Chapter notes from A Game of Thrones

In this series of blogs, I will be sharing some thoughts from my little project I fondly call “The Great Reread. Any of you ASoIaF fans certainly know how passionate we can be and how we study the text over and over again. These are partially inspired by a you tuber.

Prologue - A Game of Thrones
As Will, Gared and Ser Waymar Royce approach the dead Wildings (at Waymar’s insistence) Gared notes something amiss.
“Can’t you feel it?” Gared asked. “Listen to the darkness.”
Will could feel it. Four years in the Night’s Watch and he had never been so afraid. What was it? “Wind. Trees rustling. A wolf. Which sound is it that unmans you Gared?”
Trees rustling is later noted by Osha as the Old Gods talking to Bran. A howling wolf is an indicator of a Stark. Shortly, Ser Wymar lifts his sword to battle the Other
“The Other halted. Will saw its eyes, blue, deeper and bluer than any human eyes, a blue that burned like ice. They fixed on the long sword trembling on high, watched the moonlight running cold along the metal. For a heartbeat, he dared to hope.”

Why was the Other sizing up Wymar’s long sword? The Wildings had weapons which included swords, perhaps not as fine as Ser Wymar’s, but still, why the intense look at the blade? Did the Other think it was VS or another sword – Dawn????

Only a single Other fights Waymar but the rest of them move in to slay Waymar when is apparent that he has lost this battle. Why would they amass to kill a single man when Waymar was already too injured to save himself? I noted that Waymar reanimated very quickly, strangling Will before he can flee. And yet, we never learn where Gared was during these events or exactly what he witnessed as he was told to wait with the horses. In the books, it is Gared that is beheaded by Ned, not Will. Did the Others know Gared was there? If so, did they allow him to flee in order to spread the truth that they had returned? A harbinger of doom?
In terms of the one on one combat, could the Other have been looking for a different type of weapon or trying to determine if the holder of the weapon was a Stark?

Bran I
It was Jon that noted that the deserter was “dead of fear.” Interesting that Jon would pick that up – not Robb or Theon or Ned. Robb had even remarked that the man died well.

We also hear the first mention of Old Nan’s tales of the wildings selling women to the Others. As we know most of Old Nan’s tales bear a great deal of truth, what does this mean? Is she referencing a situation akin to Craster (which was the flip side of the coin). Much later we learn that the Wildings are more afraid of the Others than they are of the NW or the other residents of Westeros, so it is doubtful that this remembrance from Old Nan is true, at least in present day. But could this be what the Others want?

When the direwolf pups are found and Jon later finds Ghost, he wondered if it crawled away from the other pups. “ “Or had been driven away” Ned responds”. Clear foreshadowing of Jon being driven away by Cat with the approval of Ned. Bran also notes that Jon’s wolf pup’s eyes are open when the other pups are still blind.

Catelyn I

As Cat meets Ned in the godswood, the weirwood tree is describes as “bark as white as bones, it’s leaves dark read, like bloodstained hands.” We know that there were blood sacrifices to these trees and Ned always cleans his sword Ice in the waters of the pond in the godswood after he has performed an execution. Are the trees blood thirsty or is this just an result of all of the blood absorbed over the centuries by their roots?

In this chapter, we also get our first good description of VS. Unlike the show, there is no mention that Robert is on his way to WF to enlist Ned as Hand of the King. While Ned is pleased at the idea of seeing his old friend, Cat does warn him to guard his tongue. “The Lannister woman is our queen, and her pride is said to grow with every passing year.” As we come to learn, not only her pride but her power.