“I am going home, he told himself. But if that was true, why did he feel so hollow?”

Synopsis: Jon breaks cover.

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:

To start the new year off right, we begin with the second half of a two-parter, although almost instantly we get the sense that GRRM is using this particular stylistic experiment to show off how he can describe the same environment and interconnected events, but give each their own different genre and emotional palette.

Whereas Bran III went very heavily into Tolkien-inspired Hero’s Journey storytelling, Jon V is pure spy/crime fiction: the classic beat where the protagonist is forced to choose between maintaining their cover by doing something from which there is no coming back and breaking cover into desperate flight but keeping their soul intact. The reprehensible action in question is usually the killing of an innocent, and GRRM sees no need to reinvent the wheel in this case.

Speaking of GRRM’s stylistic experimentation, Jon V starts with a good example of how switching point of view characters can show us a different angle on the same event or environment, in this case Queenscrown:

On a hill above them was another roundtower, ancient and empty, thick green moss crawling up its side almost to the summit. “Who built that, all of stone like that?” Ygritte asked him. “Some king?”

“No. Just the men who used to live here.”

“What happened to them?”

“They died or went away.”

“…They were fools to leave such a castle,” said Ygritte.

“It’s only a towerhouse. Some little lordling lived there once, with his family and a few sworn men. When raiders came he would light a beacon from the roof. Winterfell has towers three times the size of that.”

While playing a similar role that the Reeds play in Bran III, the fact that Ygritte is one of those wildling raiders whom the “lordling” and “his family and a few sworn men” would hide from, and that her people are the cause for the tower’s abandonment can’t help put a sharper edge on the broader phenomenon of the Gift’s depopulation. Already in Ygritte’s callous dismissal that “they were fools to leave such a castle” – which is an…interesting position for her to take, given her broader feelings about people being forced off their land by force, and sets up her later debate with Jon about land, property, and warfare – we can see the logical extension of the wildling libertarian ethos.

At the same time, Ygritte provides a similarly pointed spin on the Reeds’ fish out of water perspective, because while the fenfolk have some exposure to Winterfell, Ygritte has a decidely post-apocalyptic view on architecture:

She looked as if she thought he was making that up. “How could men build so high, with no giants to lift the stones?”

In legend, Brandon the Builder had used giants to help raise Winterfell, but Jon did not want to confuse the issue. “Men can build a lot higher than this. In Oldtown there’s a tower taller than the Wall.” He could tell she did not believe him.

Here, GRRM seems to be borrowing from the tendency of early medieval Saxons to attribute Roman ruins to the work of giants (although how literal vs. figurative the Saxon poets were being is up to interpretation), or at least the way this tendency filtered down into the histories that he and Bernard Cornwell (who also makes use of this trope in describing 8th century London) read which laid a heavy emphasis on the loss of architectural and engineering as part of the “Dark Ages” declension following the fall of Rome. Regardless of one’s view of its historicity, it gives a very vivid image of what real technological stagnation looks like; by examining the difference between Ygritte’s weltanschauung and Jon’s, we can see exactly how much Westeros south of the Wall has changed in the eight thousand years since the Long Night.

As is so often in the case in ASOIAF, however, there is a kernel of truth in Ygritte’s musings. Just as Old Nan’s stories always come true, and just as Septon Barth is always right about everything, it almost certainly was the case that giants helped to build Winterfell and the Wall. This mythico-historical factoid is more important than it might seem, because of the way that it undermines the us vs. them dynamic that both Jon and Ygritte buy into, albeit from different perspectives. (Although it doesn’t explain how they wound up extinct south of the Wall.) Finally, for students of the Eldritch Apocalypse, note how quietly GRRM works in that the Hightower is taller (and thus capable of magically projecting over?) the Wall.

Completely departing from the parallel structure with Bran III, the “roundtower” also prompts both Jon and Ygritte to begin dreaming about their lives and what they might look “after” the war – althought it’s pretty clear that both in pretty deep denial about the conflicts between their individual dreams that speak to their broader incompatibility as a couple:

If I could show her Winterfell…give her a flower from the glass gardens, feast her in the Great Hall, and show her the stone kings on their thrones. We could bathe in the hot pools, and love beneath the heart tree while the old gods watched over us.

The dream was sweet…but Winterfell would never be his to show…

“Might be after we could come back here, and live in that tower…” If winter had come and gone more quickly and spring had followed in its turn, I might have been chosen to hold one of these towers in my father’s name.

On the one hand, Jon wants to bring his first girlfriend home – if not to meet his family (interesting that none of them are there in his imagination), at least to show off the key Romantic features of Winterfell. The “flower from the glass gardens” is the clearest example, but the hot pools are a close second…although wanting to take her to the crypts is a bit too Mary-Shelley-on-her-mother’s-grave for me. However, as he acknowledges with the significant conditional in “if winter had come and gone more quickly”, Jon recognizes that he’s made life choices that are incompatible with domestic bliss. On the other hand, Ygritte believes that “after” the war ends, the two of them can separate from the bigger institutions of Mance Rayder’s army and the Night’s Watch and the North and settle down “in that tower” – except that she doesn’t (or won’t) recognize that Jon wants to settle down within the feudal social contract (“hold one of these towers in my father’s name”) whereas as we’ll see in a bit Ygritte very much wants to stay outside of it.

Speaking of which, this is also where we get the famous (at least among ASOIAF world-builders) paragraph where Jon describes Ned’s plan for settling the Gift:

His lord father had once talked about raising new lords and settling them in the abandoned holdfasts as a shield against wildlings. The plan would have required the Watch to yield back a large part of the Gift, but his uncle Benjen believed the Lord Commander could be won around, so long as the new lordlings paid taxes to Castle Black rather than Winterfell. “It is a dream for spring, though,” Lord Eddard had said. “Even the promise of land will not lure men north with a winter coming on.”

Note that the context here is less about the grand sweep of political reform or military strategy, but rather about what was clearly Jon’s Plan B (we’ll see his childhood Plan A getting squashed in Jon XII) – if he couldn’t aspire to the lordship of Winterfell, a fixer-upper “abandoned holdfast” on the margins of the North was a more realistic alternative career goal for Ned Stark’s bastard. Despite the context, however, ADWD readers can tell that this memory is the clear inspiration for Lord Commander Jon Snow’s plan to settle the wildlings on the Gift (a very different way of getting to “after“), and Ned’s title-dropping of “a dream for spring” is meant to underline the difficulty of creating a new order of things in trying circumstances.

But On the Other Side/It Didn’t Say Nothing

Speaking of difficult circumstances this “idyllic” moment cast last, as Jon and Ygritte’s diametrically opposed worldviews drive them into less a civil exchange of views and more of a flaming row that encompasses property rights, “might makes right” morality, and broader issues of consent:

“This land belongs to the Watch,” Jon said.

Her nostrils flared. “No one lives here.”

“Your raiders drove them off.”

“They were cowards, then. If they wanted the land they should have stayed and fought.”

“Maybe they were tired of fighting. Tired of barring their doors every night and wondering if Rattleshirt or someone like him would break them down to carry off their wives. Tired of having their harvests stolen, and any valuables they might have. It’s easier to move beyond the reach of raiders.” But if the Wall should fail, all the north will lie within the reach of raiders.

“You know nothing, Jon Snow. Daughters are taken, not wives. You’re the ones who steal. You took the whole world, and built the Wall t’ keep the free folk out.”

This isn’t the first time that the two have sparred over these issues, but there’s an intensity to both their rhetorics that speaks to the complicated emotional tangle running just underneath the surface. Ygritte starts from a position of romantic nationalism that makes it easy for her to paper over real issues about consent with naive statements that “daughters are taken not wives,” but which is also intexticably linked to a “barbarian warrior” mentality that restricts ownership to current usage. One gets the idea that she would be very unimpressed with John Locke’s “turf my servant cuts” argument for expansive property rights, although not even the most fervent Georgist would argue that you only get to own what you are able to defend in hand-to-hand combat.

For his part, Jon’s position is grounded in a far more realist position: it’s all well and good to say that people should “have stayed and fought,” but it’s simply unrealistic to expect unarmed civilians (and an inadequate handful of “hedge lords” and their men) to endure a lifetime of hypervigilant violent struggle in addition to the already-difficult task of scratching out a living as farmers in the far North. As we’ll talk much more about in just a second, there’s a direct connection between this broader issue of raiding and the far more pointed discussion of wife-stealing and consent: wildling raiders don’t just take food and movable property, they take people whose rights to self-determination have to be taken into account.

But before we can get into that issue, we have one more round of freshman dorm room debates over property rights. Here, the topic shifts from the specific case of the Gift to the original source of the conflict between these two realms of men – the alienation caused by the construction of the Wall:

“The gods made the earth for all men t’ share. Only when the kings come with their crowns and steel swords, they claimed it was all theirs. My trees, they said, you can’t eat them apples. My stream, you can’t fish here. My wood, you’re not t’ hunt. My earth, my water, my castle, my daughter, keep your hands away or I’ll chop ’em off, but maybe if you kneel t’ me I’ll let you have a sniff. You call us thieves, but at least a thief has t’ be brave and clever and quick. A kneeler only has t’ kneel.”

“Harma and the Bag of Bones don’t come raiding for fish and apples. They steal swords and axes. Spices, silks, and furs. They grab every coin and ring and jeweled cup they can find, casks of wine in summer and casks of beef in winter, and they take women in any season and carry them off beyond the Wall.”

Ygritte’s argument is a pretty straightforward version of the “state of nature” argument against private property (or to be more specific, private ownership of land as an inherently fixed and limited resource). While these kind of arguments were most common during the Enlightenment from Tom Paine’s Agrarian Justice to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s corpus, they were but the heirs to a long line of rhetoric that went back to the Diggers during the English Civil War who argued that the “The Earth…was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all,” to John Ball, the spiritual leader of the Great Peasant Revolt of 1381, who grounded his arguments for political equality and land redistribution in the Book of Genesis’ account of creation.

Given how sympathetic I am to these kinds of arguments normally, it’s a sign that Ygritte is on thin ice that I find myself coming down pretty heavily on Jon’s side here. While Ygritte isn’t wrong about the exploitative nature of the Westerosi monarchy, Jon’s counter-argument is pretty devastating. Paeans to the romantic virtues of the rogue work much better in the abstract (or perhaps in the case of Mance Rayder and Tormund Giantsbane, who GRRM clearly created to fulfill this role), because all of that implied nobility of character falls apart when you’re talking about violent maniacs like “Harma and the Bag of Bones” to say nothing of human monsters like the Weeper or Varamyr Sixskins. If the right to steal belongs to everyone, it belongs to them too…even if they’re going to use it to take away the freedom of women all throughout the North.

Which at last brings us to the issue of wife-stealing. Throughout the series, Ygritte has a poster child for the extremely well-trodden trope of barbarian warrior women who will “lie with no man unless he defeats her first in fair combat” – she even has red hair, the better to fit the archetype – but here Jon’s problems with her beliefs are expressed without any mediating figure like Craster:

“And what if they do? I’d sooner be stolen by a strong man than be given t’ some weakling by my father.”

…Jon caught her wrist. “What if the man who stole you drank too much?” he insisted. “What if he was brutal or cruel?” He tightened his grip to make a point. “What if he was stronger than you, and liked to beat you bloody?”

“I’d cut his throat while he slept…A man can own a woman or a man can own a knife…but no man can own both. Every little girl learns that from her mother.”

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, there is a fair bit of sublimated and romanticized violence at the heart of marriage-by-abduction and its more modern incarnation in the Red Sonja archetype is no exception. As Jon points out, the “All Amazons Want Hercules” trope tries to use cultural standards of attractiveness to bootstrap consent to relationship-by-assault, but the moment you continue the violence after the initial “meet-cute“, it begins looking like Stockholm Syndrome. It is incredibly telling, moreover, that Ygritte’s only answer to this argument is to argue that “a man can own a woman or a man can own a knife…but no man can own both” – a victim-blaming approach that ultimately dismisses Craster’s wives as un-persons and cowards (who implicitly deserve what happens to them), and it doesn’t sound any better coming out of Ygritte’s mouth than it did coming out of Jeor Mormont’s. Domestic violence cannot be reduced to a “good guy with a gun” solution because oppression has many forms, whether we’re talking about Craster’s use of isolation and gaslighting or Varamyr’s use of skinchanging magic and threatening loved ones.

The Double Agent’s Dilemma

Underneath Jon’s behmence, we can see the increasingly heavy strain of his cover identity as the raiding party draws ever closer to its destination at Castle Black. Well before that strain finally breaks during the climax, he’s already dangerously breaking character in a desperate attempt to get through to the woman he’s fallen in love with:

“Ygritte,” he said in a low voice, “Mance cannot win this war.”

“He can!” she insisted. “You know nothing, Jon Snow. You have never seen the free folk fight!”

Wildlings fought like heroes or demons, depending on who you talked to, but it came down to the same thing in the end. They fight with reckless courage, every man out for glory. “I don’t doubt that you’re all very brave, but when it comes to battle, discipline beats valor every time. In the end Mance will fail as all the Kings-beyond-the-Wall have failed before him. And when he does, you’ll die. All of you.”

As the subject of conversation shifts abruptly from intercultural tensions to the looming threat of military conflict, Jon’s emphasis on discipline over courage calls back to multiple chapters, from the Old Bear’s plan of attack to Jon’s impressions of Mance’s camp and the host on the march. At the same time, there’s an interesring ambiguity as to how sincere he’s being in the moment. On the one hand, he will see on both sides of Castle Black that the wildling host does not fare well in setpiece battles against better-trained and better-equipped Westerosi armies, so he might be quite sincere in his attempt to ward off Ygritte’s destiny. On the other hand, as we’ll see shortly Jon has a much more pessimistic view about the Night Watch’s prospects in the privacy of his own head, so it may be the case that Jon is exaggerating in an attempt to persuade Ygritte to defect with him.

For her part, Ygritte’s faith in Mance and the wildling cause means that she’s less interested in questions of victory and defeat than the question of “which side are you on?”

“…All of us,” she said. You too. You’re no crow now, Jon Snow. I swore you weren’t. So you better not be…You’re mine,” she whisperered. “Mine, as I’m yours. And if we die, we die. All men must die, Jon Snow. But first we’ll live.”

“Yes.” His voice was thick. “First we’ll live.”

She grinned at that, showing Jon the crooked teeth that he had somehow come to love. Wildling to the bone, he thought again, with a sick sad feeling in the pit of his stomach. He flexed the fingers of his sword hand, and wondered what Ygritte would do if she knew his heart. Would she betray him if he sat her down and told her that he was still Ned Stark’s son and a man of the Night’s Watch? He hoped not, but he dare not take that risk. Too many lives depended on his somehow reaching Castle Black before the Magnar…assuming he found a chance to escape the wildlings.

As I’ve discussed before, while much of the fandom tends to focus on the ways in which Ygritte coerced Jon into a relationship, we can also see that Jon is engaged in a premeditated gaslighting campaign, where he consistently tells her what he knows Ygritte wants to hear while hiding “his heart” from her. (“But first we’ll live” is far more romantic when you don’t think about how he’s repeating her own words back to her without meaning it in the slightest.) Jon’s unwillingness to do more than hint that “he was still…a man of the Night’s Watch” because he knows she might “betray him” and prevent him from “reaching Castle Black before the Magnar” (which is incidentally a significant piece of evidence against the Jon-wanted-Ygritte-to-defect theory) speaks to the calculated nature of his actions.

Or does it? Because a little later on in the chapter, we get a window into Jon Snow’s mindset that suggests a good deal more of internal tension than he’s displaying on the outside and a good deal less sangfroid than our protagonist would like to admit:

Every day he spent among the wildlings made what he had to do that much harder. He was going to have to find some way to betray these men, and when he did they would die. He did not want their friendship, any more than he wanted Ygritte’s love. And yet…the Thenns spoke the Old Tongue and seldom talked to Jon at all, but it was different with Jarl’s raiders, the men who’d climbed the Wall. Jon was coming to know them despite himself: gaunt, quiet Errok and gregarious Grigg the Goat, the boys Quort and Bodger, Hempen Dan the ropemaker. The worst of the lot was Del, a horsefaced youth near Jon’s own age, who would talk dreamily of this wildling girl he meant to steal. “She’s lucky, like your Ygritte. She’s kissed by fire.”

This is the dilemma of the double agent: in order to accomplish his mission, Jon knows that “he was going to have to find some way to betray these men,” and that requires cultivating their friendship. Not being a pure sociopath, however, this can’t help but affect him as well, as much as “he did not want their friendship.” As much as he seeks to avoid humanizing his enemy, Jon has always been too good an anthropological observer (something he has in common with Daenerys) for his own good. It is a truism of school field trips and corporate teamwork retreats alike that shared hardship is an excellent catalyst for social bonds; thus, it makes sense that Jon “was coming to know…despite himself” his peers among “Jarl’s raiders, the men who’d climbed the Wall” with him. As is so often the case in war, Jon is learning that the enemy rank-and-file are mostly young men with the same hopes and dreams, the same inside jokes and variety of personality, as his peers among the Night’s Watch.

To bring this back to the original topic, Jon gives off a huge tell when he thinks that “He did not want their friendship, any more than he wanted Ygritte’s love.” On their own, these men aren’t really significant – we won’t even learn most of their fates after the Battle of Castle Black – but they work as a stand-in for Jon’s feelings about Ygritte. As much as Jon might like to pretend to be as much of a cold bastard as James Bond when it comes to his…undercover assignments, the reality is that he’s caught a case of the feels and has no idea what to do about his dilemma.

At the same time, Jon needs to summon up something of that calculating spirit, because, despite Jon’s participation to date as a raider, the Thenns are constantly evaluating and pushing him to further commit himself by handing over military intelligence (with the implicit threat that they might label him a spy if he refuses):

You must not balk, whatever is asked of you, the Halfhand had said. Ride with them, eat with them, fight with them, for as long as it takes. He’d ridden many leagues and walked for more, had shared their bread and salt, and Ygritte’s blankets as well, but still they did not trust him. Day and night the Thenns watched him, alert for any signs of betrayal. He could not get away, and soon it would be too late.

Fight with them, Qhorin had said, before he surrendered his own life to Longclaw…but it had not come to that, till now. Once I shed a brother’s blood I am lost. I cross the Wall for good then, and there is no crossing back.

After each day’s march the Magnar summoned him to ask shrewd sharp questions about Castle Black, its garrison and defenses. Jon lied where he dared and feigned ignorance a few times, but Grigg the Goat and Errok listened as well, and they knew enough to make Jon careful. Too blatant a lie would betray him.

Here, GRRM sets up an interesting misdirect by setting up the possibility that Jon will be asked to “shed a brother’s blood” – possibly by being asked to execute an outrider or scout from the Night’s Watch – with Jon wrestling with his conscience and deciding that this is his red line. As we will see later, the ultimate test will come from a very different direction, and ask Jon whether all men are his brothers.

Martin also uses the discussion of military logistics to further raise the stakes for Jon’s mission and his currently impossible-seeming plan to escape. We’ve known from the beginning that his time among the wildlings would always end this way, but up until now the end of his sojourn has always seemed a bit abstract and hazy. Now the prospect is becoming quite pressingly real:

But the truth was terrible. Castle Black had no defenses, but for the Wall itself. It lacked even wooden palisades or earthen dikes. The “castle” was nothing more than a cluster of towers and keeps, two-thirds of them falling into ruin. As for the garrison, the Old Bear had taken two hundred on his ranging. Had any returned? Jon could not know. Perhaps four hundred remained at the castle, but most of those were builders or stewards, not rangers.

The Thenns were hardened warriors, and more disciplined than the common run of wildling; no doubt that was why Mance had chosen them. The defenders of Castle Black…commanding them would be red-faced Bowen Marsh, the plump Lord Steward who had been made castellan in Lord Mormont’s absence. Dolorous Edd sometimes called Marsh “the Old Pomegranate,” which fit him just as well as “the Old Bear” fit Mormont. “He’s the man you want in front when the foes are in the field,” Edd would say in his usual dour voice. “He’ll count them right up for you. A regular demon for counting, that one.”

If the Magnar takes Castle Black unawares, it will be red slaughter, boys butchered in their beds before they know they are under attack. Jon had to warn them, but how? He was never sent out to forage or hunt, nor allowed to stand a watch alone. And he feared for Ygritte as well.

Finally, GRRM also takes the opportunity to set out the basic parameters of the assault on Castle Black – a few hundred weekend warriors, led by an untried REMF who’s only in command because everyone competent above him has died horribly, trying to defend a ramshackle fort against a hundred hardened raiders led by a hard-bitten warrior-god-king – so that we know why Jon absolutely has to escape right now, and what the stakes will be when he arrives home.

Gimme Shelter, Take Two

All of this goes down before Jon’s raiding party even arrives at the abandoned village by Queenscrown and GRRM returns to his temporarily-discarded parallelism experiment:

It was well past dark and the storm was raging by the time they reached the place. The village sat beside a lake, and had been so long abandoned that most of the houses had collapsed. Even the small timber inn that must once have been a welcome sight for travelers stood half-fallen and roofless. We will find scant shelter here, Jon thought gloomily. Whenever the lightning flashed he could see a stone roundtower rising from an island out in the lake, but without boats they had no way to reach it. Errok and Del had crept ahead to scout the ruins, but Del was back almost at once. Styr halted the column and sent a dozen of his Thenns trotting forward, spears in hand. By then Jon had seen it too: the glimmer of a fire, reddening the chimney of the inn. We are not alone…

Through Jon’s eyes things look completely differently than the last time we were here, with things that once looked threatening turning out to be benign and vice-versa: the abandoned village that was quietly melancholy before becomes a place where only “scant shelter” can be found; the “stone roundtower rising from an island out in the lake” which afforded refuge for Bran and co. now seems out of reach because Jon doesn’t remember his childhood stories as well as his cousin. Similarly, when Jon finally taps into the power of story, he almost gets his brother killed by giving away the secret to Ygritte. Even Hodor’s shouting – which so terrified Bran that he committed an abomination – is seen in a different light, dismissed as the wailing of “ghosts.”

Most consequentially, the lone rider and his fire which drove Bran and his companions into hiding in the cold dark turns out to be an harmless old man who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time:

The Magnar shouted commands in the Old Tongue and a score of his Thenns spread out to establish a perimeter around the village, whilst others went prowling through the houses to make certain no one else was hiding amongst the weeds and tumbled stones. The rest crowded into the roofless inn, jostling each other to get closer to the hearth. The broken branches the old man had been burning seemed to generate more smoke than heat, but any warmth was welcome on such a wild rainy night. Two of the Thenns had thrown the man to the ground and were going through his things. Another held his horse, while three more looted his saddlebags. Jon walked away. A rotten apple squished beneath his heel. Styr will kill him. The Magnar had said as much at Greyguard; any kneelers they met were to be put to death at once, to make certain they could not raise the alarm. Ride with them, eat with them, fight with them. Did that mean he must stand mute and helpless while they slit an old man’s throat?

Jon thinks that he’s being tested as a bystander, to see whether his dedication to the “greater good” of his mission can justify “stand[ing] mute and helpless while they slit an old man’s throat” – and comes to an implicit decision when he “walked away” rather than intervened. Instead, the Magnar puts Jon to the (very different) test in more ways than one:

They found the Magnar standing beneath the tree that grew through the floor of the common room. His captive knelt before the hearth, encircled by wooden spears and bronze swords. He watched Jon approach, but did not speak… “He must die,” Styr the Magnar said. “Do it, crow.”

Styr’s threat, embodied in the “wooden spears and bronze swords,” is that either this old man or Jon himself are going to die. But for Jon, the question is quite different: how far can Qhorin Halfhand’s bushido approach to the Night’s Watch oath extend? Can ruthless dedication to duty encompass not merely feigned treachery or immoral inaction, but outright murder of a civilian that he’s sworn to defend?

The old man said no word. He only looked at Jon, standing amongst the wildlings. Amidst the rain and smoke, lit only by the fire, he could not have seen that Jon was all in black, but for his sheepskin cloak. Or could he?

Jon drew Longclaw from its sheath. Rain washed the steel, and the firelight traced a sullen orange line along the edge. Such a small fire, to cost a man his life. He remembered what Qhorin Halfhand had said when they spied the fire in the Skirling Pass. Fire is life up here, he told them, but it can be death as well. That was high in the Frostfangs, though, in the lawless wild beyond the Wall. This was the Gift, protected by the Night’s Watch and the power of Winterfell. A man should have been free to build a fire here, without dying for it. “Why do you hesitate?” Styr said. “Kill him, and be done.”

Jon comes to a very different answer from his former mentor, drawing an ethical line between how things are done “high in the Frostfangs,” where the writ of the law does not run, and how things ought to be done in “the Gift, protected by the Night’s Watch and the power of Winterfell” where “a man should have been free to build a fire…without dying for it.” As Jon begins to formulate his own political ideals that we will see come to full flower in ADWD, Styr tightens the screws on him, effectively asking the sixteen-year-old Watchman whether he’s willing to die for his new beliefs:

Even then the captive did not speak…No words would save him now, though. Perhaps he knew that. So he held his tongue, and looked at Jon in accusation and appeal.

You must not balk, whatever is asked of you. Ride with them, eat with them, fight with them…But this old man had offered no resistance… He is an old man, Jon told himself. Fifty, maybe even sixty. He lived a longer life than most. The Thenns will kill him anyway, nothing I can say or do will save him. Longclaw seemed heavier than lead in his hand, too heavy to lift. The man kept staring at him, with eyes as big and black as wells. I will fall into those eyes and drown. The Magnar was looking at him too, and he could almost taste the mistrust. The man is dead. What matter if it is my hand that slays him? One cut would do it, quick and clean. Longclaw was forged of Valyrian steel. Like Ice. Jon remembered another killing; the deserter on his knees, his head rolling, the brightness of blood on snow…his father’s sword, his father’s words, his father’s face…

In a necessary (although slightly clumsy) bit of writerly sleight-of-hand, GRRM makes the old man unrealistically mute at the point of death in order to make him a practically Platonic victim, and so that the debate plays out entirely within Jon’s soul. Said debate is a rather brief passage, but it’s nonetheless interesting to see his more pragmatic side offering a series of excuses that starts with casual ageism (he’s old, so killing him doesn’t waste much life), ramps up to actual vs. proximate causes of murder and self-preservation versus extreme altruism, and concludes with an exploration of humane methods of capital punishment.

But at the end of the day, Jon Snow is a hero and GRRM’s heroes are all existential. so at the very last moment he flashes all the way back to his first appearance in Bran I and the moral lessons that Ned Stark imparted to him before they were separated forever. Incidentally, this passage is a good example of the diametrically opposed legacies of Ned Stark and Tywin Lannister: while usually this plays out at the macro-political level, here we’re seeing Ned’s influence at work on the micro level.

Ygritte has her own reasons for wanting Jon to commit himself to the wildling cause, so she steps forwards at this juncture:

“Do it, Jon Snow,” Ygritte urged. “You must. T’ prove you are no crow, but one o’ the free folk.”

“An old man sitting by a fire?”

“Orell was sitting by a fire too. You killed him quick enough.” The look she gave him then was hard. “You meant t’ kill me too, till you saw I was a woman. And I was asleep.”

“That was different. You were soldiers…sentries.”

Here, Ygritte makes two arguments. The first, echoing his internal dialogue, argues from necessity – Jon has to kill the old man to “prove you are no crow, but one o’ the free folk.” It’s that same “what side are you on” mentality, but instead of being couched in both romance and Romanticism, it’s the brutal logic of gang initiation. When her paramour talks back, Ygritte provides a second argument from moral parallelism, although as Jon suggests, she’s bullshitting more than a little bit. If you go back to Jon V of ACOK, you see that Orell died with a weapon in hand (in this case, “a burning brand”) doing his best to fulfill his duty as a soldier.

Thus grounded in military ethics, Jon moves beyond mere passive avoidance to open refusal, while still trying to keep his cover. This prompts Styr to make a dangerous determination:

…He turned his back on the man. “No.”

The Magnar moved closer, tall, cold, and dangerous. “I say yes. I command here.”

“You command Thenns,” Jon told him, “not free folk.”

“I see no free folk. I see a crow and a crow wife.”

“I’m no crow wife!” Ygritte snatched her knife from its sheath. Three quick strides, and she yanked the old man’s head back by the hair and opened his throat from ear to ear. Even in death, the man did not cry out. “You know nothing, Jon Snow!” she shouted at him, and flung the bloody blade at his feet.

But before anyone can act, Ygritte steps forward to settle the matter by her own hand; and rather than explicitly lay out the meaning of her action, GRRM leaves it somewhat ambiguous. Certainly, she’s proclaiming her own identity and loyalty as a woman of the free folk – hence “I’m no crow wife!” – but whether she’s acting to save Jon’s life by demonstrating his loyalty by proxy or blaming him for making her kill the old man, or some combination of the two, we’ll never know.

Direwolf Ex Machina

Another thing we’ll never know is whether Ygritte’s desperate ploy would have worked, because just as tensions reach their peak, GRRM takes his Chekov’s direwolf off the mantle and fires it into the middle of the crowd to devastating effect:

And death leapt down amongst them.

The lightning flash left Jon night-blind, but he glimpsed the hurtling shadow half a heartbeat before he heard the shriek. The first Thenn died as the old man had, blood gushing from his torn throat. Then the light was gone and the shape was spinning away, snarling, and another man went down in the dark…Ghost, he thought for one mad instant. Ghost leapt the Wall. Then the lightning turned the night to day, and he saw the wolf standing on Del’s chest, blood running black from his jaws. Grey. He’s grey.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen first-hand how terrifying and chaotic it can be to come under attack from a direwolf, especially at night in the middle of a thunderstorm, where the lupine tactic of attacking from the flank and then withdrawing to attack from a new angle is at its best. Even Jon, who has a good deal of experience with direwolves, is discombobulated as to which wolf he’s dealing with. (And how poignant is it, his thought that Robb had returned to the North to defend his kith and kin?) After that moment of confusion, however, Jon realizes the opportunity that GRRM the Fates have just dropped in his lap:

…All at once Jon Snow knew he would never get a better chance.

He cut down the first man as he turned toward the wolf, shoved past a second, slashed at a third. Through the madness he heard someone call his name, but whether it was Ygritte or the Magnar he could not say. The Thenn fighting to control the horse never saw him. Longclaw was feather-light. He swung at the back of the man’s calf, and felt the steel bite down to the bone. When the wildling fell the mare bolted, but somehow Jon managed to grab her mane with his off hand and vault himself onto her back. A hand closed round his ankle, and he hacked down and saw Bodger’s face dissolve in a welter of blood. The horse reared, lashing out. One hoof caught a Thenn in the temple, with a crunch.

And then they were running. Jon made no effort to guide the horse. It was all he could do to stay on her as they plunged through mud and rain and thunder. Wet grass whipped at his face and a spear flew past his ear. If the horse stumbles and breaks a leg, they will run me down and kill me, he thought, but the old gods were with him and the horse did not stumble. Lightning shivered through the black dome of sky, and thunder rolled across the plains. The shouts dwindled and died behind him.

After two-and-a-half books, the reader knows that GRRM can block out a battle such that it’s crystal clear what’s happening, but here he makes no attempt to do so. The battle plays out as a fractured flashback, with Jon unable to tell whether his arch-enemy or the woman he loves is calling his name (suggesting the two are becoming one) and unaware in the moment that he’s gotten shot or who by. The chaos and confusion of the fighting are allowed to simply echo Jon’s internal conflict.

Because far from being a rousing moment where Jon rides off into the sunset with John Williams’ horn section trumpeting his victory, this moment is as morally ambiguous as any Le Carré novel. In order to escape, Jon Snow completely abandons any sense of Stark honor, attacking men from behind and most tellingly crippling (and given their access to medical technology, likely killing outright) Bodger, who considered him a friend.

Staying with the espionage genre for a moment, the chapter ends with the hero performing self-surgery:

Long hours later, the rain stopped. Jon found himself alone in a sea of tall black grass. There was a deep throbbing ache in his right thigh. When he looked down, he was surprised to see an arrow jutting out the back of it. When did that happen? He grabbed hold of the shaft and gave it a tug, but the arrowhead was sunk deep in the meat of his leg, and the pain when he pulled on it was excruciating…The arrow had to come out, though, and nothing good could come of waiting. Jon curled his hand around the fletching, took a deep breath, and shoved the arrow forward. He grunted, then cursed. It hurt so much he had to stop. I am bleeding like a butchered pig, he thought, but there was nothing to be done for it until the arrow was out. He grimaced and tried again…and soon stopped again, trembling. Once more. This time he screamed, but when he was done the arrowhead was poking through the front of his thigh.

…Was the fletching grey, or white? Ygritte fletched her arrows with pale grey goose feathers. Did she loose a shaft at me as I fled? Jon could not blame her for that. He wondered if she’d been aiming for him or the horse.

While GRRM’s grasp on medieval combat is usually pretty good, there are some occasions where he goes full Hollywood, and this is one of them. We have plenty of medieval medical manuals that detail how to deal with arrow wounds, and this is not how you go about it. Pushing the arrow through the other side greatly exacerbates tissue and organ damage for no reason; likewise, trying to just yank out an arrow could dramatically increase blood loss by removing the thing that’s plugging out the wound.

Historical Analysis:

Rather than plunge headlong into the really gory details of medieval methods of dealing with arrow wounds, I’m going to take this opportunity to tell the last part of the story of Quintus Sertorius. When we last left off, Sertorius had made himself the master of Iberia, defeating Lucius Fufidius at the Battle of the Baetis River, Marcus Domitius Calvinus at the Anas River, and in a series of brilliant guerilla campaigns driving Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius out of his own province of Hispania Ulterior. In 76 BC, the Senate of Rome, having thoroughly exhausted all of its conventional candidates for generalship, handed over the first of many extraordinary commands to the thirty-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to history as Pompey the Great).

(Incidentally, Quintus Sertorius could be said to have skinchanger tendencies: pictured here is his pet faun, which Sertorius believed sent him messages from the goddess Diana and made him invincible in battle.)

Sertorius was overjoyed at the news, dismissing Pompey as “the young pup” just as he had dismissed Metellus Pius as “the old woman.” And indeed, at least initially, Sertorius’ confidence was well-placed, as he utterly humiliated the arrogant young warlord at the Battle of Lauron. Unfortunately for the Marian general, this proved to be his high-water mark: while he would almost capture Pompey at the Battle of Sucro and would win another handful of tactically-brilliant battles in the years to come, Metellus and Pompey refocused their attentions on Sertorius’ allies and winning a war of attrition with their superior numbers and resources.

In the end, however, it would not be either Metellus or Pompey who defeated the Roman genius of guerrilla warfare. Unable to decisively defeat him in the field, the Sullans offered a reward of “a hundred talents of silver and twenty-thousand acres of land” as well as a pardon to any exiled Roman who assassinated the general. In 72 BC, Sertorius was assassinated by a jealous subordinate at a victory feast; his Iberian republic (as well as the man who murdered him) would not survive the year.

If only Sertorius had had a Red Priestess handy…

What If?

In part because everything comes down to one moment of crisis, there’s not a huge range for hypotheticals in this chapter. If Jon kills the old man, for example, that just pushes the confrontation with Styr down the road. His soul would be (further?) tarnished, but the actual plot would be much the same. Moreover, one of the big hypotheticals from the last chapter turns out to be much less of a factor because the raiding party is so preoccupied with the old man and Jon that they barely notice the tower’s existence.

Jon dies/is caught? To me, this is the more significant and more likely alternative. After all, Styr is on the verge of ordering his death when everything goes south and even after Bran/Summer’s intervention, Jon’s still an active participant in a chaotic melee, and even after he breaks free, if his horse falters, he’s still a dead man.

To me, this is the more significant and more likely alternative. After all, Styr is on the verge of ordering his death when everything goes south and even after Bran/Summer’s intervention, Jon’s still an active participant in a chaotic melee, and even after he breaks free, if his horse falters, he’s still a dead man. Ultimately, this is a very dark scenario: odds are, Castle Black falls to Styr’s ambush and the gates are opened to Mance. However, it’s still an open question whether Mance could have gotten his host through before Stannis arrives – in Jon XII of ADWD, it takes a full day to get 3,000 of Tormund’s followers through the Wall, so it would take Mance at least a fortnight and as long as a month. In that case, you may have the worst of situations: several thousand wildlings, terrified and enranged by the loss of their kinsmen north of the Wall, loose in a North already bitterly divided by war and utterly unable to feed them, running headlong onto the spears of the Boltons.

Book vs. Show:

I don’t actually have much to say about how the show adapted this scene. Orell is a fine substitute for Styr as an antagonist – although somewhat less frightening, he has more of a motivation than the Magnar. The only real critique I have is that they over-egg the pudding somewhat when it comes to having Ygritte shoot Jon with arrows – one arrow through the leg is survivable (and say what you like about GRRM’s writing, he’s generally quite good about character’s wounds sticking with them), getting three arrows in the back is much less so.