Heresy 146

[JNR]

It is curious, given that Coldhands claims he can't come through with Sam and Gilly. So who's it for? If men can climb the Wall (or drill holes through it), and therefore don't need the Black Gate; but magical creatures can't pass with or without the Gate - and therefore do not benefit from it... then what does it do?

This is exactly why I've always considered the original purpose of the Gate a serious mystery.

One rare area of near-unanimous belief in Heresy: seems like nobody is pleased with the idea it was a "sally port," per the show.

[MaesterSam]

As to the first point, I'd say that if the Wall as originally created is a barrier rather than a fortification then its possible that the passage underneath it could be passed through in either direction at the discretion of its guardians - and I'd still like to know what's at the other end of it.

As to the dragonglass, I'm inclined to wonder about its true significance. Yes it melted Ser Puddles, but was it decisive in winning the battle for the Dawn and ending the Long Night, and here we come back to the big blank we've talked about before. It's supposedly the great victory, but yet Sam can't find anything about it and how the Others were defeated. Yet that should be at the core of this and shouldn't require ancient parchments. There has therefore to be something significant about this which GRRM deliberately isn't telling us.

What I'd suggest is that Sam doesn't find anything about dragonglass being the secret weapon, because it wasn't. Rather that what we'll eventually find is that something else ended it, whether it was the Last Hero crying pax or even some kind of great magic, and that the reason why GRRM is keeping it secret is because that's how the present story is going to be resolved. Not in a great battle on the Trident or anywhere else, but by the last hero travelling north, not with an army but with his dog and confronting whatever or whoever is responsible face to face.

I too would love to see the Black Gate from the North. I would expect it to be hidden very, very well.

I'm not sure there ever was a Battle for the Dawn, but if there was, I can't imagine them using anything other than dragonglass (aside from the one guy with dragonsteel) and it not being mentioned in the Annals. It seems to me the obsidian was perfectly effective against the Other that Sam encountered, and it's the only weapon mentioned anywhere thats effective. Aside from Lightbringer, but I find it hard to believe that one person killed off all the Others and all the wights single-handedly.

I have no disagreement with any theory disputing the big battle altogether. As wolfmaid, I believe, has pointed out before, we see how useless men are in true winter conditions. After 13 years of the worst winter ever, traveling through 100-ft snow drifts would be near impossible, horses wouldn't be going anywhere, (horses? what horses? they would have all starved to death within the first 2-3 years), and whatever people remained would be half dead too. Even without any Others, making the trip Bran and co made under the conditions of the LN (let's remember it's also dark all the time) seems unrealistic. Now add the Others and tens of thousands of wights, compare to the Fist, and a victory for man just isn't in the cards anymore.

So yes I agree, dragonglass didn't save them. Surely the LH found a way to convince the CotF to help (or to call off the attack, depending on which theory you prefer).

Was it the only way across?

Back then, GRRM assures us, the Wall was far smaller. We see the same idea reinforced in the tale that the Night's King could easily make out his future queen's beauty from atop the Wall.

This being the case, it's hard for me to imagine the Wall was originally intended to keep men from moving either north or south. Even now, at its staggering seven-hundred-foot level, it can't manage that job very well, as Jon and the free folk with him prove in SoS, and as Mance tells us outright from personal experience (claiming to have scaled it "half a hundred" times).

Meanwhile, we have

1. The Black Gate allowing men of the Night's Watch to pass both ways based on recitation of their vow. Heretical speculation has sometimes been that this magic was added long after the Wall was originally built, but there is, of course, zero evidence of this.

2. Coldhands telling us that he cannot cross the Wall with Sam using the Black Gate.

And, of course, if the original goal was to block the passage of men in the early days, going either direction, it's awfully peculiar there were no castles built along its length except for the Nightfort at that time. They would certainly have been needed to accomplish such a job.

All of this tells me that the Wall was originally intended only to block passage of the Others and wights (and whatever Coldhands is).

I tend to go with the common sense explanations in this department. Whatever the Gate was meant to do, it wasn't an everyday function or you wouldn't put it in a well and you wouldn't glamour it on the south side.

Hmm you're right, it doesn't seem like the Wall ever effectively kept men on one side or the other. But if it was built to keep Others and wights on one side, then what's with the oath being required to pass? Shouldn't people just be able to travel freely across?

You are right, it probably wasn't used all that often. Kind of like the gate at the House of the Undying (a mouth too, IIRC) - only rarely does someone need to pass through it into the other world beyond.

This suggests that the Black Gate is a passage, the only passage, through the magic warding. But why would such a passage be needed?

Excellent question! I won't presume to have an answer, but I feel like this is the question we should be asking.

(It is also noteworthy that Coldhands could not pass, despite being a former Ranger and knowing the oath. So it's not a matter of saying the oath and getting across, you have to be alive and say the oath)

[wolfmaid7]

:agree: , which is why I also suggest the expanded headcount of the Watch, shown in the creation of all the other castles, happened at the same time the Wall was blown up to its present size.

To defend anything three hundred miles long against men? Well, for that job, a very high Wall and a very large Watch and another 18 castles are certainly going to help.

But the castles, the headcount, and the super-high Wall are simply not needed against Others/wights if they can't possibly pass the Wall's wards anyway.

It is if you only have five hundred men! I'm not at all sure that's true if you have, say, ten thousand men -- 20x as many... though you still require competent leadership, adequate resources including food, etc. to get the job done and there will still be raiders getting past.

Whatever the reason, it's beyond any doubt that that's just what did happen, because GRRM says quite plainly that raising the Wall

Thousands of years to reach its present height. Clearly, Wallbuilding went on long, long after the Long Night, just as Jeor Mormont claims it did.

I think this GRRM quote gets overlooked a bit. The Wall took hundreds of years to complete and thousands of years to reach it's present height. Whatever went into the Wall to make it what it was meant to be, was over and done with in "hundreds of years." So the lore was complex and the spells woven in between probably even more so.

[Black Crow]

Turn my back for 5 minutes and we overrun.Time to close this one and continue the conversation in Heresy 147

[Matthew.]

Its possible that he might be able to come through, but there are practical difficulties to consider. Leaving aside the possibility that he might simply crumble to dust beyond the magic of the Wall, there's not exactly a bright future for a walking corpse in the realms of men.

He probably wouldn't go too far south into the realms of men... he would, however, have a rather large block of ice to keep him fresh, even in the summer. Maybe one would put dead men in the Ice Cells, until such time as it was necessary to "wake the sleepers," and this whole system was mucked up by the NK getting overly ambitious and allowing a different sort of magic to come south.