or more, ran along a jagged crest, dipped again into a valley deeper still, and then rose higher and higher, leaping from hill to hill as far as the eye could see, into the mountainous west. Jarl had chosen to assault the stretch of ice along the ridge. Here, though the top of the Wall loomed eight hundred feet above the forest floor, a good third of that height was earth and stone rather than ice; the slope was too steep for their horses, almost as difficult a scramble as the Fist of the First Men, but still vastly easier to ascend than the sheer vertical face of the Wall itself. And the ridge was densely wooded as well, offering easy concealment. Once brothers in black had gone out every day with axes to cut back the encroaching trees, but those days were long past, and here the forest grew right up to the ice.

As we’ve seen before, Jarl and Styr are rivals for leadership, who offer very different skill sets and cultures: Magnar is all about military discipline, setting out pickets with early warning systems, and the Thenns’ relatively well-developed material culture shows in the fact that they can use bronze for decoration and horses for scouting. (The fact that those precious mounts will have to be abandoned when they go over the Wall is an early sign of how out of place the Thenns are, this far south.) Jarl, on the other hand, is a southern raider, who understands the Wall on a professional level and can find a location that offers the best chance of remaining hidden during the climb, where a slope rather than a vertical climb reduces the difficulty of ascent, and where the raiders will have to deal with more than two hundred and fifty feet less ice.

Just as the wildlings have adapted their mlitary strategy to the Wall, so too have the brothers of the Night’s Watch adapted their strategies to the advances of their enemies, pointing to how the millenia-long conflict has lead to a tit-for-tat arms race:

The Others take them all, thought Jon, as he watched them scramble up the steep slope of the ridge and vanish beneath the trees. It would not be the first time wildlings had scaled the Wall, not even the hundred and first. The patrols stumbled on climbers two or three times a year, and rangers sometimes came on the broken corpses of those who had fallen. Along the east coast the raiders most often built boats to slip across the Bay of Seals. In the west they would descend into the black depths of the Gorge to make their way around the Shadow Tower. But in between the only way to defeat the Wall was to go over it, and many a raider had. Fewer come back, though, he thought with a certain grim pride. Climbers must of necessity leave their mounts behind, and many younger, greener raiders began by taking the first horses they found. Then a hue and cry would go up, ravens would fly, and as often as not the Night’s Watch would hunt them down and hang them before they could get back with their plunder and stolen women. Jarl would not make that mistake, Jon knew, but he wondered about Styr. The Magnar is a ruler, not a raider. He may not know how the game is played.

Here, we learn that rather than acting as a purely fixed defense, the Night’s Watch have learned to treat the Wall, with its built in vulnerabilities, as a way to funnel raiders towards the Shadow Tower and Eastwatch (hence why those castles have remained in service) where they can be more easily intercepted. Moreover, the Night’s Watch have shifted to a defense-in-depth, remniscent of Alfred the Great’s system of defensive burhs, messengers, and a mobile fyrd to deal with Viking raiders. Given that it was almost impossible to intercept fast-moving longships when they first landed, the idea was to wait for them to try to hit a rich target in the interior, have the local defenders of the nearest burh at the very least raise a warning if they couldn’t drive off the attack, which would allow Alfred to raise his mounted fyrd and ambush the raiders and they made their way back to their ships, slowed down by their loot.

Jon’s position is made somewhat ambivalent by the fact that, while the Night’s Watchman side of him wants the wildlings to get caught (later, he will think “if the gods are good, a patrol will chance by and put an end to this”) and is proud of his brothers’ skill at hunting down these robbers and rapers, he’s in the somewhat awkward position that he might die along with the other wildlings if his raiding party is intercepted. And thus it really matters whether Styr or Jarl ends up leading the raid, a contest that will come to an unexpected conclusion shortly.

Cultural Attitudes to the Wall

Speaking of Jon as an active observer, this chapter also shows Jon at work as a kind of amateur anthropologist: here, he notes that the Wall isn’t just a military fortification but also a cultural phenomenon, one that powerfully shapes the Weltanschauung of both sides of the conflict:

The day promised to be damp and cold, and damper and colder by the Wall, beneath those tons of ice. The closer they got, the more the Thenns held back. They have never seen the Wall before, not even the Magnar, Jon realized. It frightens them. In the Seven Kingdoms it was said that the Wall marked the end of the world. That is true for them as well. It was all in where you stood. The Wall did not awe Jarl’s raiders, Jon saw. They have done this before, every man of them. Jarl called out names when they dismounted beneath the ridge, and eleven gathered round him. All were young. The oldest could not have been more than five-and-twenty, and two of the ten were younger than Jon. Every one was lean and hard, though; they had a look of sinewy strength that reminded him of Stonesnake, the brother the Halfhand had sent off afoot when Rattleshirt was hunting them.

Showing that Jon’s sharp-eyed observational skills aren’t entirely nominal (and the enduring importance of cultural skills, something he shares with Daenerys Targaryen), here he makes two important observations. First, that the wildlings differ not only in their methods of fighting war but their mental frameworks for understanding the universe, and seeing these differences between the Thenns and the raiders noticeably humanizes them in Jon’s eyes; hence the telling moment where he begins to equate them with his “brother” Snonesnake. (It’s also telling the youth of the raiders – climbing a 700-foot-tall Wall to go on a campaign of robbery-by-force and kidnapping is a young man’s game, and so they share the young man’s folly of thinking of short-term “fortune and glory, kid,” without thinking through the risks of their occupation.)

Second, Jon realizes that both the Thenns and the Westerosi see the Wall as the end, not just of the world in a “there be snarks and grumkins dragons” way, but as the end of their world. This contributes to the process of Othering – for the Thenns, the Westerosi are purely notional enemies; for the raiders, they are two-legged sheep to be sheared without moral qualm; for the Westerosi, the wildlings are barbarians who do not belong to the “realms of men,” and have to be kept on the other side of the Wall or forced to it.

When Jon becomes Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, his major task will be not to physically move the wildlings from one side of the Wall to the other, but to conceptually redraw the boundaries between human and non-human, and as I’ll argue in ADWD, his (first?) death will be caused by this more than any other factor.

The Climb Begins

Now that he’s laid down the foundations, GRRM begins to put these themes to work, once the raiders begin their climb:

In the very shadow of the Wall the wildlings made ready, winding thick coils of hempen rope around one shoulder and down across their chests, and lacing on queer boots of supple doeskin. The boots had spikes jutting from the toes; iron, for Jarl and two others, bronze for some, but most often jagged bone. Small stone-headed hammers hung from one hip, a leathern bag of stakes from the other. Their ice axes were antlers with sharpened tines, bound to wooden hafts with strips of hide. The eleven climbers sorted themselves into three teams of four; Jarl himself made the twelfth man. “Mance promises swords for every man of the first team to reach the top,” he told them, his breath misting in the cold air. “Southron swords of castle-forged steel. And your name in the song he’ll make of this, that too. What more could a free man ask? Up, and the Others take the hindmost!”

Here, we see how the careful planning and preparation of the raiders runs up against the limitations of the wildlings’ material culture – because most wildlings don’t have access to metalworking, even bronze is a luxury of the elite, and most have to get by with tools forged from natural materials. As a result, when they make the ascent, “the iron stakes ran out before they were halfway up, and after that the climbers used horn and sharpened bone.” At the same time, we see how, despite Ygritte’s idealism, the motivations of the wildling army are more complicated than an abstract commitment to the wildling conception of freedom. (Much more on this in Jon V.) Instead, we can see Mance Rayder at work, simultaneously the shrewd politician appealing to the wildlings’ greed for “castle-forged steel” as a synecdoche for the relative material abundcance of the North on the one hand, and the bard weaving a grand romantic tale of immortal glory to cloud the minds of young men on the other.

With these poor tools and their minds concentrated on the race to the top, these twelve climbers are up against a formidable obstacle in the Wall, which presents far more of a threat than other edifices of the same height:

Ice was treacherous stuff at the best of times, and on a day like this, when the Wall was weeping, the warmth of a climber’s hand might be enough to melt it. The huge blocks could be frozen rock-hard inside, but their outer surface would be slick, with runnels of water trickling down, and patches of rotten ice where the air had gotten in. Whatever else the wildlings are, they’re brave. …Jarl’s four remained well ahead till noon, when they hit a pitch of bad ice. Jarl had looped his rope around a wind-carved pinnace and was using it to support his weight when the whole jagged thing suddenly crumbled and came crashing down, and him with it. Chunks of ice as big as a man’s head bombarded the three below, but they clung to the handholds and the stakes held, and Jarl jerked to a sudden halt at the end of the rope. By the time his team had recovered from that mischance, Grigg the Goat had almost drawn even with them. Errok’s four remained well behind. The face where they were climbing looked smooth and unpitted, covered with a sheet of icemelt that glistened wetly where the sun brushed it. Grigg’s section was darker to the eye, with more obvious features; long horizontal ledges where a block had been imperfectly positioned atop the block below, cracks and crevices, even chimneys along the vertical joins, where wind and water had eaten holes large enough for a man to hide in.

By its very nature, the Wall is not only slippery, which risks slipping with every handhold and foothold carved out of the ice, but full of hidden menace, where any place you place your axe might give out and not just threaten you with a sudden fall but a rain of “chunks of ice as big as a man’s head” on top of everyone below you, which might cause a chain reaction of falls that could easily peel an entire string of men out into the blue.

As I said at the beginning, what’s interesting about the way this is presented is that Jon, the nominal protagonist, is standing off to the side and watching it all happen. At the same time, the other interesting thing is that, rather than focusing on the interior struggle of the climbers (as is the case of earlier climbing chapters), the Wall is presented as an active antagonist, a fiendish DM carefully setting out their traps to snag the unwary:

Jon was watching them inch along when he heard the sound—a sudden crack that seemed to roll along the ice, followed by a shout of alarm. And then the air was full of shards and shrieks and falling men, as a sheet of ice a foot thick and fifty feet square broke off from the Wall and came tumbling, crumbling, rumbling, sweeping all before it. Even down at the foot of the ridge, some chunks came spinning through the trees and rolling down the slope. Jon grabbed Ygritte and pulled her down to shield her, and one of the Thenns was struck in the face by a chunk that broke his nose. And when they looked up Jarl and his team were gone. Men, ropes, stakes, all gone; nothing remained above six hundred feet. There was a wound in the Wall where the climbers had clung half a heartbeat before, the ice within as smooth and white as polished marble and shining in the sun. Far far below there was a faint red smear where someone had smashed against a frozen pinnace. The Wall defends itself, Jon thought as he pulled Ygritte back to her feet. They found Jarl in a tree, impaled upon a splintered branch and still roped to the three men who lay broken beneath him. One was still alive, but his legs and spine were shattered, and most of his ribs as well. “Mercy,” he said when they came upon him. One of the Thenns smashed his head in with a big stone mace. The Magnar gave orders, and his men began to gather fuel for a pyre.

For all his knowledge, for all his reputation, all it takes is one mistake, one bit of bad luck, and the best climber and a crucial leader of the raid is wiped off the face of the Wall along with his entire team. That is the power of the Wall, which wields its own material against those who would seek to cross it without leave. Indeed, this passage begins to raise the question of how conscious an antagonist the Wall is – does Jon’s interalized superstition, which echoes Ygritte’s comments later on, speak to the idea that the Wall is something more than a thing. (More on this later.)

The Climb Ends

After the drama in miniature of the race turning into tragedy, Jon’s own ascent of the Wall is rather perfunctory (as I’ve discussed at the beginning), and the focus is more about the wildlings’ preparations than Snow’s experience:

They unwound the long coils of hemp they’d had looped around their chests, tied them all together, and tossed down one end. The thought of trying to climb five hundred feet up that rope filled Jon with dread, but Mance had planned better than that. The raiders Jarl had left below uncasked a huge ladder, with rungs of woven hemp as thick as a man’s arm, and tied it to the climbers’ rope. Errok and Grigg and their men grunted and heaved, pulled it up, staked it to the top, then lowered the rope again to haul up a second ladder. There were five altogether. When all of them were in place, the Magnar shouted a brusque command in the Old Tongue, and five of his Thenns started up together. Even with the ladders, it was no easy climb.

At this point, I don’t really mind that it’s such a non-event, because it frees up some space to talk about something far more interesting:

Ygritte watched them struggle for a while. “I hate this Wall,” she said in a low angry voice. “Can you feel how cold it is?” “It’s made of ice,” Jon pointed out. “You know nothing, Jon Snow. This wall is made o’ blood.” Nor had it drunk its fill. By sunset, two of the Thenns had fallen from the ladder to their deaths, but they were the last. It was near midnight before Jon reached the top. The stars were out again, and Ygritte was trembling from the climb. “I almost fell,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “Twice. Thrice. The Wall was trying t’ shake me off, I could feel it.”

Ygritte sees the Wall as a living instrument of oppression, perhaps one brought into existence through blood magic. As much as he might demur publicly, Jon Snow’s rational skepticism is belied by the fact that, in the privacy of his own mind, he believes that the Wall “defends itself.” And as we see throughout ASOIAF, the rational answer is usually the wrong answer: we know from Davos’s experiences in ACOK that magical defenses can and have been built into ancient structures supposedly designed by Bran the Builder; in the next Bran chapter, we’ll learn that the Wall was one of these structures, thus why wights and White Walkers cannot cross its barrier; finally, we’ll learn from Bran’s visions of the past that the First Men fed the weirwood trees with the blood of human sacrifice. Thus, it’s quite plausible that Ygritte is entirely correct in her beliefs.

And if the Wall used magic to thwart the freedom of the Free Folk, this explains (and perhaps justifies) why the wildlings would turn to magic of their own to liberate themselves:

“I’m crying because we never found the Horn of Winter. We opened half a hundred graves and let all those shades loose in the world, and never found the Horn of Joramun to bring this cold thing down!”

As one of the most major clues that Jon ever gets in his attempt to find the Horn of Joramun in order to complete Qorin Halfhand’s original mission, I find this cryptic monologue absolutely fascinating:

First of all, it’s some of the only evidence we have that Mance Rayder was indeed actively trying to find the Horn of Winter as part of his planning to get past the Wall. And this fact is quite important when we consider his broader strategy in the Battle of Castle Black: was Mance planning to use the real Horn as a trump card rather than a bluff?

Second, I’m curious what these graves were and how Mance Rayder found out about them; my guess is that they were the barrows of the various Kings-beyond-the-Wall, because the Frostfangs are known as a place where wildlings are said worship “dark gods beneath the ground” and thus may well be sacred ground, and because of the extreme difficulty of digging graves at those altitudes in those climates suggests an immense effort, and that Mance probably learned of them through his bard’s investigations into the legends and folklore of the Free Folk.

Third, I’m really curious as to whether Ygritte’s mention of them “let[ting] all those shades loose in the world” is meant merely metaphorically, or whether Mance Rayder and his followers played some role in waking the White Walkers (which, crucially, predated the “rebirth” of magic). Keep this in mind when we consider the cause of the Free Folk in the next Jon chapter.

Historical Analysis:

Going all the way back to my very first chapter-by-chapter essay, I’ve compared the Wall to historical structures like Hadrian’s Wall. However, despite the mythology of Hadrian’s Wall as a barrier against fearsome barbarian raiders, the actual history was more about ensuring that merchants and shepherds had to pay sales taxes. Where we do see an arm’s race of tactics between the garrisons of a massive wall and northern barbarian tribes is the Great Wall of China. (See, I told you I would get to this eventually.)

What follows is a very brief summary of a great deal of history.

On the part of any number of imperial dynasties, the various Great Walls – because there were actually different walls that were built and rebuilt, moved and extended, depending on the needs and strategies of the dynasties in question – were used in many different ways. In the case of the campaign of General Meng Tian against the Xiognu, walls were used offensively, extended outwards to enclose the newly-conquered Ordos region of northeast China so that it could be more easily integrated into the empire. In other cases, as after the Ming dynasty suffered an embarrasing defeat at the heads of the Qirat Mongols, the Great Wall was used defensively, emphasizing the construction of watch towers, garrisons, and beacon fires to allow the Ming to keep various nomad peoples on the north side of the Ordos Desert.

This emphasis on fixed defenses has something of a mixed track record. In the 4th century, the Great Wall was unable to help the Western Jin dynasty hold off the Uprising of the Five Barbarians, in part because the main army was defeated out in the field, which left the empire without the necessary manpower to man the Wall. (If only Jeor Mormont had access to that history.) When the armies of Genghis Khan came up against the Great Wall of China in the 13th century, the Mongol armies used a sophisticated strategy that combined luring out defenders into ambushes and then charging the opened gates, exploiting the ethnic grievances of the garrisons against the ruling dynasty, and simply bypassing fortresses that were too difficult to capture. Finally, in the case of the Ming dynasty’s attempt to keep the Manchu out, the commander of the Sanhai Pass General Wu Sangui simply defected to the Manchu and let them through the Great Wall when the Ming Emperor was overthrown by the Shun rebels.

What If?

Given the inherent dangers of climbing a massive wall built out of ice, there’s any opportunity for things to go wrong, so here’s a couple hypotheticals that come to mind:

Jon Snow falls? If Jon dies in the climb, the danger here is that he won’t have the opportunity to warn Castle Black ahead of the attack from the south, which might well mean that Castle Black falls to assault. Where things get really chaotic is that, given how long it takes one hundred thousand people to pass through a narrow gate, is that Stannis will arrive and hit the wildling force as it’s mid-crossing, leading to much bloodshed, but also a portion of the wildling host crashing through the North without leadership, and with no force able to integrate them into Northern society.

Jon Snow is caught? If a Night’s Watch patrol intercepts Jon’s raiding party, Castle Black is much safer than in the hypothetical above. However, the danger is that Jon Snow will be caught red-handed and thus be more likely to be convicted of oathbreaking et al. than he was in OTL. In this situation, the Night’s Watch might well hold the Wall and (with Stannis’ assistance) break Mance Rayder’s host, but without a Lord Commander willing to include the wildlings in the realms of men, the danger is that the stranded wildlings only serve to swell the ranks of the Army of the Dead.

Jarl lives? This is one that I’ll have to keep an eye on myself, because my memory of how the raid goes from here to the night-time battle isn’t the strongest, so I’ll look for ways in which Jarl might have brought a different strategy than the Magnar of Thenn.

Book vs. Show:

As I’ve said before, I think in general HBO did a better job with Jon’s storyline in Season 3 than they had in Season 2. Putting Jon Snow in Jarl’s boots as the protagonist of the climb makes sense as an adaptational choice – it’s inherently more dramatic for the main characters to be the ones at risk or perfoming feats of heroism to save others, than for them to simply observe others to save them.

I have mixed feelings on Orell as the antagonist. On the one hand, having an enemy on the onside is a good direction for undercover agent stories, and him cutting the rope is a particularly dramatic moment. On the other, having him being motivated by an obsession with Ygritte is pretty clichéd, and contributed to the potential damselization of Ygritte, which is already something of an issue in this episode given that Ygritte takes the place of Jarl as the one whose axe causes the ice to give way, placing her and Jon in danger.

Similarly, I totally understand why the show decides to have the Horn of Winter drop out of the story at this point in favor of playing up Jon and Ygritte’s romance. Kit Harrington and Rose Leslie have natural chemistry together, and emphasizing the star-crossed lovers thing right ahead of Jon betraying her to save the Watch makes sense. On the other hand, I feel like de-emphasizing the Horn put the writers in something of a difficulty in Season 7 when they had to come up with a new idea for how the Wall comes down, leading to the bizarre spectacle of the Wight Hunt.