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Episode 166: A STORM OF SWORDS, SAMWELL I: "The Terror, Part 1" SHOW NOTES!
🕑 Added 2021-12-06 15:00:06 +0000 UTCHello and welcome to the Not A Cast … podcast: the one true chapter-by-chapter podcast going through A Song of Ice and Fire one chapter a week. I’m one of your hosts Jeff better known as BryndenBFish.
And I’m your other host Emmett, better known as PoorQuentyn.
Welcome to the one hundred and sixty-sixth episode of the Not A Cast, titled: “The Terror, Part 1: An Analysis of ASOS, Samwell I” in which Samwell is walking in a winter terrorland.
This episode is brought to you by our NotASmallCouncil:
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Spoiler warning: All published books, 5 novels, 3 Dunk and Egg novellas, histories, interviews, TWOW sample chapters, as well as Game of Thrones the TV show. Anything and everything!
Question
Ser Cory L, a Sworn Sword patron, asks:
I've never heard anyone else suggest the possibility that Jon emerging from the Winterfell crypts (via knowledge of the underground tunnels, provided by Bran) could be the waking of a stone dragon after the burning of Shireen.
What are your thoughts on this theory?
So, thank you Ser Cory for the question. If you’d like to ask us questions we must answer on the NotACast pod-cast, you are welcome to become a Sworn Sword or higher-level patron over at patreon.com/notacastasoiaf where you can also get show notes, bonus episodes, merch, access to the NotASlack, shout-outs at the start and end of every episode and weekly minisodes!
Yes indeed. And given that it is December and as it is tradition, we will be releasing a special bonus episode for all listeners at the end of this month that we’ll announce next week: a little taste of what you could experience as a patron. Our patrons will receive this episode way in advance, and we’ll announce our bonus episode topic next week. So, stay tuned!
But enough about patreon. When we last checked in … wait, we’ve never actually checked in with Samwell Tarly! It’s our first Samwell Tarly POV episode! Hell yeah! So, when we last checked in with the Night’s Watch, they were hanging out at the Fist of the First Men, when the horn blew not once, not twice, but three times, signalling the arrival of the holiday season, I think. Let’s find out all of this holiday cheer in this synopsis of ASOS, Samwell I, part 1!
Synopsis
Sobbing, Sam took another step. This is the last one, the very last, I can't go on, I can't. But his feet moved again. One and then the other. They took a step, and then another, and he thought, They're not my feet, they're someone else's, someone else is walking, it can't be me.
What a chapter! What an opening!
Samwell Tarly looks down and sees that his formerly black-booted feet are now white with snow, making Sam feel clubfooted with ice shoes. And the snow kept coming. The snow was deeper than his knees at this point, and he was dragging ass, or dragging his feet, trying to move. And he carries his heavy pack, hunched over. Exhausted, Samwell says he can’t go on.
At every fourth or fifth step, Sam reaches down to his swordbelt for a sword that wasn’t there. He lost it on the Fist. But he still had that dragonglass dagger, and his steel dagger for meat cuttin’. But now the belt was adding more weight to him.
His belly was so big and round that if he forgot to tug the belt slipped right off and tangled round his ankles, no matter how tight he cinched it. He had tried belting it above his belly once, but then it came almost to his armpits. Grenn had laughed himself sick at the sight of it, and Dolorous Edd had said, "I knew a man once who wore his sword on a chain around his neck like that. One day he stumbled, and the hilt went up his nose."
Samwell stumbles through the rocks and roots beneath the snow. Black Bernarr stepped into a deep hole and broke his ankle. He was put on a horse thereafter.
Sobbing, Sam took another step. It felt more like he was falling down than walking, falling endlessly but never hitting the ground, just falling forward and forward. I have to stop, it hurts too much. I'm so cold and tired, I need to sleep, just a little sleep beside a fire, and a bite to eat that isn't frozen.
But if he stopped he died. He knew that. They all knew that, the few who were left.
There were fifty or so when they rolled out of the Fist. But there were some who wandered off and died, and sometimes Samwell heard men of the rearguard screaming behind him in death. Samwell runs fast at that.
They are behind us, they are still behind us, they are taking us one by one.
Oh man. That is so bone-chilling!
Sobbing, Sam took another step. He had been cold so long he was forgetting what it was like to feel warm.
Yes. I am going to quote every time Samwell sobs and takes another step, thanks for asking. Sam describes his current garments: he’s got two layers of underoos on, a lambswool tunic, a thick coat, chainmail, a loose surcoat, a triple-thick cloak. Heavy fur mitts covered his hands and a scarf was wrapped around the lower part of his face with a watch cap pulled down over his ears. But he was still so cold, especially in his feet. His steps were a constant pain, and he was exhausted. Samwell hadn’t slept since the Fist
Sobbing, he took another step. The snow swirled down around him. Sometimes it fell from a white sky, and sometimes from a black, but that was all that remained of day and night. He wore it on his shoulders like a second cloak, and it piled up high atop the pack he carried and made it even heavier and harder to bear. The small of his back hurt abominably, as if someone had shoved a knife in there and was wiggling it back and forth with every step. His shoulders were in agony from the weight of the mail. He would have given most anything to take it off, but he was afraid to. Anyway he would have needed to remove his cloak and surcoat to get at it, and then the cold would have him.
Sam wishes he was stronger instead of weak and fat. And now he was weighed down by all the armor and clothing he was wearing.
Sobbing, he took another step. The crust was broken where he set his feet, otherwise he did not think he could have moved at all.
Samwell sees the torches through the trees in orange haloes bobbing up and down. The Old Bear had warned everyone to stay within the ring of fire or face woe, and Samwell was struggling to catch up with the torches, with men whose legs were longer and stronger than his. Sam wanted to be a torchbearer, hoping to get a little bit of warmth, but one of the rangers told Samwell he had a torch once, and he dropped it. Samwell doesn’t remember doing this, but he figures it must be true.
Was it Edd who reminded him about the torch, or Grenn? He couldn't remember that either. Fat and weak and useless, even my wits are freezing now. He took another step.
He had wrapped his scarf over his nose and mouth, but it was covered with snot now, and so stiff he feared it must be frozen to his face. Even breathing was hard, and the air was so cold it hurt to swallow it. "Mother have mercy," he muttered in a hushed husky voice beneath the frozen mask. "Mother have mercy, Mother have mercy, Mother have mercy." With each prayer he took another step, dragging his legs through the snow. "Mother have mercy, Mother have mercy, Mother have mercy."
But Sam’s mother was thousands of miles away with his sisters and his brother. She can’t hear Sam. Neither can the ethereal Mother. This was no country for the Faith. This was north of the Wall. Sam begs for mercy over and over
Maslyn screamed for mercy. Why had he suddenly remembered that? It was nothing he wanted to remember. The man had stumbled backward, dropping his sword, pleading, yielding, even yanking off his thick black glove and thrusting it up before him as if it were a gauntlet. He was still shrieking for quarter as the wight lifted him in the air by the throat and near ripped the head off him. The dead have no mercy left in them, and the Others . . . no, I mustn't think of that, don't think, don't remember, just walk, just walk, just walk.
Sobbing, he took another step.
Samwell trips over a root and bites his tongue when he hits the ground on one knee. He tastes blood, and thinks that this is the end. He tries to pull himself up to his feet, but his strength is gone, and he’s too heavy, too tired, too weak.
Someone tells Samwell to get back onto his feet, but Samwell is exhausted. He thinks dying wouldn’t be so awful here. The pain would be numbed, and he wouldn’t be the first to die. Hundreds had died on the Fist all around Samwell, more after. He releases his hand from a tree branch and lays down on his back onto the snow.
He stared upward at the pale white sky as snowflakes drifted down upon his stomach and his chest and his eyelids. The snow will cover me like a thick white blanket. It will be warm under the snow, and if they speak of me they'll have to say I died a man of the Night's Watch. I did. I did. I did my duty. No one can say I forswore myself. I'm fat and I'm weak and I'm craven, but I did my duty.
Samwell was in charge of the ravens. When the attack started, LC Mormont ordered Samwell to not fight but to send messages back to Castle Black and the Shadow Tower about what happened at the Fist of the First Men.
The Old Bear pointed a gloved finger right in Sam's face. "I don't care if you're so scared you foul your breeches, and I don't care if a thousand wildlings are coming over the walls howling for your blood, you get those birds off, or I swear I'll hunt you through all seven hells and make you damn sorry that you didn't." And Mormont's own raven had bobbed its head up and down and croaked, "Sorry, sorry, sorry."
Sam was sorry; sorry he hadn't been braver, or stronger, or good with swords, that he hadn't been a better son to his father and a better brother to Dickon and the girls. He was sorry to die too, but better men had died on the Fist, good men and true, not squeaking fat boys like him. At least he would not have the Old Bear hunting him through hell, though. I got the birds off. I did that right, at least. He had written out the messages ahead of time, short messages and simple, telling of an attack on the Fist of the First Men, and then he had tucked them away safe in his parchment pouch, hoping he would never need to send them.
And that is the synopsis of part 1 of ASOS, Samwell I! I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am that we’ve finally arrived at this chapter!
Depth
I’m a horror guy. Always have been, like how guys who are into metal seem to have come out of the womb that way. When I was little, it was “Are You Afraid of the Dark” at home on the TV, random short stories at the library. Then I moved up to Stephen King, and just as important, the movies he inspired. Then my interest splintered in countless different directions: found footage, horror manga, novels from House of Leaves to Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. I love Grand Guignol and I love the gothic sublime; I love Shakespeare’s problem plays and I love blunt VHS gore. I love it all! But what I love the most is when horror infiltrates other kinds of stories like a virus.
That’s why I love the horror sequences in ASOIAF so much. George is even better at horror than he is at high fantasy, so these moments feel like something breaking through, a subterranean river of blood emerging like a geyser.
This chapter right here, Sam I, is my favorite horror sequence in ASOIAF. Published, at least, we did do five episodes on “The Forsaken!” And the Red Wedding is up there as well of course, but Sam I is so personal for me. I’ll never forget my first time reading this chapter: on the edge of the bed, sunlight coming in harsh through the window, shadows growing where I gripped the page so tightly my fingers went numb. As soon as I understood what it was I was reading, the shape and scope, it felt like an ice pick to both eardrums, a silent frozen scream. I withered as I read it, but it was so galvanizing, a level of rawness I didn’t know existed in me. That’s why I love horror: you never forget it. Coming back now, long after the shock has faded, it’s clear that Sam I is a work of supreme craftsmanship. Everything is as good as it can possibly be, every element designed to make you react. ASOS is full of great chapters, but this is probably #1.
Impossible to disagree with you, ser. I don’t think I’d ever read a chapter like this prior to reading it in 2012. Remember how I’ve always said that the reason I picked up the books after Game of Thrones, Season Two was to find out if Samwell Tarly died at the Fist of the First Men? Well, boy, imagine the 2012 version of me still not being sure after the Prologue and coming up to a Samwell POV chapter recounting his march through hell. At no point in this chapter did I ever feel it was certain that Samwell Tarly was going to make it out of this chapter alive. For that matter, I was under no certainty that Samwell would make it out of Samwell II and III alive!
Now, while I appreciate the genre for what it is, see how it can be used as a venue to communicate deep themes, story and character, I’ve never been a horror guy. It scares me too much! As one of those Christians, I actually believe in spirits, principalities, demons and a kingdom beyond sight and sound. That horror shit scares Jesus into me. And I think that’s why this chapter is so utterly effective: it’s a horror chapter for non-horror readers. And you know why I think this is the case? Because Samwell Tarly is like me: he’s scared so bad by what he’s encountering here that he’s calling on the Mother to save him! Samwell Tarly is not a horror fan, but he’s smack dab in the middle of a horror story, and he has to survive, must survive. Or all of Westeros is doomed. It sounds dramatic, but I promise to bring it home by the end of this analysis!
- Tone and structure
- I think we should begin with the experience for the first time reader. The Prologue to ASOS ended on the mother of all cliffhangers: that third horn blast signaling the arrival of the Others
- Then we got Jon II, showing us the aftermath at the Fist of the First Men: snow turned pink by blood, horses gutted trying to escape
- Our minds fill in the rest. Mance says it for us: the Night’s Watchmen died, or most of them did, anyway, like Waymar and Will in the AGOT Prologue
- So George has set himself a challenge: how do I make this the most frightening thing ever when the audience already knows what happened?
- He did it by building this chapter around the dread of thinking about what happened, even more than the terror of experiencing it in the moment
- Sam I is a master class in tone, and it achieves its tone through structure; it’s one of the most ambitiously structured chapters in the series, up there with HOTU and “The Forsaken”
- George weaves the present moment, in which Sam flees the pursuing white walkers, into his flashbacks to the ambush
- That locks the reader into Sam’s perspective. We were put in the position of imagining what went down at the Fist; Sam is in the position of remembering what went down. Imagination and memory kinda work the same way, as we talked about in our Waltz With Bashir episode
- The thing-in-itself, the most frightening thing ever, is a structuring absence. It’s something just out of the corner of your eye, chasing you from just over the horizon, too unsettling to comprehend
- It’s something Other: a terror both primal and alien that Sam’s rational mind is trying and failing to keep at bay
- The terror is built into the very shape of the chapter. We know what happened is worse even than we imagined, because of how much it hurts Sam to even think about it
- Instead of starting off the chapter with the scary thing, George shows us Sam reacting to it, knowing that our minds will (once again) do the rest
- In other words, this chapter is not only a great example of horror--it’s about horror, about how it slinks into your subconscious and lies there in wait, about how it takes over your mind’s eye and shocks you out of yourself
- For all the ground the chapter covers in terms of style, it covers almost no ground literally, because all Sam can bring himself to do right now is take one step, and then another, and then another
- Everything is reduced to the pain of getting through the moment. It’s just about the worst situation that I can imagine. The physical exhaustion, the harsh environment, the trauma, the terror, Sam’s unique self-loathing
- We’ll unpack each of these as we go, but more important than any one of them is the way they compound into an overwhelming sense of stress
- The other angle which makes this chapter so scary is how it occurs after the Battle itself.
- Though Samwell is alive, he’s barely clinging to life here, and that danger is far from gone.
- We’re not even relieved in knowing that Samwell is alive now even though we can tell by the context that this chapter occurs chronologically after the battle itself.
- There’s a cancer-ward feeling to this chapter, like death’s grip is closing its fingers around Samwell’s neck.
- That’s the tone angle that you talked about so well. And that tone is framed within a context of Samwell being utterly and correctly terrified by what he’s experienced and experiencing.
- There’s the cold, there’s the heavy pack he’s carrying, there’s the trauma he experienced on the Fist of the First Men.
- But above all of that is the literal apocalypse pursuing Samwell and the Night’s Watch as they try to desperately try to flee to safety.
- The terror of what’s occurring overwhelms Samwell’s sense; so all he can do is sob and take plodding step after plodding step.
- Next week, we’ll open with a question from Ser Darren S about the “Sobbing, Sam took another step”; so I’ll save some of the more meta thoughts for that question.
- But here, I just want to talk about how it adds to that sense of dread. The Others are closing in, and all Samwell can do is take one slow step after the other.
- It’s hard to quantify what that does psychologically to people, but there’s a scared animal desperation to Sam here.
- But if he stopped he died. He knew that. They all knew that, the few who were left.
- That’s where Samwell is: knowing that death awaits him if he doesn’t stop moving, and yet he also knows that the Others are in cold pursuit, and even if he moves as fast as he can, they’re going to catch him.
- I think that’s the undercurrent for why Samwell falls down and refuses to get up: why make the physical exertion to live if you’re just going to die anyways?
- That is what makes this chapter so scary to me -- is Samwell merely delaying the inevitable by mere minutes by continuing to move slowly forward?
- Not being a horror movie aficionado, like my beloved co-host, I can only surmise that this is like a horror movie in novel-form.
- The intensity of that intimacy, standing in contrast to the mystical backdrop, reminds me of one of my favorite horror movies
- The Blair Witch Project is often credited with kicking off found footage as *the* horror subgenre of the 21st century, but that really didn’t start until Paranormal Activity launched a wave of imitators
- It’s like when Psycho came out and its influence slowly worked its way through the Italian giallo films before Halloween turned the model into something you could repeat forever, which...we pretty much did!
- Works that are ahead of their time often feel quaint in the rearview mirror, but also vibrant, because they’re not a part of a self-conscious strategy
- The hook of found footage is that it’s an easy way to keep the budget low, which means enormous profits if you manage to churn out a hit
- But few of the Paranormal Activity imitators captured what Blair Witch did, which was something specific to the medium of found footage
- There’s a raw, authentic quality to it, as if we’re traveling through the wreckage of a nervous breakdown: the sheer power of terror is so strong that it shatters the very lens we’re looking through, leaving fragments
- The movie is about three film students who went into the woods to make a film project, and we’re watching all that was recovered from their footage after they disappeared; it’s a chronicle of their failure and disintegration, as they gradually realize they’re being hunted by the titular witch
- There’s the built-in hook of knowing it ends poorly, just like in this Sam chapter. We know the witch gets them; we know the white walkers attacked and wiped out most of the Night’s Watch
- But in the present moment for the characters in Blair Witch, the enemy is the woods as much as the witch. There’s a sickening dread as the camera whips and pans around endless anonymous trees. They’re lost, they’re all lost, as Sam writes on the Fist. His present moment, sobbing as every step unlocks misery and memories, feels like a found-footage trek
- The most iconic scene in Blair Witch is the protagonist Heather’s confession to the camera, held unbearably close so you can see every pinprick of fear in her pupils as she talks about how it feels to be hunted
- Sam knows exactly how that feels. The first direct mention of the Others in this chapter is when he describes hearing an awful scream behind them
- They are behind us, they are still behind us, they are taking us one by one.
- So as painful as it is to keep going, the alternative is even worse. Your pain only buys more pain, because you are being herded, toyed with
- Sam’s only escape from this slog are his flashbacks to the Fist, horrifying images in isolation that are made even more effective in this context
- The transitions are radical and brutal. They make the reader flinch because they’re supposed to. It’s as if two different stories are interrupting each other, like the “cut-up” technique used by William Burroughs, a way of divining and decoding meanings hidden in the text
- When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.
- As Sam begs the Mother Above for mercy, he suddenly remembers Maslyn begging for mercy. It’s a picture of abject helplessness: we see Maslyn drop his sword, stumble and fall, hold his gauntlet up like that knight who tried to yield to Tyrion at the Blackwater
- George describes all that before he describes what Maslyn is retreating from: a wight who nearly ripped his head off
- Valar morghulis; all men must die. In the face of death, we feel a desperate desire to call timeout, to stop playing before it gets real
- We recognize that in Maslyn, the most universal of human impulses, and then Sam tells us that what’s so horrifying about the wights is that they lack all those impulses. They’re not sadistic--that would be a recognizable human impulse! They don’t care; they’re nothing inside. Tyrion at least reached down to that knight, but the living will find no mercy in the dead
- And the Others? The white walkers who sent the wights? They’re so scary that Sam cannot describe them. They are beyond language itself
- It’s hideously appropriate that at this moment, Sam trips over a tree root and falls. The memory of the Others is like a hidden root, waiting beneath the snow for its chance to reach up and drag you down into your grave
- The fear of death can be so strong that death itself seems preferable, in the way the fear of injections can be more painful than the needle itself
- This is one of the reasons horror can be so powerful. Our brains flinch away from contemplating death; horror allows us to stare into the abyss in a fictional context, understanding why it might feel like an old friend
- Sam thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to die, here and now, because then the cold stops, the fear stops, and the memories of hundreds dying all around him on the Fist stop. What’s dying of exposure next to that?
- The Others add an extra layer to this terror, because they can bring you back from the dead, force you to keep walking forever
- That’s the bleak philosophical reality this chapter confronts us with: we’re not only guaranteed to die, we’re guaranteed to see it coming, maybe even to choose it on some level, because life is no longer worth living
- This is one of the hideous aspects of the Others: they don’t allow the dead to rest.
- When Catelyn wrote Lysa about Hoster’s impending death, she includes this line:
- It is time for Father to lay down his sword and shield. It is time for him to rest.
- In our next Catelyn chapter, Maester Vyman will tell Catelyn about Hoster’s passing that:
- This battle he cannot win. It is time he lay down his sword and shield. Time to yield.
- The Others don’t allow the dead to yield, to rest. They put them right back to work, and that work is pulling more people down to the grave to serve as their slaves.
- And it’s equally hideous that the people they’re pulling down to the grave are people who are yet ready to die.
- We’ll cover Craster’s male babies and how the Others transform them into Others in our next Samwell chapter.
- But it strikes me that what the Others do to more grown up humans is somewhat similar: stealing life to make them slaves to their killer wills.
- It’s been a long time since we talked about the AGOT Prologue - well, not so long if you’re one of our patrons and got to listen to our re-visit of the AGOT Prologue! - but one thing that continues to strike me about the Others and the wights is how metaphorically and not-so-metaphorically cold-blooded they are.
- Steven Attewell compared the Others to the plague, to the plague in ice armor, and I think that works really well.
- For now, Samwell Tarly is in a horror movie; so, let’s talk about Samwell Tarly the POV character, shall we?
- Sam as a POV
- I’ve compared this chapter to HOTU, “The Forsaken,” and the Red Wedding, but all those are told from established POV characters
- This is Samwell Tarly’s very first POV chapter. What a way to begin! Compare it to the first Jaime chapter, which took its time getting us accustomed to his headspace before the action kicked in
- No such wiggle room here. George has to simultaneously describe the action at the Fist and establish Sam in our minds as a distinctive narrator
- As complicated as this chapter’s chronology gets, that actually helps here, because George can focus the character work in the present, while in the flashbacks, Sam is mostly (though not entirely) an observer on the chaos
- George uses the heightened stress of the situation to make us understand what it’s like to be Samwell Tarly: very very stressful!
- Being hunted by zombies is the worst thing that’s ever happened to Sam, because it’s one of the worst things that could ever happen to anybody
- But it’s not like his life was going great up until now. Sam’s been ruled by anxiety and depression from the moment we met him. Everywhere he goes, he flinches, sure that sooner or later, he’s gonna get hit
- So really, life always feels this way for Sam. He wakes up afraid every morning, and goes to bed afraid every night. The Others are just the most exaggerated form of a world that always seems to be out to get him
- I mean, the first word of his first chapter is “sobbing.” George comes back to it repeatedly: every step Sam takes is paid for with a sob
- Why is Sam like this? We started to learn why in book one, when he told Jon about the way his father Randyll treated him
- But that’s not adequate preparation for what it’s like inside Sam’s head. Half his brain is perpetually screaming at the other half, calling it worthless, disgusting, embarrassing, lower than shit
- It feels like every other word is negative. Sam’s always describing a scenario or a standard and then dwelling on how he fell short
- He can’t let it go. Here he is, running for his life, and his brain fixates on images of everyone laughing when he cinched his swordbelt too high
- Who gives a shit?! You’re being chased by zombies! Zombies who already killed a bunch of guys who got their swordbelts right the first time!
- But it still matters to Sam, because he’s in a cage of humiliation and shame. This is just another situation he can’t handle, another test he failed
- The chapter starts with him thinking that he’s done--this is the last step, the end of his life, he cannot bear the burden of it all any longer
- Deep down, Sam thinks he deserves to die. He’s internalized abuse as self-loathing: he is useless, or he would’ve been accepted, so why live?
- Early on in the chapter, Sam thinks that someone else must be moving his feet, that it’s not him. For a moment, you might think Sam’s been zombified, as Jon feared on the Fist: the Others are controlling him!!
- In truth, Sam is disassociating, which hints at a deeper truth: Sam wishes those weren’t his feet, that this wasn’t his body, because he hates it
- The main reason Sam hates himself is his weight. He’s always calling himself fat, associating it with weakness and childishness
- No doubt Sam’s weight is making it harder to keep going under these conditions, but again, Sam’s perspective on this is not purely rational
- This is mostly about how he’s absorbed his father’s perspective. When he talks about how “they” won’t be able to say he died first, “they” won’t be able to say he forsook his duty, he’s talking first and foremost about Dad
- Sam doesn’t even need anyone to call him names like Dad did; he does it to himself first, preemptively apologizing. Sam was sorry, he thinks as he drifts toward death: sorry he was never good enough for anyone
- It’s true that all Sam can do right now is cry as the tears freeze on his cheeks, begging the silent gods for mercy that will not come
- He’ll push himself past that at the end of the chapter, which we’ll cover next time. But I also want to say that Sam is not worthless for crying, nor for being bad at fighting, marching, etc. These aren’t inherently faults he must get past to prove himself. His self-loathing is what he has to get past
- Randyll’s treatment of his son is as monstrous in its own way as what the white walkers are doing, which leads me to my other big reference point
- Stephen King’s It is probably the novel I’ve spent the most time with; it’s my platonic ideal of horror, the peak of what the genre can achieve
- It blows up horror into mythic high fantasy, blurring the lines between coming-of-age tale, blunt social satire, and cosmic psychedelia
- Its child heroes grow up in a world haunted both by a Lovecraftian deity from beyond spacetime and by all-too-familiar human hatred
- One feeds into the other; it’s impossible to tell where we begin and the monster ends. There’s an incredible power in juxtaposing the metaphysical elements with the more personal and political ones
- In the first chapter, the protagonist’s little brother is killed by something in the sewer, something that presents itself as a clown to lure him close before transforming into something that “destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke” before ripping his arm off
- It’s an idyllic ‘50s world where mom plays Beethoven and big brother makes you a neat paper boat with paraffin so it won’t sink
- The second chapter flips the script, jumping ahead to the then-present day of the 1980s, in which a pack of drunk assholes beat a gay man to within an inch of life, in view of a public that does nothing about it
- They flip him off the bridge, where It waits to finish him off. So if the first chapter frames the city of Derry as heaven if only the monster weren’t there, the second chapter frames it as hell before the monster shows up
- George sets up a similar dynamic here: Sam is being chased by demons both literal and internal, which are converging into one terror, one face
- In It, the gay man’s partner pursues the clown to try and get him back, only for the clown to look back and reveal itself as it did to the little boy
- “It was Derry. It was this town.”
- The same is true of the Others and their wights: they are Westeros. They are this land. They embody the merciless violence Sam has always faced
- You’ve made such wonderful points talking about Samwell’s personality, his presence, his self-conception and how Samwell fits into the I wanted to talk a little about Samwell Tarly as a POV character, why he’s here, what his purpose is in the narrative and why he’s awesome.
- Samwell Tarly appears in five chapters in A Storm of Swords, five chapters in A Feast for Crows, and back in 2020, GRRM reported writing about Oldtown and “Sam” for The Winds of Winter.
- So, our boy will be back in TWOW, and that’s going to be a blast - three horns full, perhaps? - to have his POV back.
- When asked about which characters he most resembled, GRRM said:
- There's a lot of me in Tyrion Lannister, there's a lot of me in Samwell Tarly.
- He later expanded on what he meant by this when he was asked a similar question, saying:
- I’d like to say Tyrion, but it’s really Samwell Tarly. Tyrion gets more action, he gets laid more (laughter) but I’m really more like Sam.
- So, Samwell Tarly is an authorial insert into the book, similar to Tyrion, but if I’m picking up what George is putting down, Tyrion is who George wants to be in personality, Samwell is who he actually is.
- Having an authorial insert in the book who is not the idealized version of yourself is kind-of awesome, because I think it explains how he’s able to write this chapter so well.
- George isn’t simply imagining how Jon Snow or Bran Stark or Davos Seaworth would react to this situation given the individual characteristics he embedded into their characters.
- George is telling us what he would do if he was in the middle of a nightmare zombie apocalypse.
- When asked about the name Samwell and whether it was inspired by Tolkien, George said:
- There are a number of homages to LOTR in my book. I am a huge Tolkien fan.
- So, that’s some background on Samwell Tarly, but in terms of the plot mechanics of ASOS, Samwell fills in the story of the Night’s Watch after the Fist of the First Men given that Jon is off with the wildlings.
- This is similar to why Melisandre was introduced in ADWD: George knew that Jon was going to be gone yet again, and he wanted to have eyes on the Wall/Night’s Watch/wildling storyline while Jon was away.
- George works a lot of themes into Samwell’s story in ASOS -- how it feels to be singled out due to physical appearance, using smart politics to overcome obstacles and confronting an abusive past.
- But the theme I see the most in this chapter and in successive Samwell chapters in ASOS is overcoming fear.
- And while that fear is relative to what happened at the Fist, its roots go much deeper than that.
- The present mission
- Given the experimental structure of this chapter and the otherworldly horrors at the heart of it all, it can be easy to lose sight of the more mundane military realities the Night’s Watch is dealing with
- Even if they weren’t being hunted by the white walkers, the Watch would still have to deal with the problems plaguing any army in retreat
- George lingers on these details every bit as much as the apocalyptic stuff, because a rock beneath the snow can kill you as much as the zombies
- You can feel the weight of all of Sam’s clothes, the layers of wool and armor; the cold sneaks in anyway, so they’re just more burdens
- This further grounds us in the chapter, because even if we’ve never had to run for our lives, everyone’s had to deal with shitty weather
- It opens up the practical considerations that make disaster stories interesting: what would you do? How would I handle this?
- We see LC Mormont trying his best with what Sam calls “the Old Bear’s ring of fire.” Torchbearers around the edge of the march are trying to keep the enemy at bay. We know that the undead fear the flames
- But the imagery here is ambiguous. On one hand, Sam describes the torches as “orange haloes,” the heavenly adornments of angels
- On the other, calling it a “ring of fire” makes it sound more hellish, as if the Night’s Watch are stuck in one of the circles of hell with no escape
- It’s a fragile oasis, and Sam literally can’t keep up with it; the sanctuary leaves him behind in the cold. He’s not good enough, no part to play
- His only comfort is that he did his duty, which demonstrates that he’s not as useless as he thinks; it’s a thin reed that allows him to strike back against the Others as well
- Sam had his orders from LC Mormont, who’s an interesting figure to consider in terms of the themes of masculinity and abuse
- On one hand, Mormont does often speak harshly to and about Sam, as we’ve seen in the previous books. This contributes to Sam’s constant anxiety, which contributes to how martial men like this treat him
- On the other hand, that’s pretty much how Mormont talks to everyone, and he cares for Sam in his own way: telling him to stay out of immediate danger and focus on where he can do the most good, with the messages
- Randyll tried to turn Sam into a killer, and inflicted endless pain and terror on his son failing to do that. LC Mormont accepts on the face of it that Sam isn’t up for that job, and gives him a job that few of his men could do
- There is a ghastly irony to Mormont motivating Sam with fear of wildling attacks and being hunted through hell, outlandish drill sergeant shit, when the actual threat facing them now is so much worse than any of that
- I think George is showing us with LC Mormont a well-intentioned guy who is running up hard against the limits of his imagination
- He turns out to be wrong that Sam can’t be a warrior, and when Sam strikes down the white walker, it’s Jon’s words which motivate him--Jon who recognized his worth and shielded him from harm before Mormont did
- Human frailty so often disgusts us, because we don’t want to recognize it in ourselves, nor do we want to acknowledge how arbitrary death is: we can be the strongest and the most prepared, but chance can kill us
- Sam I is not a full-on tragedy like the Red Wedding, but there is an emotional resonance to how unflinching George’s gaze is here
- It’s an absolute refusal of sentiment. The strength has to come from within Sam, because his environment is as hostile as it’s possible for it to be
- It’s a condemnation of something deeper and older than the Old Bear, or even the Others themselves. It’s human misery, the terror of existence
- The chapter is a horror story, but it’s also George’s war poetry: the repetition of “Sobbing, Sam took another step” like a repeated motif to establish rhythm, the overwhelming details gradually building to a bigger picture, the sudden elaborate jumps in time and tone
- I was reading Wilfred Owen, the great WWI poet, who wrote all his poems in the final year of the war; he was killed a week before the armistice
- Strange Meeting:
- It seemed that out of battle I escaped/down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
“I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .”
- The wights are the war dead brought back with all their undone years, the hopelessness, the enemy you killed now your friend putting you to sleep
- My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
- When we talk about war, we talk about battles, we talk Generals, we talk tactics, strategies, sexy weapons, metal ways people die, heroic and cowardly deeds, on and on and etc.
- What we don’t talk about is how heavy a rucksack, how you feel the weight of every step when you’re staggering forward, how the giant weapon you have slung around your neck, balances you in a weird way.
- We don’t talk about how your knees buckle under all the weight, how every step spreads a searing pain across your lower pack.
- And while soldiers are always exhausted and tired, we don’t describe why: how a wink of sleep could lead to death, how they have to keep moving or die.
- But George takes the time to describe the physical torment Samwell experiences, trying to survive the woods.
- That frail humanity is something we react against in stories and real-life, because just get it together, just push on, just be better, why can’t you be better.
- George nails that dynamic so well where even if you’re upset at Samwell for not moving fast, you understand Samwell and why he can't just be better.
- Exhausted, overlaid with gear, freezing to death with the apocalypse upon him, Samwell Tarly flashes back to the Fist.
- What I like about this scene is how you can see Sam’s intelligence shining through here yet again.
- Like when Sam made the correct deduction that the bodies of Jafer Flowers and Othor.
- Mormont puts Samwell on a task he can achieve - recall that only one in ten watchmen can read and write.
- So, he preps the messages, tucks them away, and next week, we’ll unpack the full Battle of the Fist of the First Men and the messages Samwell does (or doesn’t) send.
Foreshadowing/Groundwork
Suppose it’s cheating to call this foreshadowing since it happens in this same chapter--but George does make sure to tell us that Sam still has his dragonglass dagger handy, because he’ll need it against the Other.
Theory/Discussion
Emmett, do you think this chapter is a taste of the apocalypse we’ll experience in full come The Winds of Winter?
Conclusion
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- Join us next week for Part 2 of ASOS Samwell I, in which a pale horse and rider approach, and Samwell must rise, dragonglass dagger in hand, to become the Slayer.
