Others

The Others are an ancient, elusive enemy whose return is associated with cold, snow, darkness, and the animation of the dead. Accounts preserved at the Citadel and discussed by Samwell Tarly describe them as beings against whom ordinary human weapons are largely ineffective, while scattered testimony from the Night’s Watch connects them to the Age of Heroes, the Long Night, and the need to burn the dead lest they rise as thralls.

Identity and Legendary Record

The surviving knowledge of the Others is inconsistent and explicitly mediated through old tales. Samwell Tarly finds accounts stating that the Others come when it is cold, or that their coming causes the cold; some say they appear in snowstorms and vanish when the skies clear, while others reverse the relationship and claim that night falls when they emerge. This instability does not erase the threat, but it makes the historical record itself part of the problem: the Night’s Watch possesses warnings without possessing a single reliable explanation.

The stories place the Others in the Age of Heroes, when the Children of the Forest supposedly gave the Night’s Watch a hundred obsidian daggers each year. Other remembered tales mention figures such as Brandon the Builder, Symeon Star-Eyes, and the Night’s King, placing the enemy within a vast and partially legendary chronology. The age of the records is underscored by uncertainty over the succession of Lord Commanders: Samwell notes that the oldest list he has found names only six hundred seventy-four, despite the Watch’s claim that Jon Snow is its nine hundred and ninety-eighth commander. The discrepancy suggests how much institutional memory has been lost or distorted.

Powers and Forms of Threat

The Others are said to hide from sunlight and emerge by night. Some accounts describe them riding the corpses of dead animals, including bears, direwolves, mammoths, and horses. Samwell considers the account of an Other mounted on a dead horse plainly credible because that is how Small Paul’s killer appeared. The tales also speak of giant ice spiders, though Samwell admits that he does not know what those creatures are. These details broaden the threat beyond a hostile people: the Others are associated with a world in which death itself becomes a means of movement and attack.

Their most consequential power is the apparent ability to turn fallen men into thralls. Samwell concludes that men killed by the Others must be burned, or the dead will rise again. This warning transforms battlefield practice into a matter of survival. Death cannot be treated as the end of an encounter, because an unburned corpse may return to serve the enemy.

Weapons and Vulnerabilities

The Others’ armor is described as proof against most ordinary blades, while their own swords are so cold that they can shatter steel. Their resistance to conventional weapons explains why the question posed after Samwell’s research is not whether the old tales are interesting, but how the enemy can actually be fought. The answer remains partial but concrete: fire dismays them, and they are vulnerable to obsidian, also called dragonglass.

Samwell’s confidence in obsidian comes from direct experience. He remembers confronting one in the haunted forest and stabbing it with the dragonglass dagger Jon Snow made for him; the creature appeared to melt away. That remembered encounter gives physical weight to traditions that might otherwise seem merely folkloric. It also connects the ancient practice of supplying the Night’s Watch with obsidian daggers to a present weapon that has already proved effective.

A further account of the Long Night speaks of the last hero killing Others with a blade of dragonsteel, which supposedly could withstand them. Samwell’s first interpretation is Valyrian steel, though the evidence does not establish that the two materials are identical. The uncertainty surrounding dragonsteel therefore mirrors the broader condition of knowledge about the Others: the records preserve possible answers, but not enough certainty to make them safely interchangeable.

Material Signs and Wider Powers

The Others are indirectly connected to objects that carry knowledge across otherwise separated communities. The Citadel’s glass candles are described as ancient obsidian candles brought from Valyria a thousand years before the Doom; four are said to exist, one green and three black. Their ritual use among acolytes is tied to testing whether a person can light an obsidian candle without any other source of illumination, while failure leaves the candidate waiting in darkness with cut fingers from the candles’ razor-sharp ridges.

Archmaester Marwyn’s black candle provides a more immediate image of this strange material tradition. It is three feet tall, slender as a sword, ridged, twisted, and glittering black. Its flame does not flicker even when the door slams hard enough to send papers flying, and its light makes whites shine like fresh snow, yellows like gold, and reds like flame while rendering shadows as black as holes. Marwyn identifies the substance as dragonglass and says that it burns without being consumed. The candle is not itself presented as an Other, but its obsidian body and unnatural light place it within the same network of ancient materials through which the novel’s hidden history becomes perceptible.

Northern War and Narrative Significance

The evidence makes the Others a boundary between forgotten knowledge and immediate danger. Samwell’s research recovers reports of cold, darkness, dead mounts, ice spiders, reanimated corpses, obsidian, fire, and dragonsteel, but the Night’s Watch already knows the central problem: survival depends on discovering how those fragments can be turned into an effective defense. The Others therefore expose the cost of institutional neglect. A society can preserve titles, lists, rituals, and legends while losing the practical knowledge those forms once carried.

Their power also appears through defamiliarized material objects rather than through a complete explanation of their society or motives. Dragonglass is at once an archaeological relic, a ritual substance, and a weapon. The glass candles are simultaneously ceremonial tests, ancient Valyrian survivals, and signs of a force that exceeds ordinary physical rules. Against this network of objects, the Others remain deliberately underexplained. What is certain is not their full nature, but the pattern of consequences surrounding them: cold accompanies their emergence, ordinary blades fail, fire and obsidian offer resistance, and the unburned dead may become part of their army.