The Battle of Castle Black

A hundred sworn brothers holding seven hundred feet of ice against a hundred thousand free folk.

Why it came to this

Mance Rayder had done the impossible thing: he had united the free folk. Ninety-odd clans, raiders, cave-dwellers, giants, Thenns and hornfoot men who had spent all of recorded history killing one another had been talked, bullied and married into a single migrating host. He had not done it out of ambition. He had done it because something was coming out of the far north that no village could stand against, and the only wall in the world that might was held by an order sworn to keep him on the wrong side of it.

That is the tragedy under the whole engagement. Mance was not raiding. He was evacuating a country. What he wanted was to get his people south of the Wall and out of reach of the dead, and the NightÔÇÖs Watch could not permit it without ceasing to be the NightÔÇÖs Watch. Both sides were correct and both sides knew it, which is why the fighting is unusually free of villains and unusually full of dead men.

The Watch, meanwhile, was in no condition to hold anything. The Great Ranging had gone north the previous year with two hundred and more of the orderÔÇÖs best and had come back as a handful of survivors with a dead Lord Commander and no plan. Of the nineteen castles along the Wall, only three were still garrisoned at all. The Watch that faced Mance amounted to something like a hundred men at Castle Black, many of them old, several of them boys, and none of them in command in any settled sense ÔÇö the Lord CommanderÔÇÖs seat was vacant and the officers spent the last weeks before the attack arguing about who should sit in it.

The ground and the hosts

The Wall is a defensive work of such extravagant scale that it becomes a problem for the men on top of it. Seven hundred feet high, three hundred miles long, sheer on its northern face and unclimbable in armour: nothing on earth gets a host over it. But nothing gets a hundred defenders along it either. A garrison of a hundred spread over three hundred miles is not a garrison, it is a rumour, and Mance knew exactly how thin it was.

So he split his force, which was the correct answer and the only one available to him. The bulk of the host ÔÇö the mammoths, the giants, the mass of the clans ÔÇö came at Castle Black from the north to fix the defenders in place and to break into the one tunnel through the ice, which is the only door in three hundred miles. Meanwhile a picked raiding party had been sent over the Wall far to the east weeks earlier, and was to come up on Castle Black from the south, where the castle has no wall at all. Castle Black was never fortified against its own side. It did not need to be.

The southern party was led by Tormund and by the Magnar of Thenn, and it included the raiders who had climbed the ice in the small hours with hemp and hooks. The northern host was ManceÔÇÖs main strength, with giants riding mammoths at the head of it and a great deal of tar-soaked timber for the tunnel.

The Watch had ice, height and stored ordnance, and very little else. Its defences amounted to the tunnelÔÇÖs three iron gates and a wall of ice-blocks behind them, casks of oil and pitch, barrels of stones for dropping, and archers on the parapet. On the page the man who organised all of it was Donal Noye, the one-armed armourer, who took command because nobody else would and turned out to be the best soldier on the Wall. The screen distributes his work between Ser Alliser Thorne and Jon Snow, and adds a piece of defensive machinery ÔÇö an enormous iron scythe on a chain, swung down the face of the Wall to sweep climbers off it ÔÇö that the novels do not have.

How it was fought

It opened in the dark and it opened in the wrong place. The southern party struck MoleÔÇÖs Town first, the village of hangers-on a few miles down the kingsroad, and destroyed it, both to cover their approach and to draw the garrison out. Then they came up on Castle Black from behind while the fires beyond the Wall told the defenders to look north.

The northern attack went in more or less simultaneously, and this is where the WatchÔÇÖs numbers stopped mattering, because two attacks against a hundred men mean fifty men in each place. Giants and mammoths came up the causeway to the tunnel mouth. Free folk swarmed the northern face with hooks and lines. On the parapet, seven hundred feet up, a handful of brothers worked the winches, poured burning oil down the ice and cut climbing lines, and the arithmetic of the drop did the rest: a man knocked off the Wall does not come back.

The fight for the castle itself was the ugly one. The southern party got in among the buildings, where there were no walls and no formation and the defenders were fighting between their own halls and stables in the dark. The Watch was outnumbered several times over at that end and held mostly because the yard is a confined space and the free folk had no siege discipline. Both tellings agree that the southern assault came within very little of taking the castle outright, and that the officer who steadied it and put the reserves where they were needed was Jon Snow, who had been north with these people, knew how they fought, and was until that week under suspicion of being one of them.

The decision, though, was in the tunnel. Everything else was noise: if the gate went, the entire host came through and the Wall was finished for good. Mance sent giants against it, and a giant harnessed to a mammoth can pull an iron gate off its hinges. The novels give the tunnel to Donal Noye and a few brothers, fighting in a black stone throat behind the outer gate, against Mag the Mighty ÔÇö the largest of the giants ÔÇö in a space too narrow for either to retreat, and Noye buys the Wall its night. The screen restages the same defence with Grenn and five brothers holding the inner gate against a giant, and the substance is identical: a small number of men are asked to stand in a corridor and not leave it, and they do not.

The Watch held the tunnel and held the yard, at a cost it could not have paid twice. The following night Mance would have come again with the same host against a garrison reduced by half, and the outcome of that would not have been in doubt.

It was not decided by the Watch at all. Stannis Baratheon, having read the same letters everyone else had ignored, had landed his surviving strength at Eastwatch and marched west along the Wall. He came into the wildling camp in column with heavy horse ÔÇö armoured cavalry against an unarmoured host encamped in the open with no cavalry of its own and no line facing south. The free folk had no answer to it. Nobody has an answer to it. The host that had taken a year to gather came apart in an afternoon and the war beyond the Wall was over.

It is worth stating plainly what that means. Every king in Westeros had received the NightÔÇÖs WatchÔÇÖs appeal for help. Exactly one of them came, and he came because he had lost his own war and needed a new one, and he was still the only one who came.

What it cost

The Watch lost a large fraction of the men it had left, which for an order already down to three manned castles was close to fatal. It also lost the one thing it had been trading on for centuries: the belief that the Wall could not be reached. It had been reached, from both sides, by an enemy with no engines and no discipline.

The free folk lost far more. Their host was scattered, their camps taken, and tens of thousands of people who had crossed a continent to escape what was behind them were left in the open beneath the Wall with winter coming on. That is the real bill, and it is paid by people who were never soldiers.

MoleÔÇÖs Town was destroyed with everyone in it. The village had no defences and no strategic value, and it is a fair index of what the campaign was actually like for the people between the two armies.

What it changed

StannisÔÇÖs intervention converted the Wall from a lost cause into a base of operations, and gave him something no other claimant had: a legitimate cause, a defensible seat, and the beginnings of a northern following. It also put a king with an army and a strong opinion about religion in the same courtyard as an order sworn to have no politics, which was going to be a problem.

For the Watch it forced the question it had been avoiding for eight thousand years. There were now tens of thousands of free folk in front of the Wall, and only two things could be done with them: leave them where they were, or let them through. Leaving them was not a neutral act, because of what was coming behind them, and everyone at Castle Black who had been north knew it.

And it settled the succession. The order elects its Lord Commander, and it had just watched one particular steward do the job all night without holding it.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Ygritte died in the yard at Castle Black. On the page she is killed anonymously in the confusion of the fighting, which is the crueller and better version; the screen gives the arrow to the boy Olly, whose family had been killed by the raiders, and thereby sets up a great deal of what happens to Jon Snow afterward.

Donal Noye died in the tunnel with Mag the Mighty, each killing the other. The WallÔÇÖs survival is very largely his doing and the novels give him no monument for it. Grenn and the brothers who held the inner gate in the showÔÇÖs version died there too.

Pyp, Styr the Magnar of Thenn and a long list of brothers and free folk fell in the castle. Mance Rayder was taken alive when Stannis broke the camp, and what Stannis and his red priestess did with a captured king who would not kneel is a matter the two tellings disagree about.

Jon Snow was elected Lord Commander of the NightÔÇÖs Watch soon afterward, largely on the strength of that night, and used the office to bring the free folk through the Wall. That decision was correct, was necessary, and cost him more than the battle did.