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The Ancient Magic Of The Children And The White Walkers
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The Black Magic Of Qyburn And The Mountain
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The Reanimation of Beric Dondarrion And Jon Snow
Highlights
- Game of Thrones explores the balance between life and death, including an important role for those beyond death.
- The White Walkers command an army of the undead, but these aren’t the only zombies in Westeros.
- The Song of Ice and Fire affects the dead as much as the living and the cold and dark undead threat from the North is matched by light magic south of the Wall.
It may not be the first thing fans think of, but the problematic relationship between life and death plays a considerable part in Game of Thrones. As Houses go head-to-head in the deadly political struggle of the Seven Kingdoms, winter brings a dark and ancient threat from the north. The leader of the White Walkers, the Night King, is a zombie-making machine, but A Song of Ice and Fire makes sure there’s a warm balance to his cold threat.
Game of Thrones poses many questions about existence, spirituality, and the afterlife. As factions fall and various candidates circle the Iron Throne, there is plenty of bloodshed, but death doesn’t have to mean the game is over. The layers and connections of Westeros reach beyond life, and the saga wouldn’t be the same without characters who cheat death.
The Ancient Magic Of The Children And The White Walkers
The White Walkers may be Game of Thrones’ most apparent connection to zombies, but they aren’t undead. At their head, the Night King, who first appeared in Season 4, is effectively an ancient super weapon that turned on its creators. In Season 6, Bran Stark sees how the Night King came to be. Originally, he was one of the First Men who waged a devastating war on the Children of the Forest after crossing the sea from Essos. He was transformed when some greenseers captured him, bound him to a heart tree, and plunged a cursed dragonglass dagger into his chest.
Beyond conventional life or death, the transformed Night King was a being of ice capable of cryokinesis — freezing anything he touched. He had enhanced strength and durability and had lived for about 10,000 years by the time of the War of the Five Kings. His most chilling power was his ability to turn the living into White Walkers and the dead into slave zombies. Intended as a mighty army to defend the Children of the Forest and their sacred trees, the White Walkers threatened all life during the Long Winter. This forced the Children and the First Men to put aside their differences and form a pact that eventually drove the White Walkers to the Land of the Always Winter in the far north of Westeros.
Despite their retreat, the devastating powers of the Night King and the White Walkers hadn’t lessened by the time of the War of the Five Kings. In the fourth season of Game of Thrones, the Night King was shown to transform a mortal baby male (a cynical offering from the ever-opportunistic wildling Craster) into a White Walker by touching him with his finger.
Particularly unnerving was the Night King’s power of necromancy. Even without physical contact, he could reanimate dead humans, giants, or animals to fill the loyal ranks of his Army of the Dead, as long as they were unburnt and relatively intact. These wights had the same ice-blue eyes as the Walkers and were virtually indestructible. While they could survive usually fatal injuries, including decapitation, they were hurt and killed by fire. Perhaps their most significant weakness was their link to their creator. Killing the Night King destroyed any entity he had created, shattering the White Walkers and returning all wights to death.
The Black Magic Of Qyburn And The Mountain
The dark magic in Westeros made it to King’s Landing with the unethical experiments of former Maester Qyburn. That was most evident in the disturbing survival of Ser Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane. The 8-foot knight was well known for his brutality and war crimes, and even a tight Lannister grip on the Iron Throne couldn’t keep him immune from punishment forever.
Dueling with Oberyn Martell in the fourth season, Clegane savagely dispatched his opponent, but not before Martell had lived up to his nickname “Viper” and stabbed the Mountain with a manticore-venom-coated lance. He faced a painful death, but Qyburn promised Cersei Lannister that he could save Clegane, although it would “change him.”
In Season 5, Clegane re-emerges after a long time in Qyburn’s laboratory, just when Cersei needs him after her Walk of Atonement. From then, Clegane only appeared in full armor, his red eyes surrounded by rotting gray flesh barely visible. Qyburn explains that Clegane had taken a holy vow of silence until evil was driven from the realm, but the loss of speech seemed to be part of “a number of things” Qyburn did to him. The new Clegane is stronger and more belligerent than his former self, although, like the wights to the Night King, he is totally obedient, carrying out the orders of his mistress, Cersei, without question.
The Mountain was Game of Thrones’ most authentic zombie and continued as Cersei’s decaying muscle until the only thing that could break his conditioning. Clegane and his younger brother Sandor’s savage rivalry ran through the series, climaxing in the finale when Ser Gregor defied Cersei and quickly dispatched Qyburn to take on his brother one last time. The fight ended with them both falling into the remains of the Red Keep tower. Like the Night King’s wights, Clegane is a zombie generated and controlled by dark magic, but Game of Thrones shows that zombies can also be created by light.
The Reanimation of Beric Dondarrion And Jon Snow
During Jon Snow’s ambitious Wight Hunt in the show’s seventh season, the idea of destroying all wights by killing their maker, the Night King, came from Beric Dondarrion, Lord of Blackhaven. He’s someone who knew about the undead. In the first season, Ned Stark sent Dondarrion to bring Gregor Clegane to justice, but it took until the third season to see the result. Clegane had killed Dondarrion, but the Red Priest, Thoros of Myr, had inadvertently brought him back to life. Now dedicated to the Lord of Light, the religion spreading through Westeros from Essos with a history of surprise resurrections, Dondarrion threw off his previous allegiances and formed the Brotherhood Without Banners.
Dondarrion also gained the ability to magically flame on the blade of his sword and was convinced of his new higher purpose, much to the annoyance of unlikely allies like Sandor Clegane. The suggestion was Dondarrion completed his purpose in the final season when he protected Arya Stark, the future slayer of the Night King. An undoubted if preachy force for good, Dondarrion reflects creator George R.R. Martin’s dislike of comic book resurrections. Dondarrion’s constant revival is a curse — each time he reawakens, he retains the scars and injuries of his death and loses a piece of himself. Martin explained in an interview with Time in 2017 that Dondarrion completes a circle with the Night King’s wights:
His memories are fading, he’s got all these scars, he’s becoming more and more physically hideous, because he’s not a living human being anymore. His heart isn’t beating, his blood isn’t flowing in his veins, he’s a wight, but a wight animated by fire instead of by ice, now we’re getting back to the whole fire and ice thing.
Unquestioningly accepting he’s a weapon of the Lord of Light, also known as the Red God, Dondarrion might be considered the most selfless zombie in Westeros if it wasn’t for the saga’s most essential character: Jon Snow.
Melisandre, a Red Priestess, is steeped in dark magic, which she misdirects for much of the Song of Ice and Fire. Having abandoned Stannis Baratheon and astonished at the number of times Thoros of Myr had successfully resurrected Dondarrion, she fulfilled her destiny in Westeros by returning Snow to life after he was killed at Castle Black. It’s a great success: Jon Snow is the most functioning zombie on the show, although he’d only undergone one resurrection compared to Dondarrion’s six by the end of the War of the Five Kings.
It’s not in doubt that Snow had died — he chillingly describes the nothing he saw when he was in the void. But after his return, Snow hardly seemed different from his previous self, bar the many stab wounds of his assassination. Game of Thrones is well known for its complicated layers of connection, with Snow more connected than most. He’s even present in the extraordinary zombie thread that runs through the saga, which shows ice and fire aren’t just locked together in life and death but undeath, too.
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