Gilly

One of Craster's daughter-wives, a frightened, gentle girl desperate to escape her father's keep before her child is born.

The fuller tale

Gilly is born into the smallest and worst world in the story: Craster’s Keep, where the daughters become wives and the sons are given to the cold. Named for the gillyflower, one of nineteen-odd women serving a father-husband who owns everything in sight including them, she has never seen a map, a coin, or a kindness with no price on it. What she has, when the Night’s Watch first shelters at the keep, is the one thing her world cannot afford: a child coming, and the certainty of what Craster does with boys.

Her first act in the tale is its bravest per ounce: she asks for help. Approaching a sworn brother — fat, frightened Sam, the least alarming crow in the yard — to beg passage south for herself and her unborn child is a treason against everything she has ever been taught, punishable by the god in the yard and the husband at the hearth. The first asking fails. The world has to fall apart — the mutiny, Craster dead, the keep in flames — before Sam can finally take her hand, and the flight that follows, a craven and a wildling girl carrying a newborn through a forest full of the dead, is one of the tale’s quiet epics.

South of the Wall, Gilly’s story becomes an education conducted at speed. Castle Black, Mole’s Town, ships, cities, castles — every stop teaches her something about the enormous world and teaches the audience something about her: that she is quick, observant, unsentimental, and far better at survival than the institutions sheltering her. She learns her letters and takes to them; it is Gilly, reading aloud from a High Septon’s dusty diary, who first turns up the record of Rhaegar’s annulment — the hinge of the entire saga’s secret — while Sam, buried in worthier volumes, nearly talks over her.

Her bond with Sam is the story’s least complicated love and one of its most argued-for. He is the first man who ever protected her without owning her; she is the first person who ever looked at Sam and saw neither a disappointment nor a joke. The family they assemble — her son called little Sam, raised by a man with no obligation to him — is built in direct defiance of both their fathers’ houses: Craster’s keep, where children were currency, and Horn Hill, where they were assets. Between them they raise the first child in the tale to be merely loved.

By the end she has crossed the entire map, outlived the world that made her, and stands at Sam’s side expecting another child — a woman who began the story as property in a nameless keep and ends it as the wife of the realm’s Grand Maester in all but title. The tale is stocked with transformations bought by swords and dragons; Gilly’s is bought by asking for help, learning to read, and refusing at every step to pass on the cruelty she was raised in. It may be the least resounding heroism in the story, and the most complete.

The page and the screen

The great divergence is the baby swap. In the books, Jon Snow — fearing Melisandre will burn any child of king’s blood — secretly exchanges Gilly’s son for Mance Rayder’s newborn and sends Gilly south nursing the wrong child, an act of cold arithmetic that leaves her grieving down the whole length of the voyage to Oldtown; her ship-board sorrow, and Sam’s guilt, color everything the books do with them. The show cuts the swap entirely, and with it that grief: screen-Gilly keeps her own boy, and her journey with Sam runs through invented stations — Mole’s Town under wildling attack, the frosty dinner table at Horn Hill, the Citadel’s scullery — toward a settled domesticity the books have not yet granted. Her diary discovery about Rhaegar’s marriage is likewise pure show; on the page the secret sleeps elsewhere.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Mole's Town falls to the wildlings; Ygritte spares Gilly and the babe. (S4·E8)
• Sam takes Gilly to Horn Hill, meets his father's contempt, and leaves with the family sword. (S6·E6)
• Gilly reads past a footnote that unmarries Rhaegar Targaryen — and no one at the table hears it. (S7·E5)
• At Craster's Keep the Watch's discipline snaps: Craster is killed at his own board, the Old Bear is stabbed dying, and Sam flees with Gilly and her newborn son. (ASOS 34)
• Sam and Gilly stumble south through the haunted forest until the dead find them — and a cold rider on an elk with black hands finds the dead: Coldhands. (ASOS 47)
• Jon commands Sam south: Maester Aemon, Gilly, and a babe that is not quite the babe everyone believes — bound for Oldtown and a maester's chain. (AFFC 6)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.