“His guilt came back afterward, but weaker than before. If this was so wrong, why did the gods make it feel so good?”

Synopsis: “Oh sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you…”

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 III is not a particularly high-octane chapter, lacking the tense spy thriller dynamics of the previous chapter or the mountain-climbing action scenes of the next, but it’s also an extremely necessary character beat for Jon Snow and Ygritte. Without the interlude in the cave as a keystone memory (to borrow Westworld’s parlance) of sweetness and love, Jon’s eventual defection back to the Night’s Watch with Ygritte’s arrow in his leg or Ygritte’s tragic death during Jon’s command of Castle Black wouldn’t land as well as they do.

A Difference in Our Stars

The chapter begins with a nice bit of metaphore, as Jon stares up at the night-time sky, looking up at the stars. In fiction, stargazing usually indicates a character who is lost and trying to find their way, either literally or metaphorically, which is true here, but GRRM gives it a twist that nicely sets the tone for the whole chapter:

“Maester Luwin had taught him his stars as a boy in Winterfell…All those he shared with Ygritte, but not some of the others. We look up at the same stars, and see such different things. The King’s Crown was the Cradle, to hear her tell it; the Stallion was the Horned Lord; the red wanderer that septons preached was sacred to their Smith up here was called the Thief. And when the Thief was in the Moonmaid, that was a propitious time for a man to steal a woman, Ygritte insisted. “Like the night you stole me. The Thief was bright that night.” “I never meant to steal you,” he said. “I never knew you were a girl until my knife was at your throat.” “If you kill a man, and never mean t’, he’s just as dead,” Ygritte said stubbornly. Jon had never met anyone so stubborn, except maybe for his little sister Arya. Is she still my sister? he wondered. Was she ever? He had never truly been a Stark, only Lord Eddard’s motherless bastard, with no more place at Winterfell than Theon Greyjoy. And even that he’d lost. When a man of the Night’s Watch said his words, he put aside his old family and joined a new one, but Jon Snow had lost those brothers too.

Cultural divisions between wildlings and Northerners over the names of the stars – note that the wildlings eschew monarchist symbols and exalt their folk-heros instead, but also prize the cunning rogue over the diligent craftsmen – belnds seamlessly into cultural differences between wildlings and Northerners over woman stealing, which nicely leads into Jon’s relationship with Ygritte, and how it makes him feel about the instability of his identity as a forrmer Stark and maybe-former brother of the Night’s Watch. (Incidentally, I wonder whether Jon’s comparison of Ygritte to Arya and questioning of whether she’s actually his sister is a hold-over from GRRM’s pitch letter which envisioned a Jon/Arya/Tyrion love triangle.)

Old Ghost-er

One way that we see these themes working out is in the interlude in which our protagonist has to tearfully part from his faithful companion, and because it’s an example of a Stark (ish) having to part with their direwolf, it’s worth taking out time with:

“Ghost,” he said quietly, “on the morrow we go over. There’s no steps here, no cage-and-crane, no way for me to get you to the other side. We have to part. Do you understand?” In the dark, the direwolf’s red eyes looked black. He nuzzled at Jon’s neck, silent as ever, his breath a hot mist. The wildlings called Jon Snow a warg, but if so he was a poor one. He did not know how to put on a wolf skin, the way Orell had with his eagle before he’d died. Once Jon had dreamed that he was Ghost, looking down upon the valley of the Milkwater where Mance Rayder had gathered his people, and that dream had turned out to be true. But he was not dreaming now, and that left him only words. “You cannot come with me,” Jon said, cupping the wolf’s head in his hands and looking deep into those eyes. “You have to go to Castle Black. Do you understand? Castle Black. Can you find it? The way home? Just follow the ice, east and east, into the sun, and you’ll find it. They will know you at Castle Black, and maybe your coming will warn them.” He had thought of writing out a warning for Ghost to carry, but he had no ink, no parchment, not even a writing quill, and the risk of discovery was too great. “I will meet you again at Castle Black, but you have to get there by yourself. We must each hunt alone for a time. Alone.”

From a Doylist perspective, this parting is due to the fact that GRRM didn’t quite think through the practical problems of protagonists with four-footed animal companions and a 700-foot-tall Wall – hence, “there’s no steps here, no cage-and-crane.” This issue is not unique to GRRM by any means; many genre authors run into issues where “cool” accessories or disabilities present dramatic drawbacks later on. Indeed, I would argue that GRRM’s introduction of the Black Gate later in ASOS was driven by his realization that Bran has both a direwolf and a disability/. Why he doesn’t use the same solution for Jon Snow (given that this requires him to use Shaggydog and Summer to cover Jon’s escape at Queenscrown, which is a bit fiddly plot-wise), I’m not entirely sure, but I think partly has to do with his desire to write an exciting mountain-climbing scene.

I think you can see the cross-currents of this decision when it comes to Jon’s self-description as a “poor” warg. Jon’s warg nature was key to why he was chosen to go on Qhorin’s ranging, and important to why he was welcomed by the wildlings, and important enough to his broader character arc that GRRM had Bran travel to Jon’s dreams. And one would think that Jon’s time with the wildlings would be a thematically appropriate and useful way of him learning about this side of himself. Sending Ghost away forestalls this, possibly because GRRM thought there wasn’t a good opportunity for Jon to spend some time with a skinchanger like Borroq on his raid across the Wall, but also possibly because GRRM wanted to keep Jon less of an awakened warg than Bran but more than Robb, Sansa, or pre-ADWD Arya until his rebirth in TWOW.

How to Come in From the Cold?

Jon’s decision to send Ghost away has a clear parallel to his decision to turn his cloak in order to maintain his cover identity: in both cases Jon is denying a part of himself for the sake of the mission. The two are directly linked when Jon thinks about trying to send Ghost as a Lassie-like warning to the Wall. Unfortunately, with surveillance preventing the sending of cleartext messages and encrypted messages and with no pre-arranged system for sending an encrypted message or signal, Agent Snow is in a difficult position when it comes to getitng his vital intelligence back to HQ:

Beyond that Wall lay the Seven Kingdoms, and everything he had sworn to protect. He had said the words, had pledged his life and honor, and by rights he should be up there standing sentry. He should be raising a horn to his lips to rouse the Night’s Watch to arms. He had no horn, though. It would not be hard to steal one from the wildlings, he suspected, but what would that accomplish? Even if he blew it, there was no one to hear. The Wall was a hundred leagues long and the Watch sadly dwindled. All but three of the strongholds had been abandoned; there might not be a brother within forty miles of here, but for Jon. If he was a brother still . . . I should have tried to kill Mance Rayder on the Fist, even if it meant my life. That was what Qhorin Halfhand would have done. But Jon had hesitated, and the chance passed. The next day he had ridden off with Styr the Magnar, Jarl, and more than a hundred picked Thenns and raiders. He told himself that he was only biding his time, that when the moment came he would slip away and ride for Castle Black. The moment never came. They rested most nights in empty wildling villages, and Styr always set a dozen of his Thenns to guard the horses. Jarl watched him suspiciously. And Ygritte was never far, day or night.

As with most stories about undercover agents behind enemy lines without well-established communications protocols, the total uncertainty of whether or not a last-minute message will get to its destination in time creates a sense of hopelessness and anxiety. Here, it manifests as Jon having second thoughts about his choice to go with the long-term play and his vow to Qhorin, which increase as the raiding party gets ever closer to the Wall and the “moment of decision” that all double-agents face. (Much more on this when we get to Queenscrown.) His frustration over the fact that “the moment…[to] slip away…never came” dovetails with the paranoia that comes from being constantly surveilled by his erstwhile companions who are rightly suspicious of the recent defector.

That Ygritte is included as one of his minders points to the essential ambiguity of the honeypot relationship:

Two hearts that beat as one. Mance Rayder’s mocking words rang bitter in his head. Jon had seldom felt so confused. I have no choice, he’d told himself the first time, when she slipped beneath his sleeping skins. If I refuse her, she will know me for a turncloak. I am playing the part the Halfhand told me to play. His body had played the part eagerly enough. His lips on hers, his hand sliding under her doeskin shirt to find a breast, his manhood stiffening when she rubbed her mound against it through their clothes. My vows, he’d thought, remembering the weirwood grove where he had said them, the nine great white trees in a circle, the carved red faces watching, listening. But her fingers were undoing his laces and her tongue was in his mouth and her hand slipped inside his smallclothes and brought him out, and he could not see the weirwoods anymore, only her. She bit his neck and he nuzzled hers, burying his nose in her thick red hair. Lucky, he thought, she is lucky, fire-kissed. “Isn’t that good?” she whispered as she guided him inside her. She was sopping wet down there, and no maiden, that was plain, but Jon did not care. His vows, her maidenhood, none of it mattered, only the heat of her, the mouth on his, the finger that pinched at his nipple. “Isn’t that sweet?” she said again. “Not so fast, oh, slow, yes, like that. There now, there now, yes, sweet, sweet. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but I can show you. Harder now. Yessss.” A part, he tried to remind himself afterward. I am playing a part. I had to do it once, to prove I’d abandoned my vows. I had to make her trust me. It need never happen again. He was still a man of the Night’s Watch, and a son of Eddard Stark. He had done what needed to be done, proved what needed to be proven.

As we have seen before, there are issues with consent on both sides, but what’s interesting in this passage is how quickly it shifts from a narrative of consent to one of performance (in both sense of the word, bum-tish) and also sin, because even lapsed Catholicism sticks with you. Jon’s angst about breaking his vow is incredibly reminiscent of a religious teen who’s broken his abstinence pledge, but the subtext of the naturalness of sex juxtaposed against the unnaturalness of vows of chastity is beginning to suggest that Aemon might have been wrong about the relationship of duty and love:

The proving had been so sweet, though, and Ygritte had gone to sleep beside him with her head against his chest, and that was sweet as well, dangerously sweet. He thought of the weirwoods again, and the words he’d said before them. It was only once, and it had to be. Even my father stumbled once, when he forgot his marriage vows and sired a bastard. Jon vowed to himself that it would be the same with him. It will never happen again. It happened twice more that night, and again in the morning, when she woke to find him hard. The wildlings were stirring by then, and several could not help but notice what was going on beneath the pile of furs. Jarl told them to be quick about it, before he had to throw a pail of water over them. Like a pair of rutting dogs, Jon thought afterward. Was that what he’d become? I am a man of the Night’s Watch, a small voice inside insisted, but every night it seemed a little fainter, and when Ygritte kissed his ears or bit his neck, he could not hear it at all. Was this how it was for my father? he wondered. Was he as weak as I am, when he dishonored himself in my mother’s bed?

Which brings us to the topic of Ned Stark and the way he’s patterned the issue of sex and infidelity for Jon as well as his putative half-brother. Much more personally for Jon than for Robb, Ned’s supposed fall from grace is directly responsible for Jon’s initial hysterical insistence on a lifetime of a chastity and now that Jon finds that he doesn’t want to stop himself at Just The Once even for the sake of his increasingly tenous adherence to the manpain ccode, he’s having a bit of a Yusuf Islam moment, Of course, the irony of all of this is that Ned Stark’s compromised honor has nothing to do with sexual infidelity and everything to do with having to carry a lie half his life, but that’s a bit abstract for a 14-year-old who’s terrified of his own erections to grasp.

Strategizing with the Enemy

Moving on from Jon’s interior monologue/recap, we get an introduction to the rest of the raiding party, which also shows us Jon doing his job as a double-agent to observe the tactics and strategies of his enemies:

The mouth of the cave was a cleft in the rock barely wide enough for a horse, half concealed behind a soldier pine. It opened to the north, so the glows of the fires within would not be visible from the Wall. Even if by some mischance a patrol should happen to pass atop the Wall tonight, they would see nothing but hills and pines and the icy sheen of starlight on a half-frozen lake. Mance Rayder had planned his thrust well… Jarl was with the Magnar; Mance had given them the joint command. Styr was none too pleased by that, Jon had noted early on. Mance Rayder had called the dark youth a “pet” of Val, who was sister to Dalla, his own queen, which made Jarl a sort of good brother once removed to the King-beyond-the-Wall. The Magnar plainly resented sharing his authority. He had brought a hundred Thenns, five times as many men as Jarl, and often acted as if he had the sole command. But it would be the younger man who got them over the ice, Jon knew… The Magnar was direct. “Jarl has warned me of crows, patrolling on high. Tell me all you know of these patrols.” Tell me, Jon noted, not tell us, though Jarl stood right beside him. He would have liked nothing better than to refuse the brusque demand, but he knew Styr would put him to death at the slightest disloyalty, and Ygritte as well, for the crime of being his. “There are four men in each patrol, two rangers and two builders,” he said. “The builders are supposed to make note of cracks, melting, and other structural problems, while the rangers look for signs of foes. They ride mules.” “Mules?” The earless man frowned. “Mules are slow.” “Slow, but more surefooted on the ice. The patrols often ride atop the Wall, and aside from Castle Black, the paths up there have not been graveled for long years. The mules are bred at Eastwatch, and specially trained to their duty.” “They often ride atop the Wall? Not always?” “No. One patrol in four follows the base instead, to search for cracks in the foundation ice or signs of tunneling.”

The south-facing cave is a good example of linking military tactics to culture, the wildlings relying on their knowledge of the geography of their home turf to hide their movements from the enemy (which fits their traditions of assymetric warfare). By contrast, the tactics of the Night’s Watch are based around organization, discipline, and knowledge of their built (as opposed to natural) environment. At the same time, we see Jon paying close attention to the political divisions between the various groups of wildlings as a means of turning the raiding party against itself. Here, we learn that there is a struggle for power between Styr, who “ruled with an iron hand” because among the Thenn he is “a god to them,” who clearly chafes at “sharing his authority” with a “younger man” who he sees as a nepotistic booty-call. Despite Jarl’s youth and smaller number of followers, the combination of support from Mance Rayder’s kin and his specialized expertise when it comes to crossing the Wall means that he has to be taken seriously.

At the same time, we can see that trying to gain information in this fashion is a dangerous game:

“When do these patrols go out? How often?” Jon shrugged. “It changes. I’ve heard that Lord Commander Qorgyle used to send them out every third day from Castle Black to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, and every second day from Castle Black to the Shadow Tower. The Watch had more men in his day, though. Lord Commander Mormont prefers to vary the number of patrols and the days of their departure, to make it more difficult for anyone to know their comings and goings. And sometimes the Old Bear will even send a larger force to one of the abandoned castles for a fortnight or a moon’s turn.” His uncle had originated that tactic, Jon knew. Anything to make the enemy unsure. “Is Stonedoor manned at present?” asked Jarl. “Greyguard?” Jon kept his face carefully blank. “Only Eastwatch, Castle Black, and the Shadow Tower were manned when I left the Wall. I can’t speak to what Bowen Marsh or Ser Denys might have done since.” “How many crows remain within the castles?” asked Styr. “Five hundred at Castle Black. Two hundred at Shadow Tower, perhaps three hundred at Eastwatch.” Jon added three hundred men to the count. If only it were that easy . . . Jarl was not fooled, however. “He’s lying,” he told Styr. “Or else including those they lost on the Fist.” “Crow,” the Magnar warned, “do not take me for Mance Rayder. If you lie to me, I will have your tongue.” “I’m no crow, and won’t be called a liar.” Jon flexed the fingers of his sword hand.

At the best of times, Jon has to volunteer information like the timing of the patrols or the manpower and staffing of the Night’s Watch (trying to limit the damage by giving information about random patrols, which is of limited help by definition, or giving them “gold dust” instead of accurate information) in order to get other bits of information like where the raid is planning to cross. Unfortunately for him, though, Styr is too suspicious and Jarl is too experienced a raider to accept his information at face value, leading to the very brink of open bloodshed. Thankfully, Jon is able to use his cover as a Night’s Watch deserter to bluff his way out, but it is a near thing indeed.

Gorne and Gendel

We then get an interesting section in which, continuing our discussion of wildling and Night’s Watch tactics, we get an explanation of why the wildling raiding parties prefer to climb a 700-foot-tall ice wall rather than tunnel through less than a hundred feet of ice and rock:

“Even in far Thenn we know the tale of Arson Iceaxe and his tunnel.” Jon knew the tale as well. Arson Iceaxe had been halfway through the Wall when his tunnel was found by rangers from the Nightfort. They did not trouble to disturb him at his digging, only sealed the way behind with ice and stone and snow. Dolorous Edd used to say that if you pressed your ear flat to the Wall, you could still hear Arson chipping away with his axe.

This conflict resembles nothing so much as the underground wars that sappers and counter-sappers fought from antiquity to WWI, with mining and counter-mining and under-mining (yes, that’s where the word comes from) all flowing together in a blind paranoid struggle. In this case, Arson Iceaxe was undone, less by getting lost (after all, the Wall is a bit less than 100 feet thick) but by running out of oxygen. The case of Gendel and Gorne, however, suggests that there is something more about the difficulty of going through or underneath the Wall:

“You know nothing, Jon Snow. It went on and on and on. There are hundreds o’ caves in these hills, and down deep they all connect. There’s even a way under your Wall. Gorne’s Way.” “Gorne,” said Jon. “Gorne was King-beyond-the-Wall.” “Aye,” said Ygritte. “Together with his brother Gendel, three thousand years ago. They led a host o’ free folk through the caves, and the Watch was none the wiser. But when they come out, the wolves o’ Winterfell fell upon them.” “There was a battle,” Jon recalled. “Gorne slew the King in the North, but his son picked up his banner and took the crown from his head, and cut down Gorne in turn.” “Yes. Gendel had the king to the south, the Umbers to the east, and the Watch to the north of him. He died as well.”

As we learn in WOIAF, Gendel and Gorne’s association with these caves arose out of them being “called upon to mediate a dispute between a clan of children [of the forest] and a family of giants over the possession of a cavern,” which brings to mind the many caves associated with the Children of the Forest from Hollow Hill all the way to the Three-Eyed Crow’s cave. At the same time, this battle also speaks to the history of conflict between Northmen and wildlings, with the battle between the brothers and the unknown King in the North resembling the Battle of Long Lake, suggesting an endless cyclicality to the conflict.

But where Gorne and Gendel are storybook villains to the North, they are heroes to the wildlings. Thus, Ygritte has a different telling of the story, where at the same time a story of wildling defeat is transformed into one of resistance and tragedy. This fits Ygritte’s history of romantic nationalism, something we’ll get into in just a second. However, it’s also clearly a case of GRRM limbering up his ghost story muscles for the Night Fort, coming up with a neat cross between the Descent and The Hills have eyes, with a strong suggestion that the very earth under the Wall reshaped itself to punish the enemies of the Watch:

“You know nothing, Jon Snow. Gendel did not die. He cut his way free, through the crows, and led his people back north with the wolves howling at their heels. Only Gendel did not know the caves as Gorne had, and took a wrong turn.” She swept the torch back and forth, so the shadows jumped and moved. “Deeper he went, and deeper, and when he tried t’ turn back the ways that seemed familiar ended in stone rather than sky. Soon his torches began t’ fail, one by one, till finally there was naught but dark. Gendel’s folk were never seen again, but on a still night you can hear their children’s children’s children sobbing under the hills, still looking for the way back up. Listen? Do you hear them?” “This way under the Wall was lost as well?” “Some have searched for it. Them that go too deep find Gendel’s children, and Gendel’s children are always hungry.” Smiling, she set the torch carefully in a notch of rock, and came toward him. “There’s naught to eat in the dark but flesh,” she whispered, biting at his neck.

Outside of a Rob Zombie movie, it’s pretty rare for cannibalism-based horror stories to take a sexual turn like that. Thankfully, this is more of a case of Ygritte being really bad at flirting than anything particularly outré, but one can see something of a Freudian line being drawn between one sort of tunnel and another, which gives GRRM a way to transition from the discussion of Gorne and Gendel to the final scene of the chapter. (More on this when we get to Sansa III, unfortunately.)

Martin’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams

And so at last we get to the main event of the chapter. It’s well-known in the fandom that GRRM is not the best writer when it comes to sex scenes, between some unfortunate imagery (“fat pink mast”), some unlikely tastes in bodily fluids, and the ages of most of the cast. I would argue that the scene between Jon and Ygritte in the cave is probably the best sex scene GRRM has written in the entire series, while recognizing that’s a low bar:

“I want you should see me.” “We shouldn’t.” “We should…,” Ygritte said as she yanked down her sheepskin breeches. “If you want to look you have to show. You know nothing, Jon Snow.” “I know I want you,” he heard himself say, all his vows and all his honor forgotten. She stood before him naked as her name day, and he was as hard as the rock around them. He had been in her half a hundred times by now, but always beneath the furs, with others all around them.

Part of what makes this scene work better than others is its thematic content: it’s about letting someone else see you at your most vulnerable; it’s also about reciprocity, since “if you want to look you have to show;” and it’s also about using physical intimacy to transcend cultural differences. Jon “know[s] nothing” about Ygritte’s world (and vice-versa), but by sharing this moment the two can learn to “see” the other person for who they are without their respective cloaks.

Another part of what makes it work, in my opinion, is that there’s a certain realness to it. Given that both participants are teenagers, after all, there’s a certain awkward sweetness to the moment:

“You know nothing, Jon Snow. Noth—oh. Oh. OHHH.” Afterward, she was almost shy, or as shy as Ygritte ever got. “That thing you did,” she said, when they lay together on their piled clothes. “With your…mouth.” She hesitated. “Is that…is it what lords do to their ladies, down in the south?” “I don’t think so.” No one had ever told Jon just what lords did with their ladies. “I only…wanted to kiss you there, that’s all. You seemed to like it.”

Memes aside, there’s no suggestion here that Jon Snow invented oral sex. Rather, it’s just a moment of a rather inexperienced teenager just doing what feels right in the moment, and another rather inexperienced teenager who seems to have never heard of (let alone experienced) it before.

At the same time, it’s not presented as magic either. While certainly Jon and Ygritte’s relationship deepens in the moment, the “two hearts that beat as one” still come from different cultures with very different sexual taboos:

“It wasn’t Longspear, then?” Jon was relieved. He liked Longspear, with his homely face and friendly ways. She punched him. “That’s vile. Would you bed your sister?” “Longspear’s not your brother.” “He’s of my village. You know nothing, Jon Snow. A true man steals a woman from afar, t’ strengthen the clan. Women who bed brothers or fathers or clan kin offend the gods, and are cursed with weak and sickly children. Even monsters.” “Craster weds his daughters,” Jon pointed out. She punched him again. “Craster’s more your kind than ours. His father was a crow who stole a woman out of Whitetree village, but after he had her he flew back t’ his Wall. She went t’ Castle Black once t’ show the crow his son, but the brothers blew their horns and run her off. Craster’s blood is black, and he bears a heavy curse.” She ran her fingers lightly across his stomach. “I feared you’d do the same once. Fly back to the Wall. You never knew what t’ do after you stole me.” Jon sat up. “Ygritte, I never stole you.” “Aye, you did.”

As is fairly common in tribal or clan-based societies, among the wildlings incest taboos normally limited to immediate family have been extended outwards to the entire fictive kinship network. To maintain the belief that all members of a village are family, and to prevent the genetic disorders that come with inbreeding (especially in a context of extremely isolated settlements), the wildlings, especially Ygritte, valorize the custom of wife-stealing from other villages. There are just two problems with Ygritte’s worldview: first, the custom of wife-stealing is just as grounded in culturally-sanctioned rape as Craster’s demented religion despite what Ygritte will argue in Jon V, as we see in the case of Varamyr Sixskins’ backstory in the Prologue of ADWD.

Second, as I’ve argued before, one can’t just no-true-scotsman away the counter-example of Craster by pointing in the direction of blood curses, because the wildlings don’t have a unified culture. Who is to say that the Thenns in their remote mountain valley far from other tribes’ villages share the same taboos as other wildlings on this topic, when they worship their lords like gods while others despise kneelers and worship freedom? The ice-river clans practice cannibalism whereas Haggon’s tribe considered it an abomination; why should we assume that is that the only taboo they break? Where do cave-dwellers find non-cave-dweller mates, exactly?

This debate breaks out between them at this moment, both as I’ve said to indicate that having sex doesn’t instantly make a couple drift-compatible but also to show that Jon still isn’t entirely willing to accept the deal he made last chapter, that for all he was able to flex against Jarl and Styr in the moment, he’s nowhere close to Becoming the Mask. From the other side, while Ygritte hasn’t abandoned her wildling nationalism, she is also experiencing some ideological changes as a result of their honeypot relationship:

“Jon Snow,” she told him, when he’d spent his seed inside her, “don’t move now, sweet. I like the feel of you in there, I do. Let’s not go back t’ Styr and Jarl. Let’s go down inside, and join up with Gendel’s children. I don’t ever want t’ leave this cave, Jon Snow. Not ever.”

This isn’t quite defection to the other side, but Ygritte’s loyalties have clearly shifted at least in part to see Jon and herself as perhaps forming their own side which doesn’t necessarily have an interest in participating in the broader conflict between Mance Rayder and the Night’s Watch. On the other hand, it’s not totally clear how permanent this change of mind is, so we’ll have to keep an eye on Ygritte’s character in the next couple of Jon chapters.

Historical Analysis:

So let’s talk about wife-stealing, a custom that has many names (wife-stealing, marriage by abduction, bride kidnapping, Rakshasa Vivaha, fuitina, etc.) and has existed in many different cultures in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Central, Southern, and East Asia. It’s also a custom that includes both the practice of the mass kidnapping of women – see the Rape of the Sabine Women as one example of raptio – and the more individual practice where a “groom” makes off with a “bride.” And it’s a custom that goes back thousands of years and has been incredibly difficult to abolish in parts of the world to the present day.

What makes this somewhat difficult to talk about is that the customs in question can describe behaviors that span the gamut, from a merely symbolic playacting ceremony overlaid on standard marriages (see Henry VIII dressing up as Robin Hood to “abduct” Anne of Cleves), to consensual elopements and honeymoons (although this last is disputed), to the good face of “matrimonio riparatore” being placed on forcible abduction and rape, to clearly prohibited sex crimes. It’s also made more difficult by the fact that the same consensual glosses have been used to discusss scenarios in which the bride’s willingness is present, clearly not present, or ambiguous in part of whole.

One common factor that might help to make this discussion more clear and transparent is that almost all of the cultural contexts of these practices include patriarchal control over women’s bodies for productive and reproductive labor. In modern-day Kyrgzstan where bride-kidnapping is rampant in rural areas, the practice seems to be linked to the unwillingness or inability of young men to pay bride-prices or dowers which are meant to compensate the wife’s family for their loss of household labor due to the custom of patrilocality (where brides leave their birth family and become a part of the husband’s family’s household).

What If?

Given that I’ve already talked about the outcome in which Jon is discovered and/or killed as a spy by the wildlings, the one hypothetical scenario that jumps out to me in this chapter is one in which Jon and Ygritte decide to run off on their own. It’s not a particularly nice scenario, which points to the somewhat selfish nature of these kinds of romantic relationships in fiction: if Jon doesn’t go warn Castle Black, odds are the castle falls from the south, which means Mance Rayder’s army crosses the Wall unimpeded and crashes into the North, even as the Ironborn, Boltons, Stark loyalists, and Stannis’ army fight over what remains. But at least Jon and Ygritte survive?

Book vs. Show:

I’d don’t really have much to say about this scene, since it’s fairly well-done, thanks to the fact that Rose Leslie and Kit Harrington’s real-world relationship give them ridiculously good on-screen chemistry. And from the vantage point of four more seasons, I think one has to say that this is perhaps one of the best-executed romantic subplots in the series, given how Benioff and Weiss managed to swing and miss on pretty much every other romantic pairings in the series.

My one critique, and this is a bit of a cheat given that I’m roping in a scene from Season 4 but it fits, is the portrayal of the Thenns on the show. Given the criticisms of how GRRM portrays indigenous peoples, it’s rather impressive how much worse Benioff and Weiss did. The Thenns are a rare example in ASOIAF of Martin giving us an example of cultural diversity and specificity beyond stereotypes of the Barbarian Horde or the Noble Savage, and turning them into universally-loathed skinhead cannibals just so that the audience wouldn’t vacillate over whether to support the wildlings or the Night’s Watch is just a really bad writing choice.