Tony Black on Bran’s Cold Handed saviour…
MAJOR spoilers for Game of Thrones – Season 6 Episode 6 – ‘Blood of My Blood’.
So hands up who thought Bran Stark was dead meat after the traumatic end of ‘The Door’? With poor old Hodor fulfilling his manifest destiny, his all-seeing Raven mentor cut to ribbons, and an undead army on his tail deep in the haunted forests beyond the Wall, it surely seemed like Bran and erstwhile protector Meera Reed had absolutely nowhere to run. Anyone who had a savvy eye on one of the Season Six trailers however–trailers which cleverly managed to suggest and hint at almost everything this relentlessly paced season has thus far thrown at us without spoiling anything directly–would have noticed what looked like Bran & Meera being rescued by a mysterious rider on horseback from an attack in the middle of ice and snow. The recent episode, ‘Blood of My Blood’, proved this to be the case and fuelled some major recent rumours as to who their enigmatic saviour might be.
The answer is twofold – both a character we haven’t seen in the show for a *very* long time and indeed somebody readers of George R.R. Martin’s books have been waiting to show up on the series for ages. It’s been a veritable two for one and given we’re in uncharted territory, it’s hard to say if this–like Hodor’s fate–was Martin’s plan all along, or David Benioff & D.B. Weiss continue to venture off the reservation into their own waters.
Let’s take a look at one side of the two-headed coin that makes up Bran’s saviour, first. Benjen Stark. Remember him? Probably not but you should have done, because he’s been a conspicuously dangling thread since almost the very beginning. The brother of long-deceased Ned Stark, and uncle to Bran, Rickon, Arya, Sansa and of course Jon, Benjen appeared in the first three episodes as a loyal, wise chap – a typical Stark, basically, which meant he was always meant for a terrible fate. Benjen had actually taken the black following the events of Robert’s Rebellion, which saw the deaths of his father Rickard & sister Lyanna, though it’s not entirely clear why; when he appears at Winterfell in ‘Winter Is Coming’ to attend the feast celebrating King Robert Baratheon’s arrival, he’s not disgraced or dishonoured like many who turn to the Night’s Watch. He holds the title of First Ranger, a prestigious position, and it’s he indeed who recruits Jon into the Watch when his #bastardproblems get a bit too much.
Before he can become the Obi-Wan to Jon’s Anakin (or should that be Luke?) however, Benjen heads off ranging beyond the Wall and disappears without a trace. His two fellow riders return but are quickly dispatched at Castle Black when they reanimate as wights–the name for the undead zombies killed by the White Walkers aka the Others–and it quickly becomes the belief of Jon and almost everyone else that Benjen can’t have survived; but that doesn’t stop Lord Commander Jeor Mormont (miss that guy!) from taking Jon and a search party beyond the Wall partly in search for him… which leads to pretty much everything that happened to the Watch involving Craster, the wildlings and the White Walkers for, oh, about four seasons! Benjen has a lot to answer for, especially given it appears he’s always been out there learning how to kill wights in utterly badass ways, hanging with the Raven and the Children of the Forest, and pretty much reinventing himself as ‘Coldhands’.
Who the heck is ‘Coldhands’? I hear you all cry, and with good question, because this is an interesting dude from Martin’s books who hasn’t yet shown up in Game of Thrones. He first appears in A Storm of Swords as “a figure with hands as black and cold as ice”, wearing a scarf covering his face and the mottled remains of a Night’s Watch cloak, riding a giant elk. He doesn’t breathe and his eyes are black, while a flock of ravens follow him. By all intents and purposes, he appears to be a wight but different; not quite alive but not quite dead either. When he arrives to save Samwell Tarly & Gilly beyond the Wall, he directs them under the Black Gate of the Nightfort and commands them to bring him Bran Stark. He subsequently takes Bran, Hodor, Meera & Jojen Reed to the weirwood tree where the ‘Three Eyed Crow’ lives, only he can’t enter, much like he can’t pass through the Black Gate under the Wall. Magic appears to bind him to the cold, yet doesn’t command him as one of the undead.
We don’t yet know his identity, but while Martin has claimed he is not Benjen Stark in the books, this could well be misdirection; though Leaf, one of the Children, suggests in the books he is ‘centuries’ old, which doesn’t tally of course with Benjen. Nonetheless, he appears to be formerly of the Watch, so if he’s not Benjen in the books, he’s certainly someone of import who took the black and now seems to serve the Crow who he delivers Bran to in A Dance of Dragons. The show changed the details on how Bran & his depleted team reached the Raven, but now it appears instead of saving Sam & Gilly, Coldhands has now become Benjen in the show continuity in order to save Bran & Meera, and perhaps he too will take them under the Black Gate to the Nightfort so Bran can make it across the Wall with his new-found Raven power.
If we can assume in the show then that Benjen and Coldhands are one and the same, what do we know about how this transformation happened? Benjen explains how after he went beyond the Wall, he was stabbed in the gut by a White Walkers’ sword and left to die, only to be saved by the Children of the Forest who used the same dragonglass magic that created the Walkers to reverse the process and save Benjen. He has been left a cold, shadowy, disfigured version of the man he used to be, and presumably in the intervening years became something of an acolyte of the Raven, learning some of his secrets and perhaps waiting in the wings as a countermeasure in case the Night’s King managed to find Bran, and stop his training to become the new Raven. Even if not Benjen, could this be Coldhands’ function in the books too? It would make an element of sense, especially if similar problems face Bran ultimately in The Winds of Winter, Martin’s next novel which will likely be released after the heat death of the universe at his current speed of writing.
What’s clear now in the show is that Benjen knows who Bran is, what he can do, who he has become, and when the Walkers venture beyond the Wall, it’s Bran who has to be there waiting for them. To do what, we don’t know. Maybe Benjen Coldhands does, but for now he’s not telling. However long he acts as their protector, let’s hope it’s long enough to finally get Bran to safety, and finally reach the understanding everyone in Westeros may be counting on for survival.
Tony Black
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Originally published May 30, 2016. Updated April 13, 2018.
