Varamyr Sixskins
A powerful, wretched wildling warg who wears the skins of six beasts, one of Mance's skinchangers (book only).
The fuller tale
Varamyr Sixskins is the greatest skinchanger of the free folk and the tale’s most unsparing study of what the gift does to a soul. Born Lump, a runt in a wildling village, he discovered young — and catastrophically — what was in him: a boy who could slip into a beast’s skin, before he understood what must never be done there. His brother’s death by the family’s dogs, with Lump inside one, got him handed to the warg Haggon, who raised him and taught him the code of the skinchangers: never eat of human meat in a beast’s body, never mate as wolves mate, and never, ever take the skin of another man — the abomination beyond all others. Varamyr repaid his teacher by breaking every law he taught, beginning with tearing Haggon’s own second life from him at his deathbed.
Grown, he made the gift a tyranny. Six beasts wore his will — three wolves, a shadowcat, a snow bear, and the eagle he took from the dead warg Orell — and with them he held a wildling village in fear for years, taking tribute in bread and salt and any woman he pointed at, a small god of a small hell. When Mance Rayder gathered the free folk, Varamyr brought his skins to the host and served as its far-seeing eyes; men stepped wide of him in the camps, and he liked it. The books offer him as the answer to a question the gentler wargs raise: skinchanging is power, and power over beasts is practice, always, for the appetite for power over men.
His prologue to the fifth book is the saga’s deepest dive into warg lore, delivered as a dying man’s inventory. Through Varamyr the reader learns the true rules: the second life, in which a slain skinchanger’s spirit flees into his beast to fade slowly inside it; the taste of the abomination, for he has been inside a man — once, wearing Orell’s eagle-hate — and inside human flesh by way of a wolf’s meal; and the cold mathematics of the gift, that every skin worn leaves some of the wearer behind. He is the lore-keeper the story deliberately makes despicable, so that the knowledge arrives without the comfort of a hero carrying it.
He matters least for what he does and most for what he shows. Bran Stark’s entire arc — the wolf dreams, the temptations, the lines a boy in a beast should not cross — is shadowed by Varamyr’s example: this is what a skinchanger becomes when appetite writes the rules. And his eyes give the books their view of the wildling apocalypse’s aftermath — the shattered host straggling through the snows after the Wall broke it, villages of the starving, the dead beginning to walk. The saga’s most wretched man is one of its most essential windows.
The page and the screen
Varamyr never appears in the show, but his estate is everywhere in it. His warg lore — the second life, the beast that carries a dead man’s grudge — was handed to Orell, whose expanded screen role absorbs both Varamyr’s teaching function and his stolen eagle; his cautionary shadow over Bran’s gift survives in the Three-Eyed Raven’s warnings; and his prologue’s vision of wights rising among the wildling dead was folded into Hardhome. The books also give him a small, crucial on-page role before his prologue: at the battle beneath the Wall it is Varamyr’s beasts and Orell’s inherited eagle that serve Mance as the host’s reconnaissance, and when Melisandre’s fires burn the eagle out of the sky with Varamyr riding it, the agony breaks him — the beginning of the ruin his prologue completes. A book-only figure, and the richest single deposit of skinchanger doctrine in the saga.
Mentioned in the chronicle
- The warg Varamyr Sixskins dies his first death in the snows south of the Wall and steals his second life from his wolf — while the cold winds rise, and the dead walk under the trees. (ADWD 1)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
Before the tale: (book only)
The books: Died in the snows south of the Wall (ADWD, ch. 1)
The great skinchanger of the free folk, who wore a shadowcat and a bear and men's fears, died a beggar in the snows after the Wall broke Mance's host. His second life in his wolf One Eye opens the fifth book — and shows what waits inside the storm.
His death opens the fifth book, and it is a masterwork of poetic justice conducted in a snowstorm. Broken by the eagle’s burning and the host’s shattering, Varamyr staggers south among the wildling refugees, robbed, wounded and dying in a nameless village — and at the end, in terror of the true death, he commits the abomination one last time: he hurls his spirit at the spearwife Thistle, the one human being who had shown him kindness, to take her body for his own. She fights him from inside — screaming, biting off her tongue, clawing at her own eyes to force him out — and both of them die in the struggle, her ruined body rising minutes later with blue eyes among the village’s new wights. Varamyr’s spirit escapes into his wolf One Eye for his second life: a fading passenger in a beast in a world filling with the dead, the great skinchanger reduced to exactly what his teacher warned him all men become who love the skin too much. The show, having no Varamyr, never owed him an ending; the books gave him a perfect one.