Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 5

Episode 4 years ago

Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 5

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King’s Landing, the capital of the seven kingdoms, is far South. Travel a road called the Kingsroad going to the North, and you will end up in Ned Stark’s lands. Keep going North past that, and you’re going past some
other Northern Houses.

All Northern roads, however, dead-end at the Wall.


The Wall, as every person in the seven kingdoms calls it, is a seven-hundred-foot-tall, miles-long structure that stretches all the way from the Narrow Sea in the East to a range of impenetrable mountains at the opposite end of the continent of Westeros, marking the end of the seven kingdoms.

That wall was built to keep out wildlings, a savage people who live on the continent of Westeros but are not considered an actual part of the seven kingdoms.

But according to legend, the real reason the Wall was built all those hundreds of years ago was to protect the seven kingdoms from the Night King and his Others, or White Walkers.
Anybody who has watched Game of Thrones knows exactly what “Night King” and “White
Walkers” mean.

Castles were built along the inside of the Wall, all along its length, to serve as garrisons for men who would volunteer to man it and serve as watchmen to warn and protect the seven kingdoms from the enemy from the North. That Brotherhood of men is known as the Night’s Watch.


Remember when I said the North has the coldest weather? Go past the Wall, however, and you’re in a place where winter never ends. I would have said it’s like Alaska, but it’s more like Siberia. The farther you go past the Wall, the colder it gets. And where the weather is coldest, there the Others roam free.

So, now that we know the basic layout of the seven kingdoms, it’s not confusing if I say that, immediately that man crossed the Wall, he ended up in the North, and was recognized for what he was by the color of his clothes, abi? Aha.

Unfortunately for the man, however, the Others have not been seen by anyone for over a hundred years and have become nothing but a myth and “an old wives’ tale”, so when he was asked what he was doing away from the Wall, he sounded like a raving lunatic.
And the penalty for deserting the Night’s Watch, under any circumstances, is death.

Men of the North brought the man to Ned Stark out of respect, who passed the lawful sentence of death on him. Ned Stark has a saying that “whoever passes the sentence should swing the sword”. He doesn’t have any need for executioners, since he performs his executions himself.

Only that his saying isn’t really correct because, I mean, executioners use axes, not swords, so it should be “should swing the axe” instead. No sword can part a person’s head from his body.

If you’re now nodding your head either physically or mentally, then you obviously have never met Lord Eddard Stark’s sword.
The sword, named Ice, is a two-handed greatsword made of Valyrian steel, the lightest, strongest and sharpest in all of the Known World and has been in his House for centuries. A weapon with a blade as black as onyx, the sword is two-handed because it measures six feet from the hilt to the sword’s tip. Too big to sheathe at his side the way all those warriors in medieval films do, Ned Stark has to carry it sheathed across his back.

So, on this particular day, Ned Stark goes outside Winterfell to a small holdfast where his men have prepared the executioner’s block, taking along with him few of his men, Ser Rodrik Cassel, a grizzled, experienced knight with white hair and prominent sidewhiskers who serves as his master-at-arms, Ser Rodrik’s nephew Jory who is Eddard’s captain of guards, and some others, as well as all his male sons; fourteen-year-old Robb, of an age with Jon, seven-year-old Bran, even Balon Greyjoy’s nineteen-year-old son Theon. All his sons, except baby Rickon, his three-year-old last son.

Ned Stark wants Bran, the only one of his boys who has never seen an execution before, to witness his first.

So the man is brought out in all his motheaten, old blacks, they all gather in front of him, put his head on the block, and Lord Stark asks for Ice to be brought to him.
“For the crime of deserting the Night’s Watch, I Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, in the name of King Robert Baratheon, first of his name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the realm, do sentence you to die.“

Bran, the youngest person present, sits on his pony beside his brothers on their horses, a little distance behind the little execution party of his father’s men. He doesn’t want to watch the man die, but Jon has told him that their father will know if he looks away.


So he watches as Ice’s midnight-black blade goes up, then comes down, bringing away the head of the deserter with it, blood spraying from the neck to wet the snow.