CHAPTER 6
ANOTHER ICE BRICK IN THE WALL
Build a Wall! 
The answer to many problems in human history has been ‘Build a wall’. Sometimes the fortification goes up to keep out bothersome Geordies and Scots (Hadrian’s Wall); sometimes it’s to stop ice creatures riding around on dead horses, raising armies of zombies (Westeros’s Wall). Sometimes it’s a case of cunningly exploiting the new era of mistrust in an established political class with unrealistic but populist policies (Donald Trump’s Wall).
In Game of Thrones, the Wall is 700 feet tall (think two Big Bens stacked on top of each other somehow), 8,000 years old, and made of magic and frozen water. No-one knows exactly how it was built–the ancestors of the Starks and giants are said to have been involved. All we know is that it is essential for dividing the North of the Starks and their allied Houses from the lawless realm of the Free Folk and the mysterious Lands of Always Winter.
It is a thing of rare beauty, even by the standards of fantasy engineering. (In the TV show, the set designers mix their fake Wall snow with sea salt to give it a sparkle suggestive of the magic that built it.) But if we take away magic, the force of gravity would definitely have something to say about that skyscraper tall feat of ice and its feet of clay (as it were). When WIRED magazine asked several engineers about its architectural potential, the prognosis was not good. Ice is a great defensive material, they said: it can withstand plenty of bombardment from the various medieval-style weapons used in Game of Thrones. However, even at sub-zero temperatures, a wall made of ice would begin to ‘deform’ under the pressure of its own colossal weight. The lowermost parts of the Wall would end up bulging outward as the uppermost parts pushed down, similar to how glaciers flow downhill. The way to counteract this would be to build the Wall on a gradient slope, but to keep a 700 foot wall upright it would need to be around 40 times that in width. So, less of a wall, more of an ice rink…
Sounding out
Even in the world of Game of Thrones, the Wall isn’t presented as indestructible. Ygritte tells Jon Snow about the Horn of Winter, a magical instrument which, if blown, will bring the Wall and all its frozen history tumbling down. The wildlings have long been seeking it, rifling through ancient bones in mouldering graves to find the ultimate weapon in their quest to push south into the kingdoms of Westeros. It is so powerful, Ygritte explains, that it can wake sleeping giants. (All over Westeros, everyone’s clamouring to find a magic horn for one reason or another. The Ironborn leader Euron Greyjoy has one at least in the books that he believes will tame dragons and win him Dany and the Seven Kingdoms.)
But what’s the real-world power of an almighty blast of sound?
There is a story in the Bible, much beloved by some young children, of Joshua and Jericho. Joshua was Moses’ second-in-command, and the Bible’s most famous warrior. He was also, it seems, a man with a keen belief in the power of a good horn blast. While besieging the Canaanite city of Jericho, he bid his priests to blow their shofars (a ram’s horn that is blown like a trumpet, and still used in synagogues today, though to slightly less dramatic effect) and the rest of the Israelites to raise a great shout in order to bring down the defensive city walls, which they duly did.
Archaeologists have struggled to find evidence of Joshua’s sonic coup in the historical city of Jericho. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, America’s The Learning Channel decided the time was right for further investigation. Doubting the lung power of even the most highly motivated musical priests, the plan was to determine if some sort of noise generating device might have been at the disposal of Joshua & Co. They commissioned Wyle Laboratories in California to build a small brick wall and pit it against the largest loudspeakers available, turned up to 11. Wyle make a speaker called the WAS 3000 that omits a sound roughly 10,000 times the volume of regular home hi-fi speakers. After just six minutes, the brick wall capitulated and crumbled obligingly before the wall of sound. I don’t think anyone’s suggested that Wyle’s speaker technology was available in the late Bronze Age when Joshua lived, but we’ve kind of proved something here, I guess…
And sound is powerful, we’ve all seen the films where an ill-timed shout or noise brings down a devastating avalanche of snow in the mountains. So could we achieve such results? Is sound a force that can become a weapon?
As ever, the genius Kate Bush may have been on the money with her song ‘Experiment IV’. In the music video, a sinister military commander (played by actor Peter Vaughan, who coincidentally also portrays Maester Aemon, friend to Jon and Samwell in Game of Thrones) secretly forces scientists to create a sound that could kill someone from a distance. There have long been rumours that such a weapon might be in development or possibly may even exist.
Infrasound is usually defined as any sound that is lower in frequency than 20 hertz (just below the limits of normal human hearing). It can be produced naturally from ocean waves and earthquakes, with the 1883 Krakatoa eruption producing infrasound that circled the globe several times.
In the 1960s NASA discovered that such sounds could disrupt respiration, produce headaches and kick off coughing. Strangely, the waves can also move small objects and even cause the flickering of a candle flame, causing some researchers to speculate that they may even be responsible for ghost sightings in a supposed haunted house. More menacingly, these low frequency sounds have also been investigated by the military as a possible source of acoustic weaponry. They are often referred to as the ‘brown note’ as the vibrations can allegedly affect the listener’s bowels, causing them to defecate uncontrollably. Indeed, in 2000 an episode of South Park involved the inadvertent broadcasting of the note on national radio, causing millions to simultaneously empty their bowels.
Continuing US television’s longstanding love affair with making sounds that can ruin absolutely anything, science show MythBusters then examined the idea by subjecting people to high levels of infrasound and discovered that the worst effect involved people feeling nauseous. In short, no need to worry about being acoustically fired upon just yet.
Concerto for Unhappy Cats
In the 17th century, German inventor and scholar Athanasius Kircher invented a number of wacky machines connected to the power of sound and harmony. In the 1600s he pondered building giant ear trumpets into the walls of palaces; he designed an automated head that could ‘speak’. And, most terrifyingly of all, he designed the katzenklavier (a piano made out of cats). What! Well, yes, it’s a keyboard with seven to nine kittens held in cages, whose tails were attached to piano keys fitted with pointy mallets. Each unfortunate feline had a different (not entirely melodious) yowling tone and thus when a note was played the poor cat would react noisily to the tail-based-affront, resulting in a melody of meows.
Fortunately, Kircher never actually built a katzenklavier, and in spite of his eccentricities he’s remembered as a great mind. The Encyclopædia Britannica hails him as a ‘one-man intellectual clearing house’, but maybe those Britannica guys are more dog people? In theory, he imagined it would provide a unique boost to ‘melancholy princes’, surprising them from their gloom and provoking ‘laughter’. And possibly this would work if the prince in question had been Joffrey, but certainly not if it were his cat-loving brother and successor King Tommen, proud owner of the fine feline Ser Pounce (and bonus kittens Boots and Lady Whiskers).
By the way, if you’ve ever wondered who has the time to give their pets affectionate and silly names amidst a backdrop of war and mass killing, such as Westeros or the Middle Ages Medievalist Dr Kathleen Walker-Meikle from University College London has discovered that in the real world Gilbert was the most common given name for cats in England in the Middle Ages; an Irish monk wrote a poem about his beloved cat Pangur Bán (‘Fair Fuller’); and we know a mouser called Mite stalked around Beaulieu Abbey in the 1300s. (Names deemed appropriate for dogs at the time included Troy, Bragge, and, delightfully, Nosewise.)
Dragon Binding
We know that animals can be made to make ungodly sounds, but a second question is how responsive are they to sounds sent their way. Recent research has shown that a great variety of animals–whales, elephants, squid, guinea fowl and rhinoceros–are sensitive to low-frequency sounds, and use sonar to migrate and communicate over vast distances. Whales, for example, use sounds or vocalisations to communicate their wants and needs to each other across the sea. Unfortunately, when it comes to understanding their high-frequency clicks and whistles, we have very little idea what they’re saying.
But can we humans talk to the animals, grunt and squeak and squawk to the animals? The question was posed in the 19th century by another eccentric scientist with an interest in everything and anything: Francis Galton–a Victorian polymath who would possibly be more widely and fondly remembered today had he not also been something of an eye-watering racial supremacist who sort of invented eugenics. But for now, let’s focus on dogs.
Galton had many odd interests. For example, he invented a boredom scale based on observing an audience’s restlessness during lectures and public events. And during his own time as an undergraduate he came up with the Gumpion Reviver, a kind of portable dripping tap to be positioned over the heads of sleepy students to keep them alert. In the early 1880s he placed an ultrasonic whistle in the end of his walking stick and went around London Zoo, noting down which animals responded whenever he produced the sound. He reported that ‘some curiosity is inevitably aroused by the unusual uproar my perambulations provoke in the canine community.’
Galton’s experiments are the reason you can blow a dog whistle and your pet can look at you quizzically for a moment, then go back to intently sniffing the base of a tree. In Game of Thrones, the closest parallel to this would be the dragon horn, with which Euron Greyjoy returns to the Iron Islands, after many years away.
Theon and Yara’s marauding uncle claims he found the horn amongst the smoking ruins of Valyria, home of the dragonlords of old. It is bound with bands of red gold and Valyrian steel graven with enchantments, and has the power to ‘control’ dragons. Dany has had a certain amount of bother getting her dragons to behave nicely in public (and not devour other people’s children), so possibly such a horn could be the answer to all her problems?
Essentially, the dragon horn is a fancy dragon-dog-whistle. And we all know how effective dog whistles can be. In a recent interview, Paul McCartney talked about adding a blast of one to the cacophony of sounds at the end of ‘A Day In The Life’, just to keep the pets of Beatles fans amused. Definitive proof that it’s possible to use sound to devastating effect, and also to control animals (or at least get them to listen to The Beatles).
Against the Wall?
A group of men from all over the Known World are barracked together on the Wall. High- and low-born alike, they have sworn to defend the frontier of civilisation from the barbarous inhabitants beyond: those who will not ‘bend the knee’ to the rulers who govern absolutely everything to the South. Hang on, though, this isn’t the great Wall in Westeros. It’s Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans in A.D. 122 to divide off the portion of Britain that they had managed to subdue and conquer–most of England and Wales–from the portion of it that violently resisted and defied Roman rule until the very last.
Hadrian’s Wall runs for 80 miles coast-to-coast, across the very top edge of England: just south of the current Scottish Border. Constructed from squared stones, it stood 3 metres (9.8 feet) wide, and 5 to 6 metres (16 to 20 feet) high, and was built to last. Some of it is still standing now.
George RR Martin has said that Hadrian’s Wall was the inspiration for his creation. He visited it with a friend, at the end of the day, when all the tourists were leaving, and felt the pull of staring out into nothingness as those Romans must have done. (Well, he was staring towards Scotland, in fact, but I don’t think he meant it rudely.)
When George RR Martin visited the Edinburgh Book Fair in 2015, Scotland was in the middle of the elections to decide whether to remain part of the UK or vote for independence. George was of course asked for his view and suggested a middle ground–whether the vote went to the Yes or No camp, Scotland should investigate constructing a massive wall of ice…