Tormund Giantsbane

A boisterous, boastful free folk war-chief and one of Mance's chief captains, full of tall tales about giants and bears and his own legendary appetites.

The fuller tale

Tormund’s titles arrive before he does: Giantsbane, Tall-talker, Horn-blower, Husband to Bears, Mead-king of Ruddy Hall, Father of Hosts — a résumé he composed himself and recites at the least provocation, each entry backed by a story that grows in the telling. He once slew a giant, or possibly slept in one’s fist through a winter; he suckled at a giantess, or bedded a bear, depending on the mead. The bragging is a wildling art form and Tormund its living master, but the saga’s joke runs the other way: strip every exaggeration and the remainder is still one of the most dangerous and most respected war-chiefs of the free folk.

In Mance Rayder’s host he is the loyal center — commander of raiders, breaker of skeptics, the chief the King-Beyond-the-Wall trusts with the hard jobs and the honest counsel. It is Tormund who leads the party over the Wall to strike Castle Black from the south, Tormund who fights on when subtler men would treat, and Tormund who is dragged from the field full of arrows still trying to bite. His courage is not the grim northern kind; it is appetite — for fighting, for mead, for life at full volume — and it makes him the free folk’s best ambassador precisely because no one can meet him and keep believing wildlings are monsters.

The alliance with Jon Snow is the unlikeliest friendship in the tale and one of its sturdiest. The crow who was Mance’s prisoner becomes the Lord Commander who unchains Tormund, and between them they do what ten thousand years of history said was impossible: bring the free folk through the Wall as allies. Tormund pays his share in full — he stands at Jon’s shoulder at Hardhome when the dead come over the palisade, sails back with the survivors, and puts the wildlings’ spears behind the Starks at the Battle of the Bastards, where he pulls down Smalljon Umber with his teeth in the man’s throat. Kneelers’ wars, he grumbles, and fights them anyway, because Jon asks.

He survives everything the end of the world throws at him — the collapse of Eastwatch, the Long Night at Winterfell — and does it while conducting the saga’s most one-sided courtship, an epic, entirely unrequited passion for Brienne of Tarth that he narrates in looks of profound, mead-lit devotion. The comedy is load-bearing: in a story where the north’s survivors are counted on fingers, Tormund’s enormous appetite for living is the argument that survival is worth it.

When the wars end he does what the free folk have always done — he goes home. The true north empties its refugees back through the Wall with Tormund at their head, and Jon Snow, exiled from every throne and title the south invented, rides out beside him. The last image of the wildling arc is Tormund leading his people into the green shoots beyond the Wall: the man who followed a king south, and finished the tale needing no king at all.

The page and the screen

Book-Tormund is grayer, older and — the White God-Beyond-the-Wall forbid — slightly more modest; several of the show’s tallest tales are the screen turning his boasts up to eleven, and the Brienne infatuation is pure invention (they never meet on the page). His book role after Mance’s fall is weightier: it is Tormund who takes up leadership of the shattered free folk remnant, Tormund who negotiates the great passage through the Wall with Lord Commander Jon Snow — hostages, terms, the weeping of chiefs handing over sons — and Tormund who is standing at Jon’s side at Castle Black on the night of the knives. He is alive in the published books, unfinished business incarnate; the show’s Hardhome and Winterfell heroics are extrapolation the books have not yet reached.

In the show, season by season

Season Four. In The Watchers on the Wall — Taken alive, still shouting.

Season Five. In Hardhome — Beats the Lord of Bones to death with his own staff; the free folk listen.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Val returns down the kingsroad with word from the wild: Tormund Giantsbane comes with the last of the free folk, and the Wall must choose between two kinds of enemy. (ADWD 50)

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.