Castle Black

Stronghold of the Night's Watch

The chief fortress of the Night's Watch, a grim huddle of keeps at the foot of the Wall with seven hundred feet of ice at its back.

The fuller tale

Castle Black is the strongest fortress in the North and, by design, not a castle at all. It has no southern wall, no moat, no gate to bar against the realm — the Night’s Watch built its keeps open to the lands they protect, a stone promise that the swords here point only north. What stands at the foot of the Wall is a work-yard more than a stronghold: the winch cage rattling up seven hundred feet of ice, the armory and the stables, the common hall where the realm’s thieves, poachers and disinherited younger sons eat at one table because the Wall makes brothers of whatever it is given.

The tale arrives with the order at its lowest ebb — fewer than a thousand men stretched over a hundred leagues, commanded by old Jeor Mormont from a tower and by habit from everywhere else. Castle Black is where Jon Snow’s illusions about the storied Watch die in the training yard, and where something better replaces them: Sam at his books, Aemon in his rookery, the discovery that a vow can be a home. It is also where the story first shows its true enemy, when a dead ranger’s eyes open blue in the night and the Lord Commander’s door becomes a battlefield.

The castle’s great hour is the battle for the Wall. Mance Rayder’s host — the largest the free folk ever assembled — breaks against it from both sides at once, giants at the gate and raiders in the yard, and a garrison of boys and old men holds because someone has to. The victory costs Castle Black its innocents and its illusions alike, and the king who arrives to finish the battle stays to complicate the peace. In the shadow of that fight the black brothers elect the youngest Lord Commander in their history, and the castle becomes the improbable center of the realm’s real war — the one nobody south of it believes in.

What follows is the order’s oldest argument, fought at knife’s length: whether the Watch guards the realms of men or merely a line on a map. Jon opens the gate to the wildlings because dead men make no distinctions, and his own officers answer in the dark of the yard with the words that have haunted the order since — for the Watch. Castle Black is where the story’s most honest man is murdered by men who believed they were being loyal, and where he returns owing nothing to any vow, his watch ended.

By the end, the castle has resumed its ancient posture — a gate between worlds, manned by whoever the realm can spare, commanded once more by a man named Snow. The story leaves through it as it entered: northward, into the trees, with the gate standing open behind.

The page and the screen

The books and show elect and kill their Lord Commander differently. On the page Jon’s election is a small political novel — Sam quietly brokering the withdrawal of two rival commanders and springing Jon as compromise — where the show settles it with a speech and a show of hands. The assassination diverges more deeply: book Jon is stabbed after announcing he will march on Winterfell himself, by weeping brothers led by Bowen Marsh, and the published books leave him dead on the ice with his resurrection an article of reader faith. The show gives the knives to Thorne and a boy with a grievance, and answers the question the books still hold open.

The chronicle here

At Castle Black, Jon learns the Watch is thieves and poachers — and starts teaching instead of beating them. (S1·E3)
A dead ranger rises in Castle Black; Jon's torch saves the Lord Commander. (S1·E8)
Stannis marches from Castle Black for Winterfell, family and red woman in train. (S5·E5)
The wildlings take Castle Black without a fight; the mutineers go to the cells. (S6·E2)
Sansa reaches Castle Black: the first Stark reunion since Winterfell burned. (S6·E4)
Castle Black hardens Jon; he turns the recruits who hated him into something like brothers, and Benjen rides north on a ranging without him. (AGOT 20)
The great ranging: two hundred brothers ride north from Castle Black into a wood emptied of wildlings, Sam struggling behind with his ravens. (ACOK 7)
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)
Wounded, Jon reaches Castle Black ahead of the Magnar's Thenns; Donal Noye arms the boys and old men, and the Wall prepares to be defended from the wrong side. (ASOS 49)
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)