The Battle of Winterfell

Everything the story had been whispering about for eight seasons, decided in one night in a godswood.

Why it came to this

Everything in the saga that is not about a chair is about this. The Long Night is the event at the bottom of Westerosi history ÔÇö an eight-thousand-year-old winter in which the dead came south, ended by an alliance of the first men and the children of the forest and commemorated by a wall, an order of sworn brothers and a great many stories nobody believed. The NightÔÇÖs Watch had spent the entire main narrative writing letters about it and being ignored by everyone with an army.

The alliance that finally formed did so late and grudgingly. It took Jon Snow going south to bend the knee to Daenerys Targaryen, a hazardous expedition beyond the Wall to bring a captured wight back as evidence, and a parley in a pit in KingÔÇÖs Landing at which the crown agreed to send its armies north and then simply did not. What actually marched to Winterfell was the North, the Vale, the free folk, the Unsullied, the Dothraki, two dragons and a handful of individuals who mattered out of all proportion to their number.

The strategic decision that shaped the battle was made in WinterfellÔÇÖs hall in the days before it. The enemyÔÇÖs host could not be beaten by killing it, because killing it made it larger. But the wights were not independent creatures ÔÇö they were animated and directed by the White Walkers, and the Walkers themselves derived from the figure the show calls the Night King. Kill him and the whole army falls. That reduced the problem from an unwinnable battle of attrition to a decapitation, and decapitations require you to make the target come to you. So the defenders offered him the one thing he had crossed a continent for: the boy in the godswood who is the living memory of the world, sitting alone under a tree with almost nobody around him, as bait.

This battle is screen material entirely. The novels have not published anything of the kind and none of its particulars should be treated as canon of the page.

The ground and the hosts

Winterfell is a strong castle with two curtain walls, a broad ditch between them and the deepest crypts in the North beneath it. It is not, however, a fortress designed for a siege by an enemy that does not eat, and its greatest asset ÔÇö the godswood inside the walls ÔÇö was also the objective the enemy was coming for.

The defenders laid out their position in depth: a screen of trenches and stakes on the open field, the Dothraki cavalry massed in front of everything, the Unsullied in formed ranks behind them as the main line of battle, catapults forward of the walls, a broad fire trench dug in a ring outside the ditch to be lit when the outer ground was given up, archers on the walls, and the noncombatant population sent down into the crypts. Both dragons were held airborne with their riders, waiting for the Night King, since killing him from the air was the plan they actually intended to win by.

Two of those decisions were poor and were criticised the moment the episode aired. Cavalry deployed forward of the infantry is a formation for charging a line that can be broken and pursuing an enemy that runs, and this enemy did neither. Artillery placed in front of the infantry is artillery that can only shoot once. Both arrangements assumed a conventional opponent, and the opponent was not conventional in any respect.

Against them came a host without number, in three parts. The wights were the mass: fast, silent, tireless, entirely without self-preservation, and reinforced by every casualty on either side. The White Walkers were the officers ÔÇö a small number of them, mounted, armed with ice and difficult to kill by any means the defenders had in quantity. And there was one dead dragon, taken beyond the Wall and raised, which cancelled out the livingÔÇÖs single greatest advantage.

The livingÔÇÖs effective weapons remained what they had been at Hardhome: fire, dragonglass and Valyrian steel. The dragonglass had been mined and worked at Dragonstone and shipped north in bulk, so for the first time every soldier in the line had a weapon that worked. It did not help as much as it should have.

How it was fought

The opening was the worst quarter-hour of the night. The Dothraki, their blades set alight by the red priestess so that the whole van of the army was visible for miles, charged into the darkness beyond the trenches at an enemy nobody had yet seen. The lights went out ÔÇö not all at once but in a wave, from the far end back ÔÇö and then there was silence, and then a few riderless horses came back. Several thousand of the finest light cavalry in the world had been swallowed without a single message reaching the line. It is the most economical demonstration in the whole story of what this enemy does to conventional force.

The first shock came against the Unsullied, who were the only troops on the field with the discipline to receive it. A phalanx of spearmen in armour, ranked deep, with shields locked, is the correct formation against a mass attack, and it held longer than anything else on the field held that night. But there is no such thing as breaking the enemyÔÇÖs morale here. The wights climbed over their own dead to reach the spears, and the line was ground back rather than broken, which is the same thing arriving slowly.

The dragons went in and made the second discovery of the night: a blizzard of the enemyÔÇÖs own making had closed over the field, and two riders in cloud could see neither the ground nor each other. Fire cleared lanes through the wights, and the lanes filled in behind them. Meanwhile the dead dragon came up through the cloud and there was a dragon fight over Winterfell, which occupied both living dragons and their riders for a long stretch of the battle and removed the only weapon the decapitation plan depended on from the place where it was needed.

On the ground the withdrawal to the walls was made under pressure and the fire trench was lit ÔÇö late, and only after Daenerys came down low to burn it alight herself. Fire is one of the two things the dead genuinely cannot pass, and for a while it worked exactly as intended and the enemy simply piled up along it. Then the enemy piled into it. They walked into the flames in numbers until enough bodies had smothered enough of the trench to make a causeway of themselves, and crossed on their own dead. There is no defensive obstacle that works against a force willing to spend an unlimited quantity of itself to fill it.

The walls went next, and went quickly, because wights climb. What followed was the long middle of the battle: fighting in the yards and along the parapets and inside the halls, in the dark, in a castle the defenders knew and the attackers did not care about. It was survivable only in small knots, and the units that had fought as units for the first two hours ceased to exist as units.

Then the enemy commander did the thing everybody had known he would do and nobody had solved. He raised the dead of the battle itself ÔÇö both armiesÔÇÖ fallen, where they lay, in the middle of the fighting, including the several thousand Dothraki lost in the first minutes and the defenders killed on the walls in the last hour. The livingÔÇÖs numbers halved and the enemyÔÇÖs doubled in a single moment, inside the castle, with no line left to reform behind. He also raised the dead in the crypts, which were the one place in Winterfell held to be safe and were the one place full of Stark dead going back thousands of years. That was the collapse. From that point there was no battle, only survival.

And it was at that point that the actual plan came due. The whole night had been an argument about the godswood ÔÇö the enemy commander had come for the boy under the tree, and the defenders had let him come, holding the tree with a token force and gambling everything on his choosing to walk in and finish it himself rather than send a subordinate. He walked in. The dead outside the godswood stood still while he did, because they do what he does. What ended the Long Night was one strike delivered by one person against one target, and the entire army on both sides was, in the end, the diversion.

What it cost

The Dothraki were effectively destroyed as a fighting force in the opening minutes and the survivors amounted to a fraction of the horde that had crossed the narrow sea. The Unsullied lost most of their strength holding the line and covering the withdrawal, which is what heavy infantry is for and does not make it cheaper. The northern houses and the free folk lost heavily in the yards.

By the accounting given afterward, roughly half of the entire combined army was gone, and what remained was in no condition to fight anyone. That fact governs everything that happens next, because the survivors were then asked to march a thousand miles south and fight a second war within weeks.

The dead paid nothing, and then paid everything at once, which is the only way this enemy could ever have been made to pay.

What it changed

It ended the threat that the whole story had been built around, in one night, at Winterfell rather than at the Wall, and it ended it decisively enough that it never returned. Eight thousand years of institutional dread was resolved by a small number of people standing in the right places at the right moment.

It also, immediately and disastrously, converted a war of survival back into a war over a chair. The alliance had held only because of the enemy; the morning after, the two claimants at Winterfell had nothing left in common and a great deal in dispute, and the army they shared was half-strength and largely foreign.

The North had been fought over, burned and half-emptied twice in five years for causes chosen elsewhere. What the northern lords concluded from that is the seed of everything they demanded afterward.

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

Arya Stark ended it. She came out of the dark behind the Night King in the godswood, was caught by the throat, and dropped the Valyrian dagger from one hand to the other to put it into him ÔÇö the same blade that had been sent to cut a sleeping boyÔÇÖs throat in the first season, returned by Bran to the person who would use it correctly. The Night King shattered, and with him every Walker and every wight on the field went down at once, mid-stride.

Theon Greyjoy held the godswood approach with the ironborn he had left and stood alone in front of Bran at the last, and was killed by the Night King in the moment before the strike. Bran thanked him first, which was the only thing anyone could have given him.

Ser Jorah Mormont died on the field outside the walls, having fought his way back to Daenerys through the collapse and stood over her until he could not. Lyanna Mormont, ten years old and Lady of Bear Island, was crushed by a wight giant at the gate and killed it as it did so. Beric Dondarrion spent the last of his six or seven lives holding a corridor so that Arya could reach the godswood, and this time the red priest was not there to give another back. Dolorous Edd, last Lord Commander of the NightÔÇÖs Watch, died in the first minutes of the fighting on the field.

Melisandre lit the Dothraki blades, lit the trench, and reminded Arya of a thing said to her years earlier about the eyes she would close. Her work being finished, she walked out beyond the walls at dawn, took off the choker she had worn her whole life, and let her true age arrive.

Viserion, raised by the enemy at the Wall, was destroyed over Winterfell. Rhaegal survived the night and did not survive the following week.

The alliance survived the battle by about a fortnight. What it did to itself afterward is the subject of the last two entries in this collection.