John Spencer
Dragons, wildfire, Valyrian steel swords, bows and arrows, spears, and daggers—these are the weapons of warfare in the world of Game of Thrones. Some are fictional; others, very real and timeless. A good, sharp blade—be it a sword or multipurpose folding pocket knife—will always be a necessary piece of kit for warfighters. But there are also weapons that are often taken for granted but are vital, major tools of warfare—whether fictional or real-world. Among those that repeatedly shape the battlefields of the Seven Kingdoms, and influence the outcomes of battles, are walls—simple walls, whose importance in war and warfare is often forgotten.
The war that rages throughout Games of Thrones in many ways resembles warfare of the Middle Ages and onward. The battle scenes, tactics, and even outcomes look remarkably like many of the great battles of European history from the twelfth century well into the nineteenth. Characters like Robert Baratheon or Jon Snow might be likened to great warriors of that era, like Henry V of England, famous for his victories during the Hundred Years’ War, including his dynamic defeat of the French in the 1415 Battle of Agincourt. There is much that modern strategists, warfighters, students of war, and a whole range of interested observers can take from the heroes and villains of both the Middle Ages and the Seven Kingdoms that apply to strategy, international relations, and politics. In particular, the ways in which walls have been used, throughout the bloody conflicts of both history and Game of Thrones, provide insights that help us better understand the real battlefields of today and anticipate the contours of those of the future.
Cities have formed the central focus of military campaigns throughout recorded history. Egyptians battled Hittites for control of cities along critical trade routes in the thirteenth century BC. Later, the leading city-states of ancient Greece stayed busy besieging, sacking, and destroying each other during the Peloponnesian War. Prior to defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington waged siege warfare and attacked castles in the early 1800s during the Peninsular War, which would have closely resembled Game of Thrones battle scenes like the sieges of King’s Landing or Riverrun. Capturing or destroying your enemy’s cities, especially their capitals, was the quickest way to achieve victory in the ancient world.1 Taking enemy cities and protecting your own—this was the art and science of warfare.
And this is the type of warfare that characterizes Games of Thrones. The castles and cities of Westeros (and Essos, across the Narrow Sea) share a key feature: they are surrounded by walls. In battle after battle, we watch as one army or another attempts to breach these walls to seize a castle or occupy a city. Want the Iron Throne? Build a massive army and lay siege to or attack the capital of the Seven Kingdoms—King’s Landing. That was Daenerys Targaryen’s single goal in season 1. Stannis Baratheon and Robb Stark each aimed to do the same, leveraging long-standing alliances, family loyalties, and oaths previously taken, all with the hope of ultimately building a force big enough to take King’s Landing.
What stood awaiting each of them? The walls of King’s Landing. Walls create fortifications that provide defensive positions of strength with which to repel attacks. They have served as the primary lines of protection for cities across history. The castles like we see in the Seven Kingdoms most resemble those first introduced in England by the Normans in 1066 after the Battle of Hastings.2 Just as in Game of Thrones, for centuries castles and their towering walls protected the nobility, their loyal citizens, and their claims to power during the Middle Ages.
Walls are incredibly challenging obstacles for any would-be attackers to negotiate. From atop a castle wall, defenders can stand behind protected positions to launch waves of arrows at approaching forces, drop stones and oil to set ablaze on attackers, or attack largely defenseless fighters attempting to scale the walls. When defending from behind walls, an outnumbered army can overcome its numerical disadvantage. In 1683 an outnumbered force of approximately twenty thousand defended Vienna from its fortifications against an estimated seventy-five thousand Ottomans for two months, until reinforcements saved them.3 That episode has echoes in Tyrion Lannister’s actions at the Battle of the Blackwater, where he and a small force positioned at the single weakest part of King’s Landing, the Mud Gate, held off a vastly larger army led by Stannis Baratheon, until they were saved by reinforcements from House Tyrell.
The Battle of the Blackwater provides a great example of what can happen when walls are too narrowly considered. Tyrion Lannister showed his lack of military training with his shallow defensive plan. The spot on the perimeter wall Tyrion wisely chose to be the point of battle should have been incorporated into a much broader defensive plan. A trained military practitioner would have developed a defense in depth, meaning a plan to attack (in what we term “kill zones”) the incoming forces as far out and continuously as possible. The use of wildfire in the harbor was excellent, but that and a few archers was the extent of the defense until the attackers were trying to bust down the gate. Tyrion’s forces had the time to construct obstacles forward of the gates—such as an abatis, where trees and branches are sharpened and faced toward the enemy—that the attackers would be forced to negotiate and that would allow defenders to continue their fire forward of the wall. Such obstacles protecting walls can still be seen at preserved battle sites like Fort Ticonderoga or Stony Point in New York.
Walls are boundaries—physical and also political. The Wall of Games of Thrones serves as a fortification, physical barrier, and political boundary separating Westeros from the wild areas to the north. The Wall was seven hundred feet tall, three hundred feet thick, and three hundred miles long, and it was said to be enchanted with strong, ancient magic to “protect men from what lies beyond,” spanning from the Bay of Seals in the east to the Gorge in the west.4 Protecting the people of Westeros from the Free Folk and the White Walkers, its simple purpose was to serve as the physical boundary between the North and the Seven Kingdoms.
The Wall is not unlike real boundary walls erected to demarcate borders and protect against invasion—from the Great Wall of China to Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. The Great Wall of China—actually a series of many walls and fortifications constructed over two millennia—totals more than thirteen thousand miles in length. Originally conceived by Emperor Qin Shi Huang in the third century BC as a means of preventing incursions from barbarian nomads, the Wall has experienced fluctuations in its importance and effectiveness across time, but it remains standing after many centuries, a symbol of the seemingly timeless turn to wall building to protect against the menace of invasion.
According to George R. R. Martin, Hadrian’s Wall provided the inspiration for the Wall in Game of Thrones. Erected by Roman legionnaires beginning in 122 AD, Hadrian’s Wall extended seventy-three miles from coast to coast across the width of northern Britain.5 It served “to separate the Romans from the barbarians.”6 Martin recalled visiting Hadrian’s Wall, saying “I stood up there and I tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionary, standing on this wall, looking at these distant hills. It was a very profound feeling. . . . We know that there were Scots beyond the hills, but they didn’t know that. It could have been any kind of monster. It was the sense of this barrier against dark forces—it planted something in me.”7
Walls also serve as political and administrative boundaries denoting ownership. The Wall in Game of Thrones separates the Seven Kingdoms from the land north of the Wall and the Free Folk, who live there. Such boundaries (whether physical walls or lines on a map) not only form the lines of war but can also be a cause of the fighting. The Free Folk didn’t agree that the line traced by the Wall somehow decided what land was theirs and what was not. Nor do many people in the real world agree that lines on a map serve that same purpose. The redrawing of borders after World War I and World War II; during decolonization; and to some degree, after the fall of the Soviet Union have triggered generations of political, cultural, economic, and social change—sometimes good but often at the cost of many, many lives. Shifting loyalties of some of the lesser lords in Games of Thrones upend previously agreed boundaries, much like what can be seen today in places like eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian sentiment among parts of the population partly underwrites the first effort to redraw European boundaries by force since World War II.8
And when these boundaries, whether historical or fictional, are marked by walls, they provide lessons that are important today, in war and for society.
Walls are only effective if there is a system of overwatch and their positions are properly manned. The Battle of Castle Black is a case in point, demonstrating how a guarded wall, properly manned, can help defeat a superior force. Jon Snow and just one hundred defenders of the Night’s Watch beat a vastly superior army of Free Folk led by Mance Rayder. But without overwatch—meaning without defenders manning the wall—it is only a matter of time before an option is discovered to overcome the obstacle. Prior to the Battle of Castle Black, Jon Snow and a band of Free Folk were able to scale the Wall without detection, using ice axes and crude crampons to infiltrate northern Westeros, because most of the forts along the Wall were unmanned. What does this teach us? If you intend to build a wall to protect a border, don’t just plan for the construction costs. Plan to pay for the costs of manning, surveilling, patrolling, and providing overwatch of it. The 224 tunnels unearthed along the U.S.-Mexico border between 1990 and 2016 show why.9
We only get a few glimpses in Game of Thrones of the type of fighting that evolved as city walls and castles improved in their protective qualities—siege warfare. The tactics of busting through city gates and castle walls improved with time. Early battering rams have been identified in ancient Egypt as early as 1900 BC, along with scaling ladders as early as 2400 BC.10 A besieging force’s tactics also included the option to just surround a city or castle and starve the defenders out. Vice versa, the inhabitants of a well-provisioned castle could opt to sit and wait for the attackers to run out of supplies. This was the tactic Ramsay Bolton thought he would employ after losing at the Battle of the Bastards—that is, until a giant demonstrated the same lesson real-world defenders intending to outlast a besieging force often learn when faced with advanced machinery like heavy artillery: with sufficient power, castle gates can come down in a few seconds.
The problem with the use of walls is that they only work if there is actually a formidable obstacle to effectively keep people in or out. There can be no holes, no vulnerabilities. Tyrion Lannister shows why, when he uses his knowledge of the sewers of Casterly Rock—something he obtained when his father assigned him the management of its sewers—to help Daenerys Targaryen capture the castle. Sewers are mundane, to say the least. But then again, so are walls themselves. And especially when it comes to fighting in cities, mastery of the mundane can tilt the balance decisively in one side’s favor. Walled fortifications are not very effective—nor is defending against a siege—if people, weapons, and equipment can get in and out of them at will. With the growth of urban areas around the world, the ability to besiege a city has become more and more difficult. In 2016 the Iraqi military was only able to begin to take back control of the Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State fighters after they had effectively surrounded and isolated it with over one hundred thousand security forces.11
Walls are not solely defensive in nature; they can be used to attack, as well. In the 2008 battle for Sadr City, a densely populated neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, U.S. military forces (perhaps unknowingly) used siege warfare to defeat an uprising by an armed militia called Jaish al-Mahdi led by the fiery cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. For over thirty days during the height of the battle, soldiers used civilian cranes to emplace more than three thousand six-ton concrete barriers to create a three-mile wall that connected previously emplaced barriers and ultimately completely encircled Sadr City. The walls restricted the militia’s ability to move freely in and out of Sadr City and were the main weapon that led to the end of the battle.
Ultimately in Game of Thrones, dragons negated much of the advantages of castles and defensive walls. Tywin Lannister said it best when he described the destruction of Harrenhal to Arya Stark. “Harrenhal was built to withstand an attack from the land,” he told her. “A million men could’ve marched on these walls and a million men would’ve been repelled. But an attack from the air, with dragon fire . . . Harren and all his sons roasted alive within these walls. Aegon Targaryen changed the rules.”12 Dragons’ real-world analogs—aircraft—certainly changed what cities must endure during war. But German bombing of London didn’t compel a British surrender during World War II, and Hamas hasn’t capitulated despite Israel’s air supremacy over Gaza. What changed the rules in the real world in a way most like the effect dragons had in Westeros was not aircraft but gunpowder. Brought to Europe in the 1300s, gunpowder allowed besiegers to fire cannonballs that were able to smash through walls, and by the time of the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s, rifled artillery could reduce most city fortifications from a range of nearly two miles.13
And yet humanity still turns to walls. From the battle for Sadr City to the Islamic State’s building of defensive fortifications in Iraq and Syria, from plans for a wall on the U.S. southern border to European discussions on how to reinforce borders amid tensions over migration, walls still feature prominently in the world. And as long as walls are built, they will define the contours of war, peace, and security. We all would be wise to study the lessons of other walls—whether Hadrian’s or Harrenhal’s—in whatever games we play in the future.
1. Louis A. DiMarco, Concrete Hell: Urban Warfare from Stalingrad to Iraq (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2012), 19.
2. C. N. Trueman, “Castles,” History Learning Site, March 5, 2015, https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/medieval-england/castles/.
3. Lou DiMarco, “Attacking the Heart and Guts: Urban Operations through the Ages,” in Block by Block: The Challenges of Urban Operations, ed. William G. Robertson (Fort Leavenworth KS: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Press, 2003), 6.
4. Mega McCluskey, “The Wall on Game of Thrones: Breaking Down Its History and Magic,” Time, August 24, 2017, http://time.com/4912209/game-of-thrones-wall-history-magic/.
5. McCluskey, “Wall on Game of Thrones.”
6. Quoted in Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Hadrian’s Wall,” by David J. Breeze, accessed November 23, 2011, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hadrians-Wall.
7. McCluskey, “Wall on Game of Thrones.”
8. Anthony Faiola, “Russia Supporters in Eastern Ukraine Pose Challenges to Pro-Western Government,” Washington Post, March 15, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-supporters-in-eastern-ukraine-pose-challenges-to-pro-western-government/2014/03/14/be21eeec-ab77-11e3-b8ca-197ef3568958_story.html?utm_term=.80ac1f8c25e2.
9. Vanda Felbab-Brown, “The Wall: The Real Costs of a Barrier between the United States and Mexico,” Brookings, August 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/essay/the-wall-the-real-costs-of-a-barrier-between-the-united-states-and-mexico/.
10. DiMarco, “Attacking the Heart and Guts,” 17.
11. Margarita Konaev and John Spencer, “The Era of Urban Warfare Is Already Here,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, March 21, 2018, https://www.fpri.org/article/2018/03/the-era-of-urban-warfare-is-already-here/.
12. David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, “A Man without Honor,” season 2, episode 7, dir. David Nutter, Game of Thrones, aired May 13, 2012, on HBO.
13. DiMarco, Concrete Hell, 24.