Old Bear

a night beyond the wall

Meera: Gods, I sure hope Jojen is ok

Bran: *eye deep in mysterious paste that lowkey sort of tastes of blood*

beyond the wall week: day four - women beyond the wall

Gilly's good. She's good and kind [...]  She . . . she made me braver, Jon. Not brave, but . . . braver.

"Thank you, Lord Snow."

The Frozen Shore is a stretch of coastline that sits on the Bay of Ice, beyond the Wall. 

The men of The Frozen Shore have queer names, as they name themselves after beasts of the region, while their women clad themselves in sealskins.   They employ chariots made of walrus bone, pulled by dogs as large as direwolves, as transport, and also breed reindeer.    Huts of ice are used by some inhabitants of the Frozen Shore, and while most free folk worship the old gods, some coastal tribes worship gods of snow and ice.

There are at least two factions of them, one wearing antlers on their hats and others wearing walrus tusks and the two sorts do not get along with each other.   Wildlings from this area have oft raided the Westerosi Bear Island, and prior to Mance Rayder negotiating peace, the men of the Frozen Shore, particularly the walrus men, warred with the cannibal ice-river clans

             The Great Walrus is one of the free folk leaders from the Frozen Shore.

❝A savage folk. The men are bad, the women worse.❞           — Tormund to Jon Snow  (’A Dance with Dragons’, Chapter 58)

AND NOW MY WATCH BEGINS | CHAPTER 4 | READ HERE

With him at her side, they've created a cover neither of them could have come up with on their own. To be not spies but just a young couple... madly in love.

BELATED HAPPY HOLIDAYS ❤️

A Game of Thrones, Jon I

“Is this one of the direwolves I’ve heard so much of?” a familiar voice asked close at hand.

Jon looked up happily as his uncle Ben put a hand on his head and ruffled his hair much as Jon had ruffled the wolf’s.

“Yes,” he said. “His name is Ghost.”

One of the squires interrupted the bawdy story he’d been telling to make room at the table for their lord’s brother. Benjen Stark straddled the bench with long legs.

He snagged a roasted onion, dripping brown with gravy, from a nearby trencher and bit into it. It crunched.

Benjen watched Ghost with amusement as he ate his onion. “A very quiet wolf,” he observed.

“He’s not like the others,” Jon said. “He never makes a sound. That’s why I named him Ghost. That, and because he’s white. The others are all dark, grey or black.”

“There are still direwolves beyond the Wall. We hear them on our rangings.”

Hi there. Why do you think Jon Snow would delegate Cotter Pyke, his Commander at Eastwatch, the rather important task of retrieving the free folk from Hardhome when he could have given the job to say, Ser Glendon Hewett? Realistically, being he was from the Shield Islands, as well as being one of Jon’s old adversaries from back in ASOS, wouldn’t Ser Glendon be trusted to do a competent job with such an expedition? Would you consider this a mistake on Jon (or GRRMs) part?

Cotter Pyke was a former Ironborn reaver who was likely the most experienced seaman at Eastwatch, and he would have been expected to lead the expedition himself by virtue of being the commander.

Jon didn't know who Pyke would name to run things in his stead. Jon expected Pyke to go to Hardhome, get the wildlings onto the ships and go.

And to be fair, he didn't know the Lyseni pirates found themselves in Hardhome, and deceived the free folk into being kidnapped to be sold into slavery. That really fucked up his naval rescue efforts since now the wildlings didn't feel safe enough to board the ships, leaving them stalled.

“I've never had a crown on my head or sat my arse on a bloody throne, if that's what you're asking. My birth is as low as a man's can get, no septon's ever smeared my head with oils, I don't own any castles, and my queen wears furs and amber, not silk and sapphires. I am my own champion, my own fool, and my own harpist.” -  Jon X, aSoS

Mance Rayder and his woman Dalla

Happy Birthday @the-perfunctorily ! ❤❤❤

Okay, given how little regular travel there is between the two sides of the Wall in recent centuries, specifically northwards - and given how the one group that primarily speaks the Old Tongue associated with the First Men is the one that lives in comparative isolation furthest from the Wall - and given that the Wall was originally built with one castle with a magically warded and locked underground passageway and no gate - and that the other castles and their gates were all added later with no discernible explanation but to allow travel back and forth...

... I can't help but conclude that all wildlings beyond the Wall (save maybe the Thenns but unlikely) moved there long after the Wall was finished and the Common Tongue was already established, or else took it on through extensive interaction with the regions south of the Wall to the point where it was feasible to use it almost exclusively.

Any narrative that paints them as primary victims of the Wall's construction is blatantly false (primarily Ygritte's distorted idea) and any narrative that assumes them to be immediately oppressed and deliberately cut off from the regions South of the Wall needs to explain 19 (!) gates deliberately carved into the magical ice where there were none before. You don't have hundreds of thousands of people settled beyond the Wall just from a trickle of hardy climbers or a few ships sailing past the Wall in secret over the centuries.

Everything - to my mind - points to slowly deteriorating relations between the descendents of the First Men who remained in the North south of the Wall and the descendents of First Men who belonged to a wave of settlers that migrated beyond the Wall in a coordinated expansion and had extensive trade and peaceful contact with their group of origin for a long long time.

Been working on a new blorbo for a beyond the wall campaign im playing in. Still working out his details but i like what im working with atm

Osha - Alexandre Vauthier Couture Fall 2022

"Bael had brought her back?"

"No. They had been in Winterfell all the time, hiding with the dead beneath the castle. The maid loved Bael so dearly she bore him a son, the song says . . . though if truth be told, all the maids love Bael in them songs he wrote. Be that as it may, what's certain is that Bael left the child in payment for the rose he'd plucked unasked, and that the boy grew to be the next Lord Stark. So there it is—you have Bael's blood in you, same as me."

beyond the wall week 2022 - day two: songs & legends

The golden hour on the low road to Taos. Photo: Chuck Carl (July 15, 2023) :: [Robert Scott Horton]

* * * *

"Beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security fences topped with barbed wire and razor wire, beyond the asphalt belting of the superhighways, beyond the cemented banksides of temporarily stopped and mutilated rivers, beyond the rage of lies that poisons the air, there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then -

May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night."

 - Edward Abbey Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside entheognosis

[thanks whiskey river]