The Wall

The Wall is the greatest work of men that ever was, and no man living knows for certain who raised it. The tale the North keeps is that it was thrown up at the end of the Long Night, some eight thousand years past, when the Others had been driven back beyond the world's edge and men resolved they should never come again.

Brandon the Builder is the name the songs give the maker — the same legendary Stark credited with Winterfell and with half the old marvels of the North. The singers add that he did not labour alone: that the giants lent their strength to lift the great blocks of ice, and that the children of the forest wove spells into the frozen rampart to bind it against the dead. Giants, children, and a man who lived long enough to raise three wonders in one lifetime — the maesters set all this down, and believe as much of it as they must, which is little. What is certain is that the Wall stands, and that no ordinary masonry could have raised it.

The Wall is more than ice, or so the oldest brothers hold. Spells are said to be woven through it — the wards of the children of the forest, laid at its raising — so that the dead and the Others cannot pass while it stands. Creatures of cold magic falter at it; a wight will not cross, and the wildlings, who fear such things more than any southron, have battered at the Wall for thousands of years and never yet brought it down for long.

At the abandoned Nightfort stands the Black Gate, a door of pale weirwood grown in the shape of a face, sunk deep beneath the castle. It opens only for a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch who speaks the words of the oath, and lets a traveller pass clean through the base of the Wall. The maesters, who mistrust all magic, record these tales without endorsing them — but the black brothers who keep the ice do not laugh at them, and that reticence is itself a kind of testimony.

The Watch does not live on ice alone. Brandon's Gift, granted by Brandon the Builder in the dawn of the order, gave the black brothers the land for twenty-five leagues south of the Wall to farm and work, that the men who guarded the realm need not also starve.

Thousands of years later, Good Queen Alysanne Targaryen flew her dragon Silverwing to the Wall, was moved by the plight of the shrinking Watch, and prevailed upon her husband King Jaehaerys I to grant a second strip of land — the New Gift, another twenty-five leagues. In the novels' day both Gifts stand all but empty, their villages abandoned to wildling raids and hard winters, the fields the Watch was given to feed itself gone back to grass.