Name: その他：白き亡者について何かわかったことはありますか？ (Others: what do we know about the white walkers?)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T08:10:25.000Z
Duration: 18 min 38 s
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In the very first chapter of A Song of Ice and Fire and the very first sequence of Game of Thrones,

we see mysterious icy figures called “white walkers”, or “Others”.

At first, we know nothing about them. Now, five books and five seasons later, we… still

know almost nothing. But we “do know some things”, so let's look at what we've got and try to work out what the Others are, what they want, and what'll happen.

The Others appear as “white shadows in the darkness”, “Tall and gaunt”

with “Bright … blue” eyes. They “come when it's cold”, in the night, or else

they bring the cold and darkness when they come. Old Nan calls them “dead things”,

Sam calls them “monsters”, and Stannis calls them “Demons made of snow and ice and cold”,

but when one's killed we see they're “creatures” made of “blood”

and “flesh” and “bone”. George Martin has said that they're “not dead”

but“a different sort of life” – “strange, beautiful … inhuman, elegant, dangerous”.

In the show, the walkers look more or less like really old men with wrinkled skin, white

beards, black nails, and bad teeth. Either way, the Others clearly aren't “dead things”

or “demons” but living creatures. They speak, in a language of their own. They laugh,

they “screech” in pain , in the show they show shock and anger. They make things out of ice.

So the Others are intelligent, with emotion and maybe culture.

They might not be the monsters that they seem. That said, they do a lot of killing.

The Others wear “rippl[ing] … shift[ing]” armour that can make them near-“invisible”,

and wield “strange pale sword[s]” so sharp they can “slice … through ringmail

as if it were silk”. They fight effortlessly, mercilessly, “lightning quick” and

with the strength, in the show, to throw men like ragdolls. “their … swords are so

cold they shatter steel”, and their armour protects them from most blades – they seem

unstoppable. But they can be killed with obsidian, also called dragonglass. Sam stabs an Other

with an obsidian dagger, and the walker “melt[s] away“, its fingers smoking where they touch

obsidian. It's also hinted that Valyrian steel swords can kill walkers , and we see

this in the show – Jon Snow's Valyrian steel sword disintegrates an Other into icy

CGI. Others also apparently “don't like fire” – which probably means they'd

really hate dragons. The Others resurrect the dead as “wights”,

basically zombies controlled by the Others. Wights are “slow clumsy things”, “with

blue eyes and cold black hands”, though in the show they're sometimes skeletal and

fast . Wights don't speak , and seem to have no humanity left – though they seem

to keep some memories. The Others make wights out of “men … women … children” – and

animals – walkers “ride dead horses”, send a bear into battle , and animate a

raven. The Others use wights to fight for them, and they're very dangerous. Wights

seem stronger than living men, able to “[lift a man] in the air by the throat and near [rip]

the head off him”. In the show they tear through timber with their bare hands, they

fall off a cliff and keep on running. They don't seem to feel pain. Even losing their

head won't stop them , and if a hand is cut off, the hand will keep moving. Unlike

the Others, wights aren't hurt by obsidian. The only way to stop them is to chop them

into bits , or to burn them. Wights are really flammable, “burst[ing] into flame” from

even a little touch of fire. So one wight isn't all that bad, but at the Fist of the

First Men, and at Hardhome in the show, they come in a huge “swarm”, an unstoppable

“tide of [the] living dead”, all controlled by the icy white walkers.

So what do the Others want? What are they doing? Well, they've been killing a lot

of humans. In Book 1 they kill some wildlings, and some men of the Night's Watch , and

they send wights after the Lord Commander and acting First Ranger at Castle Black. In

Book 3 they use wights to kill hundreds of Night's Watchmen at the Fist of the First

Men , then Sam kills a walker, and later wights are sent after Sam and Gilly. In Book 5 wights

attack Bran and company , and attack Hardhome. We also learn the Others have been attacking

wildlings for years , forcing them to flee south and “hide behind [the] Wall”. So

the Others are killing humans of many different groups on a large scale, and are building

an army of the dead . But that's not all they're doing.

The wildling Craster refers to the Others as “gods”, and has a sort of an agreement with them.

They don't attack him and his wives , and in return, Craster gives them his male children,

leaving the newborns in the snow to be collected by the Others. In the show, there's a scene

where an Other takes one of Craster's sons to a kind of an altar in what looks like the

far-north Land of Always Winter. There, the baby is changed into what looks like an Other.

One of Craster's wives refers to the Others as “Craster's sons”. So it looks like

the Others can transform humans into Others, and that some people give their children to

the Others as a religious offering. It's probably not just Craster doing this. There

are all sorts of “strange” wildling cultures further to the north, and some of them are

rumoured to worship “gods of snow and ice”. Sacrifice to the Others may be a widespread

thing. The word Others is used as a curse, like a swear word, and the phrase is almost

always “The Others take you”. It's not 'the Others kill you”, or 'the Others

steal your stuff' – it is sometimes 'the Others bugger you' – but it's almost

always “the Others take you”, suggesting that the Others have a history of taking humans.

We also hear stories of “wildlings who would lay with the Others to birth half-human children”,

which sounds like a different thing, but either way, the Others clearly don't just

want to kill humans, but also want to use them make more Others. Maybe that's the

only way Others can reproduce, maybe this is part of some kind of natural cycle. For

now, we don't know. What we do know is that the Others are killing people, they're building

an army of the dead, and winter is coming. Melisandre says they're “marshalling”

their “evil” “power” and will wage “a war for life itself”, that they'll

bring a “night that never ends”, unless “true men” can fight them in a “great

battle” called “the war for the dawn”. Stannis calls the Others “The only enemy

that matters”. Jon calls them the “real foe” and says “they will come for us”.

Everyone's expecting war between humanity and the Others.

Which could make sense, because a “war for the dawn” has apparently happened before.

We're told legends of “the Long Night” – a dark winter, thousands of years ago,

that lasted a generation. It's said that “In that darkness, the Others came”, to

“extinguish all light and warmth”. “They swept over holdfasts and cities and kingdoms,

felled heroes and armies by the score, riding” “monstrous ice spiders and the horses of

the dead”, “leading hosts of the slain”. When “the realms of men” were almost

at “an end”, Westeros was saved by the “last hero”, who, with the “help”

of the children of the forest – who might have given him obsidian – established the

Night's Watch, and defeated the Others in battle. After this victory, the Wall was

built to make sure the Others could never came back. So that's the story in Westeros.

Across the Narrow Sea, the Rhoynar have legends of a darkness, but there's no mention of

the Others or a battle. In central Essos, the Dothraki and the cultures of Slaver's

Bay seem to have no tales of the Long Night. But in the far east, there are legends very

similar to the one of the “last hero” and the “battle for the dawn”.

The YiTish say that during the Long Night they were attacked by the “Lion of Night” and his “demons”,

who were defeated when a hero called Azor Ahai forged a burning sword and led humanity

into battle. Now, huge mysterious citadels called the Five Forts stand to keep the demons

out, dividing the “realms of men” from the Grey Waste beyond . Which sounds a lot

like the Wall, right? And the “demons” of the “Lion of Night” sound a lot like

the Others. Isn't it super weird that such similar things happened on apparently opposite

sides of the world? George Martin has said that his world is round, so if you went far

enough east you must eventually find Westeros. Maybe these two places, the Grey Waste and

the Land of Always Winter, are connected. Maybe the Others of Westeros and the “demons”

字幕リスト動画再生

その他：白き亡者について何かわかったことはありますか？ (Others: what do we know about the white walkers?)

apparently

sense

sacrifice

mysterious