Dalbridge squired for Jaehaerys II, and he probably wasn’t knighted because Jaehaerys II died unexpectedly. Like Ser Hugh of the Vale, Dalbridge wasn’t of a family sufficiently ennobled to merit a last name; unlike King Robert, who honored Jon Arryn’s memory by knighting his squire, Aerys II was rather keen to replace his father’s favorites and didn’t feel beholden to a young squire of no family of significance.
As to how he ended up at the Wall, I don’t know. It could be that he remained in King’s Landing and was sent to the Wall for being a Targaryen loyalist by Tywin Lannister along with Aliser Thorne; it could be that without any other means of income, he turned to banditry or some other criminal pastime to keep body and soul together; it could be that he went of his own volition, because the Night’s Watch offers room, board, and clothing to anyone who joins.
One important corrective: “hordes of wildlings attacking the Wall” is NOT a new development:
“Wildlings have invaded the realm before.“ Jon had heard the tales from Old Nan and Maester Luwin both, back at Winterfell. “Raymun Redbeard led them south in the time of my grandfather’s grandfather, and before him there was a king named Bael the Bard.” “Aye, and long before them came the Horned Lord and the brother kings Gendel and Gorne, and in ancient days Joramun, who blew the Horn of Winter and woke giants from the earth. Each man of them broke his strength on the Wall, or was broken by the power of Winterfell on the far side…”
The Watch is primarily a defensive military force manning a fixed fortification. GRRM’s problems with math aside, it makes a lot more sense to train them in archery and siege weaponry than it does to emphasize hand-to-hand training, given that melee weapons’ arms-length range doesn’t do you much good when you’re on the top of a bloody great wall and the enemy is at the bottom.
Now, ranging is a different story, but I would maintain that Ser Alliser’s godawful training scheme is still a bad one: emphasizing fighting on foot one-on-one is a very bad idea when the Night’s Watch is badly outnumbered by wildling raiders, who are absolutely going to use their advantage of numbers to overwhelm whatever negligable training in the blade a crow gets in boot camp.
To the extent that you’d emphasize melee combat at all in the Watch, it should absolutely be focusing on cavalry tactics, which would allow the Night’s Watch to punch above their weight vis-a-vis the mostly on-foot Wildlings. And cavalry tactics emphasize horsemanship over swordsmanship, because you don’t need to be very good with a sword when you’re thundering down on someone at top horsepower.
As a historian, one of the steepest hurdles and most fascinating mysteries I deal with is how to overcome the gap in patterns of thought between the past and the present that have convinced so many that “the past is a foreign country.” So many beliefs and attitudes that we today consider to be universal human characteristics or values turn out to be bounded by culture and epoch, so…
Based off a long conversation from Twitter, but I’ve started to have some ideas about the Horn of Joramun, one of the more significant objects in the series if assumptions are right that it will bring down the Wall.
The Horn is a curious object, because it seems to have a strong duality about it: it’s known as both the Horn of Winter and the Horn of Joramun, and it is supposed to have "woke giants from the earth” and it’s also supposed to have the power “bring this cold thing down.” And yet, even through Joramun was a King Beyond-the-Wall “in ancient days,” whom Jeor Mormont places as coming before the Horned Lord and the brothers Gendel and Gorne, and describes all of them as having “broke his strength on the Wall, or was broken by the power of Winterfell on the far side,” the Wall still stands.
Why did Joramun never use the Horn to bring down the Wall?
The answer, I think, lies in the other thing we know about Joramun – his involvement in the legend of the Night’s King (the real one, not the one from the show):
“He brought her back to the Nightfort and proclaimed her a queen and himself her king, and with strange sorceries he bound his Sworn Brothers to his will. For thirteen years they had ruled, Night’s King and his corpse queen, till finally the Stark of Winterfell and Joramun of the wildlings had joined to free the Watch from bondage. After his fall, when it was found he had been sacrificing to the Others, all records of Night’s King had been destroyed, his very name forbidden.”
This cooperation between a wildling King and a Stark of Winterfell is unprecedented, which further emphasizes that the Night’s King was an abomination (binding “his Sworn Brothers to his will” with “strange sorceries” should be a hint) rather than some sort of marriage alliance to cement an imagined Pact between White Walkers and humans (which theory constantly ignores that the wildlings have always been living north of the Wall). It certainly demonstrates that Joramun clearly viewed the White Walkers as an existential threat so great that it involved allying with one ancient enemy (the Starks) to free another ancient enemy (the Night’s Watch) from sorcerous bondage.
Here’s what I think happened: Joramun was an early King-beyond-the-Wall who “broke his strength” on the Wall and, looking for a solution to this strategic problem as so many KbtW did, turned to magic. Specifically, he created a horn which was imbued with the magic of giants, which could both wake them from their slumber (perhaps giants are prone to hibernation?) and bring down the Wall. On a sidenote, it’s possible that these two things are linked, if GRRM is a fan of Attack on Titan and has giants walled up inside the Wall whose awakening would shake it down from the foundations. (Just laying down a marker in advance of TWOW…)
Regardless of how the thing worked, Joramun was interrupted by the crisis of the Night’s King before he could bring down the Wall. And what he saw and experienced in fighting the Night’s King convinced him that the White Walkers were such an existential threat that the Wall had to remain to keep humanity protected, even if that meant his own people had to remain in exile. (Perhaps this lesson is why the Horned Lord had his maxim that “sorcery is a sword without a hilt. There is no safe way to grasp it.“) And so he had the Horn buried with him to keep it from ever being used.
To me, this version of events works on a number of levels: it reconciles both aspects of Joramun’s history, it explains why the Horn has never been used before, and it fits the “human heart at war with itself” model of GRRM’s writing, as Joramun is caught between his love for his people and his humanity
Synopsis: Retreating from the Battle of the Fist of the First Men, Sam Tarly slays a White Walker with the help of Small Paul and Grenn.
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
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“Might be you fooled these others, crow, but don’t think you’ll be fooling Mance. He’ll take one look a’ you and know you’re false…”
Synopsis: Jon Snow meets Mance Rayder.
SPOILER WARNING: This chapter analysis, and all following, will contain spoilers for all Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones episodes. Caveat lector.
(more…)
While barring marriage goes along with the forswearing of lands and titles – since people have this stubborn inclination to try to pass wealth down through family lines – I think celibacy has been a long-term mistake, because it means that the Watch doesn’t naturally reproduce its own manpower.
If it was up to me, I’d embrace a somewhat Spartan model – communal reproduction, child-rearing, and education, all to build identification to the group as opposed to the fortunes of the individual family.
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