Wun Wun

Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun, one of the last giants, who comes south with the free folk — a mountain of muscle that speaks the Old Tongue and little else.

The fuller tale

Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun — Wun Wun, to everyone whose tongue gives out — is one of the last giants in the world, and the story’s walking elegy for everything the world is losing. The giants of the true north are not the ogres of southern tales but an old, dwindling people: mammoth-riders, Old Tongue-speakers, gentler than their size until pushed, who have been retreating before men since men arrived. By the tale’s time they number in the dozens, all of them inside Mance Rayder’s host, refugees like everyone else from the cold that is eating their world.

Wun Wun comes south with the free folk remnant and becomes, improbably, a fixture of the Wall’s garrison — a fourteen-foot ally with a taste for anything resembling food and a temper that surfaces exactly when armed men forget their manners. The sworn brothers and the kneeler lords gawk, and the tale enjoys the reversal: the monster of legend turns out to be the most straightforwardly honest creature at Castle Black, dangerous only to people who richly earn it.

His meaning is written in his rarity. Every other faction in the saga can replace its losses; the giants cannot. When Wun Wun fights — and he fights like a siege engine with a grievance — the audience is watching a species spend itself for allies who, two years earlier, would have hunted it. The free folk understood what the realm learns late: when the giants are gone, they are gone, and the world that comes after will be smaller in every sense.

The page and the screen

The tellings deploy him differently. Book-Wun Wun is a Castle Black character: recruited from the refugees, lodged in the castle, and central to the fifth book’s explosive final scene — when the Watch’s tensions detonate, it is Wun Wun who tears apart the queen’s knight Ser Patrek in the yard, the chaos into which the mutineers’ knives come out for Jon Snow. He is alive in the published books, roaring over a dead knight as the story cuts to black. The show marched him further: through the massacre at Hardhome, over the wall of Castle Black to end the mutineers’ standoff, and into the Stark vanguard at the Battle of the Bastards — a military career the books have not yet written.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The Vale knights break the encirclement; Wun Wun breaks the gate; Sansa feeds Ramsay to his own hounds. (S6·E9)

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

The show: Fell at Winterfell (S8·E3)

The last giant of the free folk broke the gate of Winterfell for the Starks and died against its wall, feathered with arrows and bolts, Ramsay's final shaft in his eye. With him went the giants from the world of men.

In the show the last giant dies buying Winterfell back for the Starks. At the Battle of the Bastards, Wun Wun anchors the wildling line through the slaughter, survives the arrow-storm and the crush, and when the survivors reach Winterfell’s sealed gates he breaks them open with his own body — shouldering through the oak and iron until the way is clear and he can no longer stand. Feathered with shafts and bolts, kneeling in the breach he made, he looks up as Ramsay Bolton puts a final arrow in his eye. Jon Snow reaches him in time to watch him fall; the death goes unavenged for approximately ninety seconds. With him, the show quietly notes, the age of giants ends. He is alive in the published books.