Styr

The Magnar of Thenn, lord of the most disciplined and fearsome of the free folk, who leads a raiding party over the Wall.

The fuller tale

The Thenns are the free folk’s paradox: the most disciplined, most law-bound, most nearly civilized of the peoples beyond the Wall — and for exactly that reason, the most feared. In their high mountain valley in the far north they mine bronze, forge scaled armor, and obey their lord absolutely, for the Magnar of Thenn is more god than chief. Styr holds that title, and wears it like his people wear their bronze: without ornament and without doubt. Earless, scarred, humorless, he commands the closest thing Mance Rayder’s patchwork host has to regular infantry.

That is why Mance gives him the hardest assignment of the war: take a picked band over the Wall itself and fall on Castle Black from its undefended southern side when the main host strikes the north face. Styr’s column — with Jon Snow embedded in it as a very unconvincing turncloak — climbs the ice, raids down through the Gift, and announces itself in slaughtered villages. It is Styr who sets Jon the test of killing an innocent old man, and Styr who is proven right about the crow when Jon breaks and flees at the Queenscrown.

As a character he is the free folk with the charm removed — a reminder, carefully placed beside Ygritte and Tormund, that the world beyond the Wall contains tyrants of its own, and that freedom from kneeling is not freedom from power. The Magnar kneels to no southern king because his people already kneel to him.

The page and the screen

The show reinvented the Thenns wholesale. The books’ Thenns are the least savage of the free folk — bronze-armored, Old Tongue-speaking, so orderly that the Watch later marries their new Magnar, Styr’s son Sigorn, to Alys Karstark, founding a house of Thenn kneelers in the north’s heartland. The screen’s Thenns are scarified, bald, and eat their enemies — cannibalism borrowed from the ice-river clans to give season four a memorable villain, with Styr rebuilt to match as a leering brute. Book-Styr is no monster, merely absolute; his quarrel with Jon is professional, not sadistic. The two versions share a name, a mission and a death at Castle Black, and almost nothing else.

Where they stand, season by season

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

The show: Fell at Castle Black (S4·E9)

The books: Fell in the assault on Castle Black (ASOS, ch. 55)

The Magnar of Thenn, scarred and earless, met Jon Snow in the yard of Castle Black when the wildlings breached the gate. He nearly beat Jon to death before taking a smith's hammer through the skull.

Both tellings kill him at Castle Black, in the assault he led. On screen he gets a villain’s exit: breaking through the gate with his Thenns, he beats Jon Snow half to death in the yard — swordless, outmatched, spitting — until Jon’s hand closes on a smith’s hammer and drives it up through the Magnar’s skull. The books end him with the Wall itself: leading the escalade against the castle’s southern face, Styr and his climbers meet the Watch’s prepared defenses on the ice, and the great stair collapses in fire and frozen thunder, taking the Magnar down with tons of ice — the mountain lord killed by the only thing in the south taller than his mountains. His people’s story continues without him in the books, wearing Karstark colors.