Monsters of Ice and Fire: The Others

Here on the Monsters of Ice and Fire series, we examine the various creatures in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. What are their roots, mythical and otherwise? What is their meaning? I’ve waited a long while to take a proper look at the most recognizable monster of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, but it’s time. With our exploration of the undead hopefully fresh in everyone’s mind, it’s time to dive deep into the Others (or the White Walkers). I’d like to propose that, depending on how you look at them, the Others are either the most interesting or least interesting monsters in the world of Ice and Fire.

Are the Others Boring?

The Others are very boring in the sense that there is little in the way of examples of humanoid ice monsters from cultural or literary history I could dig up and present to you. Well, it’s not that there’s nothing to talk about, but nothing on the nose. The Others have antecedents, but none that resemble them exactly, and there aren’t many.

However, this is also why the Others could be considered especially interesting. The Others are the most unique monsters in A Song of Ice and Fire, and present a kind of monstrosity we can’t get anywhere else. That element is very important when talking about monsters, since monstrosity is to a large degree about shock and the unseen. And what’s more shocking than something completely new?

Before we come back to how unique the Others actually are, let’s focus on the few historical antetypes we do have. We’ve already covered the undead, which is closely tied with the Others, and we touched on elemental spirits in the essay about sea monsters. Now, let’s bring them together.

Undead Elementals

In the Undead essay, I proposed that, in addition to being creatures who control the undead, the Others are not themselves unlike the undead in several ways. They are humanoids, very likely even former human beings — on Game of Thrones, we know this is the case with the White Walkers — whose bloodstream has either stopped or fundamentally changed and whose body temperature does not resemble what we are used to from living creatures. They are also yet to show empathy for humans, and ostensibly lack the capability for empathy of any kind, just like many varieties of undead.

So like the undead, the Others are changed human beings, or human beings who lack crucial human traits. We can see this idea at work in the story of “the Night’s Queen,” an Other woman who purportedly seduced a Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch thousands of years in Westeros’ past. She seems very much human, even to the extent that she can seduce a human man, yet there lurks something profoundly inhuman within her. This is not specific to undead monsters, but a trait that many kinds of monsters share; think of human-animal hybrids like centaurs or sphinxes, for example. We can say that, much like the undead (and other monsters), the Others are human-inhuman hybrids, but they also resemble the undead…they don’t have a working circulatory system in the conventional sense, their bodies are cold, etc.

So that’s the undead part. Next: What are elementals? Unfortunately, there is no satisfying academic answer to that question. There are Paracelsus’ Elementargeister — beings of pure air, water, fire and earth — and plentiful elemental spirits of nature, but neither come close to elementals as they are most commonly depicted in pop culture these days. For that, we must turn to…video games.

Unlike Paracelsus’ creatures or the Naiads of Greek mythology, the elementals of pop culture are typically not much human-looking lesser gods and goddesses, personifications of the elements, but super human-sized humanoids made solely from those elements and wielding their power in concentrated form. In this context, the Others would qualify as ice elementals. Ice is not strictly an element, no matter which system we are talking about. In Europe, four “classical” elements — the ones named above — have been the norm from antiquity through the establishment of proper chemistry during the Enlightenment. Daoist and Buddhist traditions tell of five elements. While disciplines disagree concerning air, wood, metal and space, all of them agree that fire, water and earth are elements…and that ice is not. But in fantasy video games, that isn’t a problem, so that’s where we’ll draw our comparison.

Video Games And Culture

The ice elemental as a trope is pretty clear cut — it’s a being made from ice, having ice-like properties and wielding the power of ice — but it has no fixed idea or concept, no theory or system common to all its instances. There is at least a trend, though. For example, the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft has an ice elemental (and many other ice creatures we would loosely describe as ice elementals). WoW’s ice elemental is a big, broad creature made from ice. It is described as an “elemental conglomerate”, a combination of more than one element, the two elements in this case being water and air. That said, it does not seem to be equal parts water and air. While WoW’s ice elementals resemble earth elementals in many ways, they are predominantly creatures of water; they drop items related to water, cannot be mined and serve Neptulon the Tidehunter, the Elemental Lord of Water. A lot of other games depict ice elementals in this way, as a variation on water elementals.

If we compare the Others to the ice elementals from video games, we can see that they are different. For one thing, their frames are much more delicate. They are human-sized and humanoid. More importantly, though, they appear to have no special connection to water at all, beyond the fact that they don’t seem fond of swimming. It is the cold itself they represent, not frozen water.

Before There Was Chemistry

Classical elemental theory has a thing or two to teach us about the cold, too. So maybe we can reconcile that with the video game ice elemental?

Easier said than done. Each of the four classical elements represent a combination of two qualities, hot or cold on the one hand and wet or dry on the other. The two cool elements are water (wet) and earth (dry), while air is considered hot and wet. So in classical terms, an ice elemental that represents the cold could be made of water and earth, but not air.

There is another group of creatures similar to the Others we should keep in mind. This group is much more diverse and has a much longer history. Let’s call them personifications of winter. Since we have been talking a lot about pop culture, we might as well throw Disney’s Frozen into the mix. Unlike the elementals we talked about above, the lead character in that movie, the princess Elsa, does not consist of frozen water, but she does control the powers of cold. Disney did not invent Elsa for its 2013 movie; Frozen is based on The Snow Queen (Snedronningen), a story written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen and published in 1844.

Fairy Tales of Ice (and Fire)

More so than Disney’s Elsa, Andersen’s Snow Queen is mysteriously connected to death. Also, in Anderson’s version, she steals children. We also find these two aspects in the Others. The character in A Song of Ice and Fire most closely resembling the Snow Queen in our old friend the Night’s Queen. Anderson’s Snow Queen kisses her victims up to three times, the first to numb the feeling of cold (which seems to mean making them immune to the cold outright), the second to make them forget their earlier life, and the third to kill them. It’s a fairy tale expression of the idea that freezing to death is a somewhat agreeable way to die. The human body turns a feeling of cold and pain into a relatively pleasant feeling of warmth and tiredness at some point, leading people in the process of freezing to death to no longer struggle and just lay down and die instead, supposedly not suffering as much anymore. By the time the victim receives the last kiss, so to speak, they are no longer fighting it.

Another interesting connection: there is a talking crow in The Snow Queen; it tells Gerda, the protagonist, where to find her brother Kai, the Snow Queen’s victim. And in A Song of Ice and Fire, the Three-Eyed Crow is one of the main bulwarks against the advance of the White Walkers. It’s probably a coincidence, but still interesting to point out.

Andersen’s fairy tales are known as “original fairy tales” (or “Kunstmärchen” in German, which means “art fairy tales”) This is in contrast to traditional fairy tales, which are thought to have evolved naturally and been told by ordinary people throughout the centuries. That said, Anderson’s work is deeply rooted in (folk) fairy tale lore and Germanic mythology, or at least Andersen’s understanding of them.

The Circle of Life and the Cycle of Seasons

More interesting may be the Slavic fairy tale tradition. Take the figure of Ded Moroz, who is seemingly little more than a Slavic equivalent to Santa Claus but ultimately has more to offer.

Ded Moroz is thought to have originated as the son of the god Veles and the goddess Mara. Both deities are closely linked to both death and the cycle of the seasons. The connection between the cycle of seasons and the circle of life in general is in no way special to Slavic mythology, but rather a near-constant throughout mythologies of cultures in non-tropical climates. Winter means death for a variety of plants and insects and used to be a much more dangerous time of year for human beings. Predictably, it has always been used as a metaphor for death drawing close or death itself.

In the Others, we see all of these things closely intertwined. The Others literally bring death, but they also bring a winter much harsher than most people in our world will have experienced — they represent a damaged cycle of season much more dangerous then the one we know. They have characteristics of the undead. They represent the death that winter brings to plants and insects, but they are also the symbol and the core of an icy apocalypse, a new level of death.

Scary Perfection

Now that we’ve looked at the Others’ few mythological ancestors, we can properly look at them as monsters. We have already talked about how the Others are similar to the undead and other hybrid monsters since they mix human traits with shockingly inhuman ones. The Others seem human to the extent that they can be perceived as beautiful, much in the same way that we can find a well-formed human body beautiful. It’s a bit of paradox: humans generally find symmetry and an absence of flaws attractive. The more a creature deviates from this ideal, the uglier or even monstrous we find it, or so you would think. The Others’ perfection, though, lacks this attractive quality in part because perfection is inhuman. Symmetry is attractive. Perfect symmetry is uncomfortable.

In western religion, the paradigmatic example for monstrous perfection is the abrahamitic god. (The word “monstrous” might be inappropriate here, but the word itself doesn’t matter much.) Let’s open our bibles real quick to see what I mean. Sample this passage about God from  Exodus 33:18-23:

"Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” And the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”"

While there are different interpretations as to why seeing the abrahamitic god in all his glory means death, the idea that it would simply be overwhelming seems the most common, and the one I want to talk about. We see something similar when the angel approaches the shepherds in Luke 2:10-11 to tell them: “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” The shepherds have to be told not to be afraid in the face of the angels’ glory, which is obviously inferior compared to God’s. I guess we can say we see a variation of this at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, too, when the faces of the Nazis quite literally melt away when the ark’s interior is revealed.

The Philosophy of the Others

When I hear about “the Others,” I can’t help but think of the philosophical concept of “the Other,” which can mean two things. In a strictly Hegelian sense, the Other is the opposite of the Self that is needed to define what the Self is, where it begins, where it ends, what its essence is. The Other can also be understood as that which possesses absolute alterity. This absolute Other is not the same as the Hegelian Other, because while the Hegelian Other is a construct produced by the Self, the absolutely Other is incomprehensible to the Self. It’s out there, and we don’t know where it came from.

That said, we can also understand these concepts as two sides of the same coin. Since the absolute Other (not the Self’s idea of the Other) can only be understood by the Self through the concepts of the Self, the Other can never be truly known in the same way the Self can — it cannot be known on its own terms, because we cannot shed our preconceptions dictated by the Self.

With all that in mind, we must ask ourselves how much alterity — how much otherness — there actually is in the Others of A Song of Ice and Fire. The answer are not readily available. We do not yet know for sure if the Others are just former humans like the White Walkers on the show, most of whom are turned as babies. They might be just like humans, with their differences due mainly to indoctrination (other than the physical differences, anyway). Perhaps the Others cast the humans as their Other to define their Self, as happens the other way around.

The Uncanny Valley

When it comes to what scares us the most, there is an interesting relationship between what we can perceive with our senses and what we can imagine. Take the concept of the uncanny valley.  The hypothesis is that the more closely a human-like entity — usually a robot — resembles a human being, the more affinity we feel towards it. However, at some point, that trend stops and reversing itself. The robot gets more and more sympathetic until it reaches a threshold beyond which it suddenly becomes creepy, only to reach another threshold beyond which the old trend resumes, somewhat counterintuitively.

This idea applies not just to robots but also aliens, fantastic creatures and monsters from A Song of Ice and Fire. The Others are at their most scary — visually, sonically and otherwise — the deeper they get into the uncanny valley. (We can imagine the Others of the books to be more uncanny then the White Walkers of Game of Thrones; on the page, our heroes are more shocked at the very existence of what they thought were fairy tale creatures.) If they were truly different from humans in every way, they might not have the same frightening effect.

But either way, the Others combine uncanniness with alterity to unsettling effect. They are human and not human, familiar and unfamiliar, terrestrial and alien. They are one of the most — if not the most — enduring monsters George R.R. Martin has created.

To stay up to date on everything Game of Thrones, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Watch Game of Thrones for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels