We have been given plenty of rumours in the main story about how the Long Night was caused, how it was ended, who ended it, and where the Others came from. The series has also thrown plenty of theories into the ether to get our brains thinking. But I believe most of what we have been told is intentionally misleading, and that the TV explanation was likely a load of mess made up by D&D because they didn’t know what else to do. Here I will set out how I think the Long Night was caused, when it started, where the Others might have come from, and many other things that I haven’t seen theorised yet, at least not all in one place.
Rather than referencing throughout the essay, I want to say here that whilst I have read A Song of Ice and Fire multiple times and have formed my own theories and opinions, they have been complemented, inspired, supported and fortified by the many other fantastic content creators in this space. I am not trying to claim every idea as my own, and I give full credit to other creators for some of these ideas. If something sounds familiar, I haven’t stolen it, but rather run with it, built on it, and given full credit to what has come before. I can’t name them all here, but I will try to name the ones I watch the most, including David Lightbringer, In Deep Geek, Crowfood’s Daughter, Quinn’s Ideas, Quinn the GM, Alt Shift X, and many others.
Firstly, let’s quickly go over what the most prevalent theory is.
The First Men came to Westeros via the Arm of Dorne. They started to cut down the trees that the Children of the Forest worshipped, who in turn attacked the men. So far, this stuff is all pretty self-explanatory, and I have no issue with it. The next bit is that, to stop the humans crossing, the Children did a huge piece of magic that broke the Arm of Dorne to stop people crossing. This is where I first start to question things. Some have made compelling cases on this, and some of my own thinking was kickstarted by people like David Lightbringer.
I won’t slow us down here, and instead revisit this point later, but as the story goes, the Children destroyed the Arm of Dorne, but the war still raged on. There is evidence that perhaps another Hammer of the Waters was performed near the Neck, which broke the Iron Islands from the mainland and flooded the Neck.
When neither of these slowing tactics worked, the Children of the Forest made the Others to combat the First Men. But the Others went out of control, and so the Children of the Forest sided with the humans to destroy the Others and were successful. This included the Last Hero forming the Night’s Watch with twelve of his closest men and going to find the Children of the Forest, who taught him how to defeat them. The humans and the Children then signed the Pact. The Wall was built with the help of the giants and the Children, and they all stayed that way until the Andals invaded.
There are several key moments in the text that suggest this happened in a totally different way, which I will set out.
· The old castles of Westeros
· The Night’s Watch
· The Night’s King
· Last Hero / Azor Ahai stories
The Old Castles of Westeros
Let’s start with the old castles of Westeros. The timeline widely accepted by fans simply doesn’t work when you look at how and why the castles were made. If the humans and Children only formed this bond towards the end of the war, and then the Last Hero went off and defeated the Others, how and why do these castles have spells built into them?
The spells are clearly there to keep Others out, and could only have been put there by the Children of the Forest, working alongside men.
No. The union likely came much earlier than the timeline suggests.
My alternative theory is that the humans and the Children of the Forest already had some form of understanding prior to the Long Night, or at least weren’t at war as we assume. No big battles, just a healthy distrust and dislike of one another.
Then the Long Night came.
I’ll get on to theories as to what caused it shortly, but when the Long Night came, so did the Others. The Children of the Forest and the First Men then worked together to fashion not the castles we know, but huge underground cities that people were forced to hide in.
Let’s look at the Winterfell crypts.
Huge, cavernous halls that go on for miles and miles.
Why?
Why does one family need so many crypts when, after thousands of years, whoever is in them would be made of dust by now?
It’s because they were once caverns that were used to survive the harsh cold of winter. Men and Children of the Forest likely lived in communion down there.
Another example of proof that the Children helped build these great caverns and put the spells on them is Storm’s End. There is an off-hand comment made in Book Two that states a young boy (Bran the Builder) helped the Storm King build Storm’s End.
What does a young boy know about building castles and imbuing them with magic spells? Nothing. But a Child of the Forest, who had a long life, would know how to build these caverns and spells to defend against the Long Night.
Storm’s End was built amongst endless storms, right? Storms so great that it kept getting knocked down. Storms usually come with very dark skies, almost like night-time.
What if the Storm Kings of old kept trying to build strongholds against the Others who came for them in the Long Night, and it was only when one of the Children of the Forest came and helped him that the last one survived?
I always thought it was quite interesting that one of the few Children we meet in the books is called Leaf. Could this ancient Child of the Forest who helped build the castles have been called Branch?
I know it sounds stupid, but over thousands of years it might have been shortened.
Here is a grim part.
I always wondered why the bottom layers of the Winterfell crypts had been collapsed. But if generations after generations were living in the crypts, where did the dead go? Where did the poop, and wee, and everything else go?
That could be a perfect explanation as to why the bottom layers were collapsed.
The Night’s Watch
The castles take me on to my next subject: the Night’s Watch.
It always seemed strange to me that the Last Hero apparently formed the Night’s Watch, and then they all died, apart from the Last Hero, who apparently defeated the Others, but then their order was formed again immediately after it.
It seems more likely to me that the timelines again occurred much earlier.
Let’s say my theory is correct, and that during the Long Night mankind lived in these cavern cities under the ground, protected by spells from the Children.
Where did the food come from?
What about the running of the caverns, and the building?
Suddenly, the different orders of the Night’s Watch make more sense.
I don’t believe that the orders of the builders, the rangers and the stewards were simply about what happened at the Wall. The Wall hadn’t even been built yet.
Rather, the Night’s Watch existed during the Long Night.
The rangers were tasked with leaving the caverns to go in search of food and survivors, and to look out for Others.
The builders were tasked with structural work, expanding existing caverns or building new ones in new areas.
The stewards were in charge of everything that went on inside the caverns.
It makes sense at the Wall, don’t get me wrong, but it makes even more sense in this scenario.
The Night’s King
That moves us on nicely to the Night’s King legend.
We are told that the Night’s King was the 13th commander of the Night’s Watch. He married an ice queen and sacrificed children to the Others.
But how can he be the 13th commander of the Night’s Watch when the Night’s Watch only started after the Others were defeated?
This supports further my idea that the Night’s Watch was an order formed to protect those people who lived in the huge cavern cities of Westeros.
They lived under there for many years, maybe as many as 100. This is just me thinking that each commander ruled for eight to ten years, but it could be significantly less.
I do believe the Night’s King made some sort of pact with the Others.
Perhaps times were tough. Maybe they were eating their own dead. We see a little bit of similarity here with Stannis at Storm’s End and him being on the brink of doing this. The is a ton of symbolism between Nights King and Stannis.
What if this ice woman was like another version of Melisandre, who served the ice god rather than the fire god?
Perhaps, like with Stannis, she sought out this king and said that the Night’s King would have reprieve from their plight if he would sacrifice king’s blood, king here being the commander of the Night’s Watch.
This seemed to work for him.
Perhaps he was given special privileges, able to walk free in the night, and others started to join him. Rangers sneaking off to also get in on the action.
They too started to sacrifice their children.
But the Others are greedy masters, and soon it wasn’t enough just to have their children. They started to take other children too.
Brandon the Breaker and Joramun
Here we need to speculate a bit.
Because we are told that at this point in the story Brandon Stark the Breaker and the wildling king Joramun teamed up to defeat the Night’s King.
But the wildlings wouldn’t have existed before a Wall was raised.
They would just be First Men. Northmen.
Or would they?
If we start to buy into a world where mankind lived in caverns under the ground, and I have given good evidence that some at least did, what about those that didn’t?
There would be some who didn’t have the safety of the caverns, who never found one, or even preferred to live outside and risk the Others and the cold.
These people would also be wildlings in a way. Free Folk, in that they live free of the caverns. Joruman was the king of these people beyond the walls of the caverns.
If the Night’s King is preying on these Free Folk, stealing away their children, then of course they would fight back, and Joramun led them.
But perhaps he knew he couldn’t do it alone.
So he called on those that lived in the caverns, begged for their help, and they answered.
And so, Joramun blew the Horn of Winter and woke giants from the earth.
The people of the caverns answered the call and left their homes to fight against the atrocity of child sacrifice.
Sounds feasible, right?
We are piecing together the bits of information drip-fed to us throughout the story.
Let’s say, through sheer will, fighting with the Children of the Forest, the men pushed the enemy further north, ridding Westeros of the Others and their allies. There is more to this that I cover later, so just bear with me here.
The Children used the same spells they put in place over the caverns to start the forming of the Wall.
It wasn’t an 800-foot wall to begin with. Rather, more likely a series of weirwood tree walls grown across the expanse, hence the castles built along its edge to guard it.
But what of the Night’s Watch?
Their commander betrayed man, and many of his brothers joined the dark cause, selling their children to the Others.
How about a pact?
A series of words that forever ties them to their duty.
Likely, the people thought the Others might never return, and that the Night’s Watch vows were just a punishment to spend the rest of their lives on the Wall.
But to be certain, they made the people of the Night’s Watch swear to never bear children.
Not because it might distract them, but because they had already sold children to the Others before and might do so again.
What Caused the Long Night?
The obvious point we haven’t covered yet is what caused the Long Night.
This bit I am less certain on.
I believe GRRM has given us the clues we need, but how to puzzle that out?
We hear a story of the moon cracking, and dragons pouring forth, in Book One. The timing of this story is very important because Book One was very tight. Nothing was put in there off-hand, and so the idea that the moon cracked is important.
David Lightbringer thinks this means that moon shards crashing into the Earth caused the Long Night. This is the most compelling case I have heard that might have caused the Long Night, but I am not totally sold for one main reason. George has continually stated that the seasons being out of sync and the Long Night were caused by magical events rather than scientific ones.
A meteor causing a dust cloud and long winter would make a lot of sense scientifically, but it doesn’t account for the magical element, nor the lingering seasons being out of sync, unless it knocked the Earth out of its orbit.
But again, this is scientific, and if this is going to be resolved by the end of the story, wouldn’t it make more sense for the answer to be magical?
So I think something definitely caused the Moon to crack, and perhaps that did result in meteors coming to ground, but I don’t think that was the cause of the Long Night.
Another area we can study is the similarities between the forging of Lightbringer and the Bloodstone Emperor usurping his sister and killing her. The story of Nissa Nissa and Lightbringer also results in the cracking of the moon.
Again, the moon is important here.
You will need to bear with me here as I try to bring lots of bits and pieces together.
The first thing I want to do is propose that the Bloodstone Emperor and Azor Ahai are the same person.
Secondly, that Nissa Nissa and the empress whom Bloodstone usurped are the same person.
And now I want to propose that Nissa Nissa was actually a Child of the Forest.
If Azor Ahai and the Bloodstone Emperor are one and the same, then I believe that Azor Ahai married a Child of the Forest.
The Bloodstone Emperor was said to have married a tiger woman. Well, Children of the Forest have yellow cat eyes, and the dappled skin they possessed might have been mistaken for stripes, especially after thousands of years of rumours.
If this is true, and Azor/Bloodstone was married to a Child of the Forest, and they sacrificed her to end the Long Night, how would that have worked?
There is another curious similarity here.
In the Azor Ahai story, the second attempt at forging Lightbringer saw him plunge it into a living lion. In the Bloodstone Emperor’s story, we see the Lion of Night as the evil entity responsible for the Long Night.
So again, another connection between these two characters.
We are told that the Bloodstone Emperor worships oily black stone.
What if, perhaps, the stone he “worshipped” was in fact dragonglass?
So Azor Ahai sacrifices his Child of the Forest wife to end the Long Night.
But that only answers how he does it, and doesn’t give us a clear understanding of how this ends the Long Night.
Again, the moon is important.
Why does cracking the moon end the Long Night?
The Two Moons
What if the Long Night was caused by an eclipse?
What if there were once two moons in the sky, and by some magical means, one of them was permanently blocking the sun from the Earth?
Over generations, the world would get colder, and these strange creatures that had been long kept at the poles of the Earth would come forth slowly to claim the new frozen Earth.
As the Earth slowly freezes, the Children help man build bunkers under the earth and put spells in place to protect them from the Others.
They live in fear under the earth for generations, until one of their own, perhaps even a Stark, decides he wants to live above the earth again and so makes a pact with the Others to give his children in return for freedom. Perhaps in return the Others give this Nights King a sword made of ICE?
Other brothers of the Nights Watch join him.
In disgust, the Free Folk rebel against these child sacrifices, and Joramun calls to the people in the caverns to come forth, blowing the Horn to wake giants from the earth.
They defeat the Night’s King, but the moon still covers the sun and the Others still walk the earth.
And so the First Hero, Azor Ahai, Bloodstone Emperor, asks the ultimate sacrifice and performs a ritual, killing his wife, a Child of the Forest, to shatter the moon, ending the eclipse and darkness and driving the Others back.
Maybe Bran the Builder, who I predict was a Child of the Forest, was a woman Child of the Forest, our “Branch”… and she married Joramun, who was a Stark.
Bran the Builder and Bran the Breaker were the same Bran, a Child of the Forest, who teamed up with Joramun to defeat the Night’s King, and then used strong magic, sacrificing Bran to end the eclipse and the Long Night.
We now also have an answer as to why the Starks have warg/green seer abilities. Because they descend from Jorumun and Bran (child of the forest). Bran was called Bran the Breaker because it was her sacrifice at the hands of Jorumun, the Last Hero, which broke the moon.
And so there you have it.
My theory.
Some of it borrowed from others, but most of it completely original, using my own knowledge and building on ideas I have come across over the years.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
If you would like to discuss this theory with me, feel free to send me an email at Michaelmagwrites@gmail.com