Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 12

Episode 4 years ago

Inside Game Of Thrones - Season 1 - Episode 12

BRANDON STARK

Brandon Stark is the second trueborn son of Lord Eddard Stark. This young boy is seven years old, and has one favourite pastime: climbing.


That boy can climb anything climbable, from the armory walls to the kitchen walls to the walls of the castle itself. There are times when Bran would disappear for hours on end, and would require a search party to find him again.

Lady Stark, his mother, always keeps telling him that he can fall.Fall?The word sounds so alien to Bran. I don’t think his mother understood just how well the boy could climb, because if she did, she wouldn’t have feared whether or not he would fall. That boy was the real lord of the castle, the way he climbed.

The guards always kept a keen eye up on the rooftops because of Bran, and whenever they spotted him, all of them would give chase. But the boy was able to swing along rafters with the speed and agility of a monkey, and compared to him, the men were like. . .like, well, great blundering oafs.

That day when he went with his father and brothers to witness the execution of that Night’s Watch deserter became the happiest of his life, because they brought home six pups of what his father called a direwolf. A DIREWOLF! And they gave one to him. That wolf became his closest friend, and began to follow him on his climbing expeditions.

During the King’s stay at Winterfell, Bran got to practice sparring using blunted wooden swords with Prince Tommen, the King’s young son. Then their father said that he was going South with the King to become his new Hand, and that he was taking Sansa, Arya and Bran with him.

Bran can’t believe it. He’s very excited to be going South. He has heard all about the lands of summer and of dragons and of the huge dragon skulls in the throne room of the infamous Red Keep in King’s Landing, and of the great deeds of the knights of the Kingsguard. And now he’s finally going South. He really can’t wait.
But on the last day before their departure, father said he has to say goodbye to Winterfell first.

He first goes to the smithy to say goodbye to Mikken, Winterfell’s blacksmith, then to the simpleminded stableboy Hodor, then to the stall in the stables where his little pony stays. All along he had been excited to finally be moving on to a real horse, but now that he realizes he’s seeing his beloved pony for the last time, he’s sad to be leaving it behind.

And that kind of just spoils the whole goodbye ceremony for the poor boy.

But Bran knows there’s no better way to say goodbye than to go on one last climb. So it’s off to the godswood, his direwolf loping along by his side.

He hasn’t really decided what to name his direwolf, but all his siblings have already chosen names for theirs. Robb calls his Grey Wind, Arya Nymeria, after some woman warrior, Sansa named hers Lady, no surprise there, and Jon called his wolf Ghost, which Bran thinks is a really cool name and wished he had thought of first, even though his wolf didn’t have white fur like that of his bastard brother. His baby brother, three-year-old Rickon, named his wolf Shaggydog, which in Bran’s opinion is a rather silly name for a direwolf.

There in the godswood is the heart tree, a white tree with leaves the color of blood and afaceand haunting eyes that usually give him the shivers. He, unlike his father,hatesgoing into that grove, but Bran isn’t going there to worship the old gods.

Averting his eyes from the hideous face, he tells his direwolf “Stay”, then vaults up into the branches of the tree, scaling up higher and higher through the leaves. He hasn’t even been gone twenty seconds before the wolf raises his head and begins to howl, and Bran has to scamper back down to the lower branches to shout at it to quiet down.
You know, back when they first found these direwolves, Jon said they were meant to have those pups. I really think those animals were sent from the gods, because, just look at how the wolf started to howl when Bran started climbing, maybe to bring people there so they could drag him back down or something. Kind of like that dog in Dog of War.



Anyway, the wolf quiets down when he comes down, only to start howling again when he goes back up. Bran comes down again to shout at it again, but the moment he starts climbing, Mr Direwolf just starts up again. Bran eventually has to leave the wolf howling like that and continue climbing.
Up at the top where the weirwood branches begin branching out, they lean close to a building’s roof, and Bran just swings from the top branch right up onto the roof. He has discovered before that climbing the tree first before swinging to the roof saves a lot more time than just climbing the building itself.
His destination? The Broken Tower, a high, round stone tower that got struck by lightning years ago and whose top part got caved in, but was never rebuilt. The broken stones at the top still remain like that, with treacherous footing where more stones are still in danger of collapsing in.
Sometime ago, Maester Luwin tried to get Bran to stop climbing through fear. They made a miniature Bran out of baked clay and dressed him up in Bran’s clothes, then tossed him out of the rookery window to watch it shatter on the ground. Bran found the whole exercise interesting. Then the Maester told him that was exactly what would happen to him if he fell.

He would break, just like that little clay Bran.
Bran’s seven-year-old mind had only one answer for that. “But I never fall. Never.” And that was that.