The Crow Who Flew Down From the Wall

An Archetype of Freedom

Do most people want to be free? Do you want to be free? Maybe you believe in freedom as an idea, or ideal, but do you live it? I wonder, while writing this, if there are people who’ve fought and died to defend a freedom that they themselves couldn’t fully embrace in their own lives.

I think of a stoic fighting for an indulgent utopia, or a repressed relative defending the wild child of the family.

Those who prize the idea of freedom, are not always the ones who can truly live it in practice. There are some, though, who can. My example is fictional, but there are enough in the flesh for me to know they exist. Far, far more than just exist.

Mance Rayder is a character from A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones). He was born to wildling parents, somewhere beyond The Wall. His origins are firmly rooted in the Free Folk, but as a child, Mance was taken in by the Night's Watch after a group of brothers found him. They raised him at Castle Black and trained him as a ranger.

The Night’s Watch, at least by this point in its history, is less a noble brotherhood and more a penal colony wrapped in black. It is a place where men - thieves, rapists, murderers, bastards, and those of high birth with nowhere else to go - find themselves sworn to service for life, defending the realm from threats beyond the Wall. In exchange, they give up everything: family names, titles, lands, and any future beyond their role. Despite his heritage, Mance embraced the Night's Watch life. He swore the oaths. Did his duty. Took the black.

But perhaps it is true that you cannot change a man’s nature.

One night, on a ranging expedition beyond the wall, Mance and his brothers in black brought down a fine giant Elk. A feast for sure, but not one you can lay easy claim to. No dinner reservations in the wild. The smell of its blood, when skinning it, drew a shadow cat out of its lair. They fought it off, but not without near fatal wounds. It shredded Mance’s skin and he bled worse than the elk. His brothers, fearing he might die before they got him back to the Maester, turned to a wildling woman known to be a healer.

She cleaned his wounds, sewed him up, fed him porridge and potions until he was strong enough to ride again. She sewed up his black cloak too, with scarlet silk that her grandmother had pulled from the wreck of a cog washed up on the Frozen Shore in the distant land of Asshai. It was her greatest treasure, which she gifted to him.

When he returned, The Night’s Watch insisted that he throw the red-strewn cloak away, and re-don the all black cloak, to go with the all black breeches and black boots.

It’s funny, the things that make someone snap in body or mind. A small movement throws your back out. A slight, on the edge of a sentence, ends a friendship. A thought - simple at first - that something is not quite right, watered by ever more signs of that same not-quite-rightness, grows.

His tattered cloak was proof of life.

Vitality. Adventure. A memento, hard-earned in the thrill of a near miss. The threads, red, like scars; the marks life leaves on us. It’s a story, be it bad or good, but our own all the same.

It is here that the Night’s Watch show their hand. Everyone there is recast as a blank slate and kept that way. It’s a subjugation of the individual will. Dehumanising. This won’t do for any spirit who lusts after life, after freedom.

Mance abandons the watch. A crow who flew down from the wall.

His desertion was not an act of rebellion; it was a reclaiming of identity. He wandered among the Free Folk, learning their ways, playing his lute, and winning their respect not by birthright but by wit and daring. He did what no man before him had done - he united them, and became a king in the process.

Jon: Are you a true king?

Mance: I've never had a crown on my head or sat my arse on a bloody throne, if that's what you're asking. My birth is as low as a man's can get, no septon's ever smeared my head with oils, I don't own any castles, and my queen wears furs and amber, not silk and sapphires. I am my own champion, my own fool, and my own harpist.

— Jon Snow and Mance

Part showman. Part conman. A fox in wolf’s clothing. Tricksy bird. Singing, somewhere at the edge of the world, waiting to see if the wind dares push him off. Free.