Ygritte

A free folk spearwife, red-haired and sharp-tongued (kissed by fire, and lucky for it), quick to tell any crow how little he knows.

The fuller tale

Ygritte is the free folk’s whole argument in one red-haired package. A spearwife of no particular band and no rank — the wildlings have none to give — she is kissed by fire, quick with a bow, quicker with a jibe, and possessed of exactly one settled opinion about the boy crow captured in the Skirling Pass: that he knows nothing. The phrase starts as mockery, becomes flirtation, becomes love, and never once stops being true.

She meets Jon Snow across a drawn blade — his — and survives because he cannot swing it. That failed execution is the hinge of both their stories: to Ygritte it is proof the crow has a man inside the cloak; to the wildlings it is a debt; and to Jon it is the first crack in the wall between his vows and his eyes. She repays it by vouching for him to Rattleshirt’s band and to Mance himself, staking her standing on a turncloak’s sincerity — which makes her, by the free folk’s hard accounting, responsible for him.

What follows is the tale’s best-argued romance. In the cave beneath the earth, in the climb up the Wall’s impossible face, Ygritte teaches Jon the free folk from the inside — that they are not the raiders of Old Nan’s tales but a people, with songs and dead and a claim to the north older than the Starks — and un-teaches him most of what the Watch taught. Her creed is stated plainly: you are mine and I am yours, and if we die, we die, but first we’ll live. Jon, fatally, is never quite able to say the same words without hearing his vows underneath them.

When he breaks — abandoning the raiding party at the Queenscrown rather than kill an old man for show — Ygritte’s heartbreak arrives as arrows. She puts three shafts in him as he flees, and the books and show agree on the essential ambiguity: a woman who could split a wallet at a hundred paces left every one of them out of the kill. Reunited at the storming of Castle Black on opposite sides, she fights her way through the Watch with his name in her teeth, the war and the love wound so tight together that not even she can say which one aimed her bow.

Ygritte’s meaning outlives her: she is the face Jon Snow sees every time the Watch debates whether wildlings are people. The gates that open to the free folk, the alliance that holds the Long Night — the tale routes all of it through one spearwife who took a crow into a cave and told him he knew nothing. She was right, and he spent the rest of the saga learning what she knew.

The page and the screen

The show hands her death an author: Olly, the boy whose village her band destroyed, puts the arrow in her back in the burning yard of Castle Black — grief answering grief, and Jon holds her as she goes. The books are crueler by being vaguer: Jon finds her dying after the battle with a shaft through her chest, and the tale never says whose it was; he prays it wasn’t his, and gets no answer. Book-Ygritte is also a fraction more feral and more mythic — it is she who tells the tale of Bael the Bard and insists the Starks have wildling blood, and her jealous streak (the show’s cave idyll notwithstanding) runs hotter on the page. Both tellings agree on the essentials: the red hair, the creed, and the last line about the cave.

In the show, season by season

Season Two. In A Man Without Honor — "You know nothing, Jon Snow."

Season Three. In The Climb — Knows his cloak is still black — and climbs with him anyway.

Season Four. In The Watchers on the Wall — Dies kissed by fire, in the wrong castle, in the right arms.

In the books

A Storm of Swords. In The Wall Holds — "You know nothing, Jon Snow." Her last arrow never flew.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Beyond the Wall, Jon is ordered to execute a wildling woman named Ygritte — and can't. (S2·E6)
• Ygritte talks circles around her captor until the ambush is hers, not his. (S2·E7)
• Jon and Ygritte find a cave; his vows lose a clause. (S3·E5)
• Mole's Town falls to the wildlings; Ygritte spares Gilly and the babe. (S4·E8)
• Ygritte dies in Jon's arms with the only true thing either ever said: you know nothing. (S4·E9)
• In the Skirling Pass Jon takes a wildling captive and cannot open her throat; her name is Ygritte, and letting her go will cost him everything. (ACOK 52)
• South with the free folk: Ygritte claims Jon with a boldness no vow prepared him for, and Orell's eagle watches him with a dead man's hate. (ASOS 16)
• The Wall by its wrong side: Jon and Ygritte climb seven hundred feet of ice with the Thenns, and the Wall weeps and cracks and tries to shrug them off. (ASOS 31)
• At the Queenscrown the wildlings test Jon with an old man's life; he fails their test and passes his own, and rides for Castle Black with Ygritte's arrow in his leg. (ASOS 42)
• The Thenns storm Castle Black from the south: Donal Noye holds the gate against a giant and dies for it, and Ygritte dies in Jon's arms with a kissed curse. (ASOS 56)

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

The show: Fell in the battle for the Wall (S4·E9)

The books: An arrow beneath the Wall (ASOS, ch. 56)

The girl kissed by fire drew her bow on Jon Snow in the burning yard of Castle Black and hesitated — and a boy from a village she'd raided didn't. She died in Jon's arms: 'We should have stayed in that cave.'

She dies in Jon Snow’s arms in the wreck of the battle for Castle Black. On screen she has him at bowshot in the burning yard — and hesitates, the bow trembling between love and war, until Olly’s arrow takes her through the back. In the books Jon finds her among the wounded when the fighting ebbs, an arrow in her chest that no one will ever claim, her hair the last warm color in a yard full of ash. Both tellings give her the same dying words — that they should have stayed in that cave — and Jon the same answer, that he’ll take her back there. He keeps the promise the only way left: her body is burned north of the Wall, in the free air, as the free folk do, and the fire her hair was kissed by takes the rest of her home.