Actress Rose Leslie in Game of Thrones
Wildlings are savages without morals, scruples or loyalties, Theon Greyjoy told us on last week’s episode of Game of Thrones. The irony, of course, was having the conventional wisdom of the elites of Westeros parroted by a man who appears utterly lacking in those virtues. Moreover, when the captive wildling Osha gets naked and offers to acquaint him with her knowledge of “savage things” in exchange for her freedom, Theon is suckered into a plot that costs him dearly. Indeed, the series’ second season positively radiates with the allure of the wild women of the north, as Jon Snow find his Night Watch vows of chastity strained by the proximity of the fiery Ygritte. And it only gets steamier. But Game of Thrones’ walk on the wildling side goes way beyond Theon’s and Jon’s transgressive desire for the “other”; the writers and the novelist behind the series, George R.R. Martin, once again reveal their rebel inclinations by taking great pains to demonstrate that in the fictional universe of Game of Thrones — as in the history of our own societies — one man’s wildlings are another man’s free people (the name the wildlings use for themselves).
There’s certainly more to the wildlings than their combat-capable and sexually confident women. Osha seduces Theon to not only pursue her own freedom but also save Brann and Rickon Stark. She knows the significance of Brann’s dreams; wildlings are privy to older bodies of knowledge denied and suppressed by the religious authorities that prop up the monarchical order south of the wall — after all, Maester Luwin, whose title makes him part of the elite of Westerosi scholarship, tells Brann they’re simply bad dreams.
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And then there’s the politics. Ygritte taunts Jon with the freedoms and pleasures denied him by the strictures of Westerosi rules, rattling his confidence in the values of the society he has pledged to defend and its stark (pun intended) injustices and inequalities enforced by violence. “You think you’re free?” Ygritte taunts in last night’s episode, as Jon insists she’s his prisoner and not, as she claims, a free woman. “We don’t go serving some shit king because his father was king,” she sneers, mocking the monarchic principle that governs Westeros, which sees itself as better than the wildlings. Jon, on the defensive, shoots back that the wildlings follow Mance Rayder, the Night Watch deserter proclaimed as the “King Beyond the Wall.” “Yes,” Ygritte agrees. “But we chose Mance Rayder.”
The wildlings are a threat to the order that prevails south of the wall less because they periodically raid and loot its villages but because they refuse to bend the knee to the established authority in the Seven Kingdoms. They live by their own rules and codes, and their leaders can govern only with the consent of their people. A King Beyond the Wall would lose his head if he displayed the sort of murderous caprice of King Joffrey. The violent inequalities of Westeros are based, first and foremost, in the ownership of land and resources, and the power to allocate them. And that’s what the wildlings detest most. “The gods made the earth for all men to share,” Ygritte declares at one point (in the book). “Only when the kings come with their crowns and steel swords, they claimed it was theirs. My trees, they said, you can’t eat them apples. My stream, you can’t fish here. My wood, you’re not to hunt. My earth, my water, my castle, my daughter, keep your hands away or I’ll chop ’em off, but maybe you kneel to me I’ll let you have a sniff.”
There’s plenty of brutality north of the wall, no doubt, as Craster’s systematic rape of his daughters demonstrates — although he seems to be something of an outcast in wildling society, since its rules preclude incest. And the wildlings raid the villages of the smallfolk south of the wall and prey upon them, pillaging resources and capturing young women as brides. In many ways, theirs is a primitive society in which might creates right, though the series repeatedly illustrates that the same is true for “civilized” Westeros, where patterns of violence are simply codified in law for which a divine authority is claimed.
The mating rituals of the wildlings, for example, require that a man steal away the daughter of a rival clansman, risking death doing so, while she fights every step of the way. Once wed, if he fails to impress his captive bride, his culture allows her to slit his throat the first chance she gets. Free women, then, have more say over their marriage than do the ladies and princesses of Westeros, who are traded as chattel in marriages that are nothing more than sweeteners on strategic deals binding powerful houses and kingdoms. (Cersei Lannister slept with her brother rather than consummate her arranged marriage to Robert Baratheon; poor little Mycella, still a child, has been packed off to Dorne, betrothed to young Trystane Martell.) Even Robb Stark, King in the North, has been pledged to marry one of the daughters of Lord Walder Frey as the price for crossing the River Trident at The Twins, the fortified bridge controlled by the Freys, during a stolen march that was the key to the northmen’s initial victory over the Lannisters. Last week, Robb was warned by his mother in no uncertain terms that his royal obligations mean he follows his heart and the lovely Talisa at his own peril.
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Jon Snow’s status as a bastard south of the wall diminishes his stake in the social order of Westeros, and the free people offer him, and us, a glimpse of a lifestyle that offers a radical critique of the society that sent him to the wall to protect it. Wildling culture, as depicted in Game of Thrones, shares some features of Caribbean pirate culture in the late 17th century, when deserters from the colonial navies of the time made common cause with freed slaves, indigenous people and others who had no stake in heeding the laws of Europe’s distant crowns, and instead struck out for themselves — creating on-ship and onshore communities that transgressed many of the conventions on race, class, gender and property that prevailed in European societies at the time.
Like the wildlings, the pirates were not revolutionaries trying to overthrow European society; they had simply found a way to live outside of it, defying its rules in order to secure their own freedom and aggrandizement, often through preying brutally on those who “bent the knee,” as it were. Still, men and women defying rules deemed immutable, their lifestyle was revolutionary. Many pirates recognized that they had nothing to gain by observing the rules of a society designed to keep them in chains of poverty and servitude to a self-aggrandizing and enriching elite on whose behalf they were expected to fight and die, or work till they dropped. Instead, they fought for their own liberty and the wealth to sustain their merry lifestyle free of the bonds of royal authority and the burdens of royal tribute. Self-serving though they may have been, and willing to make mutually beneficial deals with those whose authority they defied, some saw merit in helping others shake off the royal yoke. Indeed, a number of “privateers” helped defend the American revolution in its infancy.
Qorin Halfhand, the ranger commander who led the raiding party that put Jon Snow face to face with Ygritte, told him in last week’s episode that the rhetoric about the Watch being the thin black line between civilization and barbarism is bollocks. Most of his brothers in black had no choice but to join the Watch if they wanted to keep their heads; now they fight to stay alive in its colors. The brutality of that system was made abundantly clear in the first episode of the first season, when Ned Stark lops off the head of a terrified deserter from the Watch who has fled the unspeakable horror of an encounter with the zombie “white walkers.”
Things are bound to get more interesting when we meet Mance Rayder, the popular and visionary King North of the Wall who was once a loyal officer of the Night Watch. Jon Snow is beginning to discover that there’s far more — or maybe far less — to the distinction between wildling and King’s subject than he’d been led to believe. Of course, the pirate realm and that of European royalty were separated by many thousands of sea miles in an era when that might as well have put them on different planets. But Game of Thrones is marching them inexorably into one another’s midst. This is going to get a lot more interesting. Ygritte’s character, after all, could just as well be speaking for an Occupy Westeros movement — if there were such a thing. Savages or anarchists? It may not matter much. Remember, winter is coming.