The Citadel: Concordance - 3.4. The Wildlings

3.4. The Wildlings

Wildlings are executed if caught south of the Wall (I: 12)
The wildlings are seen as cruel and primitive, killers and thieves and slavers (I: 12)
The wildlings speak in fear of the white walkers, which some of them are fighting (I: 338)
The wildlings name themselves the Free Folk (I: 484)
The wildlings are known to enter the Seven Kingdoms by entering the mountains west of the Shadow Tower and taking high, perilous passes south (I: 652)
Wildlings can and do scale the Wall to enter the south (II: 54. III: 83)
A typical wildling village has small, one-room houses made of unmortared stone (II: 150. V: 65)
The villagers of Whitetree put the burnt remains of their dead inside of the mouth of their carved weirwood (II: 151)
The wildlings burn their dead (II: 151)
Wildlings sometimes use little boats to steal down past the wall, crossing the Bay of Seals (II: 188)
Some wildlings have actually aided the rangers in the past (II: 260, 261)
There are wildlings who believe the Others are gods, calling them the cold gods in the night and white shadows; they give up animals and even children to appease them when 'the white cold' comes (II: 271)
Not even wildlings dare live in the Frostfangs during the winter (II: 374)
There are thousands of wildlings (II: 374)
The Ice Dragon (its name may be different outside of the North) is a constellation used to help mark direction, because the blue star in the rider's eye points the way north (II: 381)
The wildlings call the Others the white walkers (II: 381)
The wildlings keep thralls (II: 458)
Warrior women are called spearwives amongst the wildlings (II: 542)
The wildlings appear to consider the bastard name of Snow evil (II: 542)
All the wildlings know the songs of the old King-beyond-the-Wall Bael the Bard, which in general have maids falling in love with him all the time (II: 544-545)
Men of the Night's Watch who have the misfortune to be captured rather than killed in battle tend to be killed slowly (II: 546)
The wildlings have many songs of their own (II: 558)
The Night's Watch is not adverse to accepting orphans and boys from the wildlings to raise to the black, and has done so in the past (II: 274-275, 558)
"Rayder" appears to be the last name given at the Wall for men who were wildling-born but raised to the black (II: 558)
The wildlings have horses (II: 560)
Mammoths appear in a wildling army (II: 561)
The wildlings do not spare brothers of the Night's Watch, unless they break their oaths and prove it by cutting their black cloaks, swearing on a father's grave, cursing the Watch and the Lord Commander, and other like things (II: 692)
Some wildlings use hounds (II: 695)
Wildlings use crude round shields of skin stretched over wicker, painting them with figures such as skulls and bones, serpents, bear claws, twisted demonic faces, and severed heads (II: 695. III: 617, 834)
Some wildlings have crude helms of wood and boiled leather or sewn sheepskins, while others use bows of wood and horn which are outranged by yew longbows but can seemingly shoot an arrow as high as seven hundred feet (II: 695-696. III: 721, 722)
Some wildlings even use weapons such as stone axes and flails (II: 695-696)
The only metal armor that wildlings wear are bits and pieces looted from dead rangers. (II: 695)
Wildlings do not mine nor smelt and there are few smiths and fewer forges north of the Wall (II: 695)
Wildling horses are surefooted (II: 695)
The wildlings cast runes (II: 696)
Even chiefs are argued with by lesser wildlings when a decision needs to be made (II: 698)
It's a rare thing to find a dozen mounted wildlings (III: 3)
The wildlings have oxen, mules, and horses (III: 11)
Wildling weapons are more often made of stone and bone than steel (III: 11)
The wildlings have wayns, carts, and sleds (III: 11, 77)
Wildlings use fire-hardened spears and lances on foot or horseback (III: 76)
Some wildlings have armor made from bronze scales sewn on to leather (III: 79)
The Thenns are more well armed and armored than most wildlings, with bronze helms, axes of bronze and a few axes of chipped stone, short stabbing spears with leaf-shaped heads, shirts sewn with bronze discs, and plain unadorned shields of black boiled leather with bronze rims and bosses (III: 79, 297, 469, 470, 548, 617-619)
The wildlings have maps, either stolen or made by themselves (III: 79)
The land of Thenn has a lord, whom they name Magnar ("lord" in the Old Tongue of the First Men). He is considered more a god than a man by his people (III: 80, 171)
Wildlings do not name their "Your Grace". Most simply refer to them by name without title or style (III: 82)
The wildlings have no trained ravens (III: 82)
There is more commerce between the black brothers and the free folk that many realize or admit (III: 83)
The guest right protects a guest who has eaten his host's food from harm, at least for the length of the stay. The laws of hospitality as old as the First Men (III: 83)
The wildlings occasionally scavage items that wash up on the Frozen Shore, sometimes including items from exotic lands such as silk from Asshai (III: 84)
Most wildling men wear beards (III: 167)
Wildling men are expected to be quite forceful with women, going so far as stealing them. The women, in turn, are expected to put up a fight (III, 169, 171)
The wildlings ride with whatever leader they please (III: 169)
Red hair is rare among the wildlings. They prize it and consider it lucky, saying it's kissed by fire (III: 170)
Wildlings ride mammoths, putting tall wooden towers on their backs (III: 170)
A wildling woman pregnant with a child she does not want will find a woods witch to make her a cup of moon tea (III: 171, 913)
The wildlings have no laws. They steal endlessly from each other, and have little interest in marriage (III: 171)
Wildlings live throughout the northern lands beyond the Wall, from the furthest reaches of the haunted forests to the hidden valleys of the Frostfangs, and even stranger places (III: 172)
There are wildlings from the Frozen Shore who ride in chariots made of walrus bones pulled by packs of huge, white savage dogs (III: 172, 720)
Terrible ice-river clans who are said to be cannibals (III: 172)
Cave dwellers with their faced dyed blue and purple and green (III: 172)
The little Hornfoot men trot along in the freezing cold on snow-covered ground, their feet bare but their soles hard as boiled leather (III: 172, 894)
More than half the wildlings have never seen the Wall, and most of those have not a single word of the Common Tongue (III: 172)
There are songs in the Old Tongue among the wildlings, and they make for strange and wild music (III: 172)
Some wildlings exist in clans, with clan mothers (III: 172)
The Hornfoots and the Nightrunners are traditional enemies, as are the cannibal clans of the great ice rivers and the walrus men of the Frozen Shore (III: 172)
Wildling hosts are undisciplined even under a strong king (III: 173)
Wildlings make use of aurochs and fire flingers in war (III: 173)
Only one in a hundred wildlings is mounted (III: 173)
The wildlings have a song called "The Last of the Giants", which needs a deep voice to be done properly. It's a sad song bemoaning how men have come into the land to hunt the giants from their stone halls, with dogs and fire and sharp spears, and saying that because of them all the giants shall be gone (III: 175, 176)
Wildlings have daggers made of bone (III: 175)
The wildlings have many of the same names for constellations as the folk of the Seven Kingdoms do, although there are some differences. The King's Crown is the named the Cradle by them, as the Stallion is named the Horned Lord (III: 294)
The red wanderer that the Faith holds sacred to the Smith is named the Thief by the wildlings. When the Thief is within the Moonmaid, it's considered a propitious time for a man to steal a woman (III: 294. IV: 225))
The men of Thenn speak the Old Tongue, and most have only a few words of the Common Tongue (III: 297)
Raiders start at a young age, at as little as 12 years (III: 298)
Arson Iceaxe was a wildling who had tunneled halfway through the Wall when he was found by rangers from the Nightfort. They did not trouble to disturb him at his digging, only sealed the way behind with ice and stone and snow (III: 298)
Some say Iceaxe can still be heard chipping away at the Wall if an ear is pressed to it (III: 298)
The Thenns consider themselves the last of the First Men (III: 299)
The Magnar of Thenn rules his people with an iron hand (III: 299)
The men of Thenn are surrounded in their homeland by cave dwellers, Hornfoot men, giants, and the cannibal clans of the ice rivers (III: 299)
The Thenns are savage fighters, but because of their belief in their Magnar as their god they are absolutely obedient and much more disciplined than other wildlings (III: 299)
The wildlings say that many have searched for Gorne's Way, but some are lost. They believe this is because they meet Gendel's children, who are always hungry for the flesh of men (III: 300, 301)
The wildlings do not bed members of their villages. They believe a true man will steal a woman from afar to strengthen the clan. Women who wed brothers, fathers, or clan kin offend the gods, and are cursed with weak and sickly children (III: 302)
The Thenns carry bronze-banded warhorns (III: 336)
The wildlings climb the Wall with the aid of hempen rope, queer boots of supple doeskin spiked with iron, bronze, or more usually jagged bone, small stone-headed hammers, stakes of iron and bone and horn, and antlers with sharpened tines bound to wooden hafts with strips of hide serving as ice axes (III: 337, 338, 340)
The Watch stumbles on climbers two or three times a year during its patrols, and rangers sometimes come across the broken bodies of those who had fallen (III: 338)
In the east the wildlings use boats to slip past Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and across the Bay of Seals, while in the west they descend into the black depths of the Gorge to make their way around the Shadow Tower (III: 338)
Young, green raiders will often steal a horse as soon as they've crossed the Wall, and the hue and cry that brings greatly increases the chances that they'll be captured and hung (III: 338)
Climbing even 500 feet of Wall is an exercise that can take most of a day (III: 341)
The wildlings have huge ladders of woven hemp that can be some hundred feet long (III: 341)
Wildling raids have increased over the last years as the Watch has grown weaker, and so the places nearest the Wall have been raided so often that people have moved further south into the mountains or into the Umber lands east of the Kingsroad (III: 453)
The Umber lands are raided by wildlings on occasion, but not as often as those who live nearer to the Wall in the Gift (III: 453)
Wildlings steal daughters, not wives (III: 462)
The wildlings believe that the gods made the earth for all men to share. When the kings came with their crowns and their steel swords, they stole it, claiming it was all theirs and theirs alone (III: 462)
Raiders do not cross the Wall to steal fish and apples. They take swords and axes, spices, silks, and furs, every coin, ring, and jeweled cup they can find, casks of wine in summer and casks of beef in winter, and they take women in any season to carry them off beyond the Wall (III: 463)
Every wildling girl learns from her mother that a man can own a woman or a man can own a knife, but never both (III: 463)
Wildlings fight like demons or heroes, depending on who you asked, but in the end it means that they fight with reckless courage, every man out for glory without discipline (III: 463, 464)
The wildlings know of the green men of the Isle of Faces (III: 466)
There are women said to be woods witches among the wildlings, and sometimes their sons and daughters are said to have gifts for foretelling the weather (III: 466)
Some wildlings have bronze swords (III: 469)
Wildlings from the Frozen Shore have raided Bear Island in the past, and there are wildlings who make a life of sailing the salt sea (III: 522, 719)
The wildlings believe it's bad luck to name a child before he was two (and sometimes older, if he is particularly sickly) because so many of them die (III: 532. IV: 523. V: 13)
Wildlings believe the Others and their wights can smell life, and that the newborn stink of life most of all (III: 533)
The wildlings are fair thieves but bad hagglers (III: 608)
The Magnar of Thenn has a long weirwood spear with an ornate bronze head, which may be a symbol of his rule (III: 621)
The wildlings make music with drums, pipes, and skins (III: 717, 720)
There seem to be many languages beyond the Wall, besides the Old Tongue of the First Men and the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms (III: 718)
The wildlings have slingers (III: 720)
The wildlings have tools such as sledgehammers and long saws with teeth of bone and flint (III: 778)
Wildlings can quickly raise crude longhalls of logs and woven branches, sometimes featuring roofs of sod (III: 779. V: 65)
Wildlings can make and use rolling mantlets, slanting wooden shields large enough for several men to hide behind, to protect their archers (III: 779)
Old women might drive about in dog carts while on the march (III: 834)
The Horn of Winter is huge and black, eight feet along its curve and so wide at the mouth that a man's arm could fit to the elbow. It is banded with old dark gold, more brown than yellow, and graven with runes (III: 836)
The wildlings have no trumpets, only warhorns (III: 840)
Raiding is a part of wildling culture, but martial discipline is largely unknown to them (SSM: 1)
Wildlings place importance in a man keeping word (SSM: 1)
The wildlings do note hate northmen as much as they hate the Night's Watch (SSM: 1)

Last revised February 09, 2016
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3.4.1. Geography beyond the Wall

The forest north of the Wall is never allowed closer than half a mile, and is supposed to be haunted (I: 179)
Over the decades, the places which the abandoned citadels once manned have had the forest creeping in nearer to the Wall (I: 179)
Icy mountains rise west and north of the Shadow Tower (I: 372)
Beyond the Wall, in the haunted forest, there are groves of carven weirwoods left by the Children (I: 432)
One can find groves of nine carven weirwoods beyond the Wall, something which is unheard of south of it (I: 434)
The Gorge (I: 654)
There is a small village, consisting of four one-room houses of unmortared stone around a well and sheepfold named Whitetree which appears on old maps. Its name comes from the giant weirwood that is in its midst, its limbs pale and its face having a hole large enough to place a sheep within for a mouth (II: 150)
There are other villages south of Whitetree, at least three of them (II: 152)
North of Whitetree there's water, perhaps a lake. West of it are some flint hills (II: 152)
The "ranger roads" are game trails and stream beds which the brothers of the Watch who are ranging north use to lead them deeper into the north beyond the Wall (II: 153)
There are at least seven wildling villages between Castle Black and Craster's Keep (II: 260)
The Frostfangs are cruel and inhospitable, a wilderness of stone and ice (II: 275)
The Fist of the First Men is a hill that juts above a dense tangle of forest. It's windswept heights are visible from miles away (II: 371)
The Fist has steep bare brown slopes, knuckled with stone (II: 371)
The Fist's summit is crowned by a chest-high wall of tumbled grey rocks patched with lichen and bearded with moss. It is difficult to find a gap in the wall where horses can be led through (II: 371)
The Fist of the First Men is an ancient ringfort used in the Dawn Age (II: 371)
There is a brook at the foot of the Fist (II: 372)
For some reason, a direwolf warg refuses to enter the enclosure of the Fist, but domesticated animals such as a raven and horses don't object (but later caged ravens show disquiet) (II: 372, 374)
From the summit of the Fist, the Milkwater (a river) can be seen curving away to the south (II: 373)
Up-river from the Fist, the land is more rugged, the dense forest giving way to bare stoney hills that rise high and wild to the north and the west (II: 373)
The mountains in the northwestern horizon from the Fist are many, range on range of them fading into the distance, their jagged peaks always snow-covered (II: 373)
To the south and east of the Fist, the wood goes on as far as the eye can see (II: 373)
Pines and sentinel trees dominate the forest south and east of the Fist, but occasional broadleafs or weirwoods can be seen (II: 373)
The easiest road up to the Frostfangs (the mountains northwest of the Fist) is to follow the Milkwater to its source, but this path is very visible. Other paths into the Frostfangs include the Giant's Stair and the Skirling Pass, if it is clear (II: 374)
The Frostfangs are very cold, even in the summer (II: 374)
Not even wildlings dare live in the Frostfangs during the winter (II: 374)
For a sizeable host, the only way down from the Frostfangs is along the Milkwater (II: 374)
A fire lit on the summit of the Fist would be visible from the foothills of the Frostfangs (II: 375)
The Skirling Pass is more than two thousand feet above sea level. It is named for the keening sound the wind makes as it blows through the pass (II: 538)
By day the mountains are a blue-grey, brushed by frost. By night, they're black, unless the moon limns them in silver and white (II: 538)
The Skirling Pass is actually a series of passes, a long and twisting course that goes up around a succession of icy wind-carved peaks and down through hidden valleys that rarely see sunlight (II: 538)
Few trees grow on the slopes of the Frostfangs; those that do are stunted and twisted, growing sideways from cracks and fissures (II: 538)
Tumbled shelves of rock often overhang trails that make their way up the slopes (II: 538)
The Frostfangs have a diverse series of wonders. Icy waterfalls plunge over sheer stone cliffs, mountain meadows are filled with grass and wildflowers, there are ravines so deep and black they seem to go all the way to hell, and bridges of natural stone span distances with only the sky to either side (II: 539)
Above the treeline of the Frostfangs, particularly about the Skirling Pass, there is no grass with a few weeds and pale litchen clinging to life amongst cracks in the rock (II: 557)
A wind-carved arch marks the highest point of the Skirling Pass before it broadens and begins a long descent towards the valley of the Milkwater (II: 557)
From the top of the Skirling Pass, there is a hidden valley, long and v-shaped, amongst the mountains. A glacier of ice several thousand high plugs one end, squeezed between the mountains. Under that icy height is a great lake, its waters a deep cobalt that reflect the snow-capped peaks that surround it (II: 560-561)
The deep lake amongst the mountains is the source of the Milkwater (II: 561)
The Forktop is a huge mountain with jagged twin peaks in the Frostfangs (II: 562)
There's a path through the heart of the mountains, a tunnel whose entrance is hidden behind a twisting waterfall. The stony path twists and turns and goes up and down and at times is tight enough that garrons will become nervous (II: 693-694)
The path takes many hours to walk (II: 694)
The banks of the Milkwater are stony (III: 2)
The shortest way to the Wall from the Fist of the First Men is due south towards the Shadow Tower (III: 6)
The foothills of the Frostfangs are full of narrow winding valleys (III: 11)
There is a region named Thenn in the far north (III: 80)
The Milkwater passes through the heart of the Haunted Forest (III: 173)
Not far from the Fist of the First Men, the Milkwater grows shallow as it makes a great loop to the east (III: 176)
The south slope of the Fist of the First Men is the easiest approach (III: 176)
There's rough, hilly ground near the Wall between the Shadow Tower and Castle Black (III: 295)
Deep lakes stretch like long thing fingers along narrow valleys floors amidst the foothills of the Frostfangs, and flint ridges and pine-clad hills stand side by side (III: 295)
There is a vast network of caves near the Wall and the abandoned castles of Greyguard and Stonedoor. It's said one of the passages even opens south of the Wall that the wildlings call Gorne's Way (III: 297, 300)
Thenn is a little land, a high mountain valley hidden among the northernmost peaks of the Frostfangs, surrounded by cave dwellers, Hornfoot men, giants, and the cannibal clans of the ice rivers (III: 299)
Oak and ash trees can be found in the Haunted Forest, along with sentinels and weirwoods (III: 336)
The land west of Castle Black is rugged and wild, full of huge humped hills, high granites cliff, deep valleys, and so on (III: 336, 337)
The Gorge is very deep, and is used by wildlings to slip around the Shadow Tower in the west (III: 338)
Beyond Skagos is the Shivering Sea (III: 608)
The eastern coast has a hundred little coves where wildlings are wont to trade (III: 608)
Within the deep Gorge is a place called the Bridge of Skulls. Around it and below it are many rocks, and it stands over at least one pool of water (III: 780, 861)
The woods in the lands beyond the Wall are full of streams and lakes (V: 66)
No army could go west around the Wall because of the mountains and a deep river gorge. Only small groups of raiders ever filter through (SSM: 1)
Hardhome is the closest things the wildlings have to a city (SSM: 1)

Last revised March 21, 2013
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3.4.2. Trade and Resources

The wildlings have contact with smugglers from the Free Cities and perhaps Westeros as well, trading goods in the little coves on the eastern coast along the Shivering Sea. They take steel weapons and armor in return for furs, ivory, amber, and obsidian (III: 608)
Chieftains and notorious men may receive tributes from villages and clans under their sway in the form of bread, salt, and cider (V: 9)
A dozen strings of amber and a pile of pelts might be traded for six skins of wine, a block of salt, and a copper kettle (V: 11-12)
Some Wildings could trade at Eastwatch, if they were welcomed as friends of the Watch (V: 12)

Last revised March 15, 2013
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3.4.3. Kings-beyond-the-Wall

Raymun Redbeard once led the wildlings south against the Wall some 150 or more years ago, and before him there was the king Bael the Bard (II: 275)
Long before Raymun and Bael, there was the Horned Lord and the brother kings Gendel and Gorne (II: 276)
In ancient times, stories say that Joramun blew the Horn of Winter and woke giants from the earth (II: 276)
All the wildlings hosts that have attacked southwards have broken their strength on the Wall or by the power of Winterfell beyond (II: 276)
Bael the Bard is said to have made the song of the winter rose, recounting an adventure in his past. All the wildlings know his songs, which in general have maids falling in love with him all the time (II: 544-545)
Bael was a great raider before he was King-beyond-the-Wall (II: 544)
Bael lived in the time of a Lord Brandon Stark (known to the wildlings as Brandon the Daughterless), who had no other children save a daughter. The story has it that Bael seduced the daughter, who gave birth to a bastard son who eventually inherited Winterfell (II: 544-545)
The story says that Bael was slain by his bastard son, the young Lord Stark, because he refused to fight his own blood. Because of the kinslaying, the Starks were cursed; the story goes that Lord Stark's mother killed herself when she saw Bael's head upon Lord Stark's spear, and Lord Stark himself did not long outlive her when one of the Bolton lords skinned him (II: 545)
Wildlings do not name their kings "Your Grace". Most simply refer to them by name without title or style (III: 82)
Bael the Bard wrote and lived his own songs (III: 83)
The brother kings Gendel and Gorne existed some three thousand years ago (III: 300)
Gendel and Gorne are said to have led their host through the network of caves amidst the hills north of the Wall, exiting on the southern side. However, the Starks of Winterfell fell upon them then (III: 300)
Gorne slew the King in the North in battle, but his son picked up his banner and took the crown from his head, and cut down Gorne in turn (III: 300)
In the south it's said that Gendel died, as the Watch came to attack him from the north while the King in the North was to the south and the Umbers to the east. The wildlings say differently however, claiming he cut his way free through the Watch and led his people back north into the caves. However, it was Gorne who knew the caves best, and without him to lead them Gendel and his folk were lost. The wildlings believe that Gendel's folk never escaped the caves, but their children's children's children sob under the hills, and are always hungry for the flesh of men (III: 300)
Lord Commander Rodrik Flint thought to make himself King-beyond-the-Wall (III: 612)
It's said that Joramun joined forces with the Stark of Winterfell against the Night's King, the thirteenth Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. He was defeated and his name and all records of him were destroyed (III: 629, 630)
The Horned Lord once said that sorcery is a sword without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it (III: 836)

Last revised February 28, 2007
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