Alliser Thorne
Master-at-arms at Castle Black, a bitter, hard-handed old knight who fought for the losing side in the rebellion and has hated soft southron boys ever since.
The fuller tale
Ser Alliser Thorne is what loyalty looks like after history has finished with it. A knight of the Crownlands, he fought for the Targaryens to the bitter end of Robert’s Rebellion, and when the dust settled the victors offered him the standard mercy of the age: the Wall or worse. So the Watch inherited a proud, capable, permanently embittered man — and made him master-at-arms, with a license to grind every new recruit under the heel of his disappointment.
His training-yard method is cruelty as curriculum. He hangs mocking names on the boys — Lord Snow for the bastard with the polished sword-work, Ser Piggy for the fat one who cannot hold a blade — and sets them against each other to find out who breaks. The defensible version of his logic is that the Wall kills soft men and it is better they break in the yard; the truth underneath is plainer, that a man cheated of his cause enjoys having someone to punish. Jon Snow, wellborn, gifted and adored by the other recruits, offends him on every axis at once, and the enmity between them becomes one of the Watch’s load-bearing structures.
The wildling assault is his finest hour, and it is genuinely fine. With the Lord Commander dead beyond the Wall and Mance Rayder’s host at the gate, Thorne holds Castle Black — commanding from the top of the Wall, then taking the fight hand-to-hand in the yard against Tormund Giantsbane, roaring at his brothers that they need to fight and being entirely correct. Whatever else the man is, he is no coward, and the defense of the Wall is the one night his hardness and the Watch’s need point the same direction.
Then Jon Snow beats him for the Lord Commandership, and everything curdles. Thorne serves — made First Ranger, obeying orders he despises — while Jon opens the gates to the free folk Thorne has spent a career fighting. To Thorne this is not policy but treason against the dead: every brother killed by wildling raiders, unavenged and now unremembered, in the name of a threat he half-believes in at best. He tells Jon to his face that he has a good heart and that it will get them all killed. It is the tale’s tidy trick that the Watch’s most honest warning and its greatest crime come from the same mouth.
Thorne matters because he is the Watch’s institutional grudge made flesh — the argument that an order built to guard men cannot survive being asked to love them. Set against Jon’s mercy, he loses the argument and the future; but the story declines to make him small. He states his reasons in daylight, signs his name to his deed, and never once asks anyone’s pardon, which is more than most of the tale’s betrayers manage.
The page and the screen
Book-Thorne is a pettier creature with a smaller part. He duels Jon with insults rather than conspiracies, and his great humiliation is an embassy: sent to King’s Landing with a wight’s severed hand to prove the dead are rising, he waits so long for an audience that the hand rots to bone, and Tyrion laughs the Watch’s evidence out of court — a scene that quietly explains why the realm never came to help. By the time of Jon’s command, the books have shipped him off to Eastwatch and then out on a ranging from which he has not returned; he has no part in the mutiny, whose knives belong to Bowen Marsh and the stewards. The show fused Thorne with that conspiracy to give Jon’s murder a familiar face — dramatically efficient, and a real change: the books’ betrayal comes from the Watch’s cautious middle, not its old grudge.
In the show, season by season
Season Four. In The Watchers on the Wall — Wrong about everything except how to hold a gate.
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Back from the wildlings, Jon is called turncloak by Janos Slynt and Alliser Thorne; his reward for holding the Wall is an arrest, and worse planned. (ASOS 65)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Hanged at Castle Black (S6·E3)
First Ranger, mutineer, and Jon Snow's oldest enemy at the Wall — he led the knives 'for the Watch' and hanged for it when Jon rose again. He went to the rope unbowed: 'I fought, I lost. Now I rest.'
In the show he finishes what he started. Leading the mutineers, he puts a knife in Jon Snow’s heart beside the sign that reads traitor, holds Castle Black against Davos and the loyalists, and loses when the free folk arrive with a giant. When Jon returns from the dead, his first and last act as Lord Commander is the sentence: Thorne hangs beside Olly and the other mutineers, and goes to the rope with his spine straight — he fought, he lost, now he rests, and he’d do it all again. Jon cuts the ropes down himself and leaves the Watch with the bodies.
In the published books he is alive, so far as anyone knows — dispatched beyond the Wall on a ranging by the Lord Commander he loathed, and not yet returned when the knives came out at Castle Black. Whether Jon meant the mission as employment or exile is left for the reader to weigh; Thorne himself suspected the latter, loudly.