Hardhome

The only thing like a town the free folk ever raised, on the sheltered bay of Storrold's Point — emptied six hundred years ago in a night of fire no one can explain, and shunned ever since.

The fuller tale

Hardhome is the closest the free folk ever came to a town, and the reason they never tried again. Sheltered on the bay of Storrold’s Point, it grew into a rough port of a thousand hearths — until, six hundred years ago, a night of fire annihilated it so completely that sailors swore the screams could be heard at sea, and the Watch found only ash and bone. No one ever learned what happened. The free folk say the place is cursed, and the free folk do not scare easily.

The story brings it back as a refugee camp at the end of the world: thousands of wildlings pinned against the sea, with winter on one side and the dead on the other. Jon Snow sails there to offer the unthinkable — passage south of the Wall for the Watch’s oldest enemies — because every wildling who dies at Hardhome is a soldier for the other side. The evacuation becomes a massacre in front of him, and the sequence ends on the tale’s most eloquent piece of silence: the Night King on the dock, raising his arms, and ten thousand dead standing up at once. No scene in the story argues the true war more plainly.

Hardhome is where the game of thrones is exposed as a sideshow. Everyone who leaves that bay alive understands the arithmetic of the Long Night — every corpse is a recruit — and spends the rest of the tale trying to explain it to people who were not there.

The page and the screen

The battle of Hardhome is pure show invention — one of its finest hours, and not on any page. In the books the tragedy is heard, not seen: the wildlings at Hardhome starve and burn in reported fragments, ships are sent and wrecked, and a ranger’s letter speaks of dead things in the woods and dead things in the water. Book Jon plans a rescue by land he never gets to lead — the knives at Castle Black come first.

The chronicle here

• Jon rides for Hardhome; Maester Aemon dies at the Wall with Egg's name on his lips. (S5·E7)
• At Hardhome, five thousand free folk board boats — until the storm of the dead arrives. (S5·E8)
• The Wall's larders shrink as the free folk swell; word comes of thousands more starving at Hardhome, where the dead walk the shore — a rescue no one can afford. (ADWD 22)
• Refugees of the Karstark plot and colder things: Jon weighs Hardhome, the missing rangers, and letters that go unanswered — winter is not coming; it is here. (ADWD 45)
• Tormund's thousands pass the Wall in a long cold line, giants and mammoths and all; Jon counts eight thousand mouths, three thousand spears — and one letter from Hardhome that curdles the blood. (ADWD 54)
• Queen Selyse and her court roost in the King's Tower with red priest and fool; Jon plans the Hardhome rescue by sea over every objection Bowen Marsh can spell. (ADWD 59)

Souls the story brings here

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

• Karsi — Fell at Hardhome
• Rattleshirt — Beaten down before the free folk (a different fate in the books)