The Wall

The great ice wall raised by Bran the Builder eight thousand years ago, stretching a hundred leagues from the Shadow Tower to Eastwatch. Manned by the Night's Watch from its nineteen castles — three still garrisoned — it is the realm's shield against whatever the long night sends south. Old Nan says there are spells woven through the ice.

The fuller tale

The Wall is the largest thing ever built by human hands, and it may be truer to say it was only partly built by them — the tales give Bran the Builder the design, giants the labor, and the children of the forest the spells woven through the ice. Seven hundred feet high and a hundred leagues long, it runs from the mountains by the Shadow Tower to the sea at Eastwatch, wide enough at the top for a dozen riders abreast, weeping in summer, silent in winter. Nineteen castles punctuate its length; in the story’s time three are manned, by fewer swords than a middling lord commands, guarding the realm against an enemy it has spent eight thousand years converting into a nursery rhyme.

The genius of the Wall is that it is a border between stories. South of it lies the game of thrones; north of it, the reason the game is trivial — and the Wall’s garrison of thieves and cast-offs are the only people positioned to know both truths at once. Every character who passes through its gates is reordered by the crossing: Jon most of all, but also Tyrion, who came to piss off the edge of the world and left strangely serious, and every wildling who ever looked up at it and understood that the kneelers’ real king is made of ice.

The tale spends its length testing the Wall’s two natures — fortification and idea. As fortification it holds magnificently: Mance’s hundred thousand break against one undermanned castle. As idea it is trickier, because the Wall was raised against the dead, not the living, and the story’s hardest argument — Jon’s — is that using it to keep out the free folk delivers the other side an army. The Wall’s spells, the old tales say, bar the dead from passing; which is why, in the end, the enemy does not climb it. He acquires a dragon and removes the objection at Eastwatch, and the sound of the ice coming down is the two stories crashing into one.

The page and the screen

In the published books the Wall still stands. Its fall at Eastwatch, the risen dragon and the blue fire are the show writing beyond the page; the books instead circle the Wall’s magic — the Black Gate under the Nightfort, the rule that its spells bar the undead, the question of what Jon’s death within its shadow does to those wards. The Horn of Winter, said to be able to bring the Wall down, is a live artifact in the books and a discarded thread on screen.

The chronicle here

• 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)
• 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)

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

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground — or none the maesters have set down.