Rattleshirt

The Lord of Bones, a boastful wildling raider armored in the clattering bones of dead men and beasts, loud and vicious in equal measure.

The fuller tale

The Lord of Bones announces himself before you see him: a clatter of dead men’s ribs and giants’ knuckles, sewn over boiled leather and topped with a broken giant’s-skull helm. The free folk name him for the armor — Rattleshirt to his face if you are brave, the Lord o’ Bones in the songs — and he has built a raider’s reputation to match, loud, vicious, and endlessly boastful of the corpses that supplied his wardrobe. Among a people whose only rank is reputation, Rattleshirt’s bones are his patent of nobility, and he defends them with a jealousy any southern lord would recognize.

It is Rattleshirt’s war band that closes the trap in the Skirling Pass, and Rattleshirt who takes custody of the tale’s most consequential prisoner: Jon Snow, the crow who claims to want to turn his cloak. He argues loudly for killing him — his standing instinct in all ambiguous cases — and is overruled by Ygritte’s vouching and Mance’s curiosity, a decision he resents down every mile of the march. The tale uses him as the free folk’s id: where Mance calculates and Tormund laughs, Rattleshirt simply wants what raiders want, and his sneering vigil over Jon keeps the stakes of the infiltration honest.

After the wildling host shatters beneath the Wall, the Lord of Bones ends up where all the broken pieces do — a captive of the kneelers, bones and bluster confiscated, reduced from war-chief to inventory. It is the free folk’s defeat in one image: the man who wore his kills as armor, standing in a pen wearing someone else’s mercy.

The page and the screen

The show keeps the bones and discards nearly everything else. Screen-Rattleshirt is a minor heavy — Jon’s captor in the Skirling Pass, a heckler at Hardhome — while book-Rattleshirt is loaded with one of the saga’s strangest destinies: after the battle, Melisandre’s ruby glamour swaps his seeming with Mance Rayder’s, and it is Rattleshirt who burns in Mance’s shape before the assembled Wall while the true king stands by wearing the bone-lord’s rattling shirt. For weeks afterward, the man everyone at Castle Black despises as Rattleshirt — sparring brutally with Jon, sneering from under the giant’s skull — is Mance Rayder in disguise, one of the books’ best-hidden tricks. The show, having no glamour plot, spent the character as crowd color and gave him a quick, crowd-pleasing exit at Tormund’s hands.

Where they stand, season by season

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

The show: Beaten down before the free folk (a different fate in the books) (S5·E8)

The books: Burned in a king's skin (ADWD, ch. 11)

The Lord of Bones sneered one taunt too many at Tormund in front of the free folk gathered at Hardhome. Tormund took his own staff off him and beat him dead with it, then asked for the crowd's next objection.

His two deaths could not be less alike. In the books he dies in another man’s skin: condemned in Mance Rayder’s place, wrapped in Melisandre’s glamour, the Lord of Bones burns in a cage before the Wall screaming under a king’s face, and not even his executioners know whom the fire is actually eating. It is among the crueler deaths in the saga — anonymous by design, his last agony credited to a man he hated. The show’s version is almost merciful by comparison: at Hardhome, when Rattleshirt jeers once too often at the crows’ peace offer and calls Tormund a traitor, Tormund takes the bone-lord’s own staff from him and beats him to death with it in front of the assembled chieftains, then asks if anyone else objects. Nobody does; the meeting proceeds over his body.