Mance Rayder

Mance Rayder

King-Beyond-the-Wall

House / Order	None (free folk)
Race / Culture
Status	Alive (in the novels)
Origin	Beyond the Wall; The North
Born	Unknown
Died	—
Weapon
Fate	Captured at the Wall; secretly spared by Melisandre through a glamour and sent on a covert mission
Portrayed by

The Wall can stop an army, but not a man alone.

Mance Rayder is the King-Beyond-the-Wall, the wildling leader who united the scattered and feuding free folk into a single great host to march south against the Wall. A former brother of the Night's Watch who forsook his vows, Mance is a charismatic, cunning, and music-loving leader whose goal is not conquest but escape, to bring his people through the Wall and away from the rising threat of the Others.

Background

Mance was found as a child and raised by the Night's Watch, serving as a ranger of considerable skill. His break with the Watch came over a small thing, by his own telling: after a ranging in which a wildling woman mended his torn cloak with a patch of red silk, his fellow brothers demanded he cut the bright patch away to keep the black of his uniform pure. Unwilling to give up that small token of warmth and beauty, and resentful of the Watch's rigidity, he deserted to live among the free folk.

King-Beyond-the-Wall

Among the wildlings, Mance achieved what no leader before him had managed: he united the giants, the cannibal Thenns, the cave-dwellers, the raiders, the spearwives, and a hundred other quarrelsome peoples under a single banner. He did this not by birthright, which the free folk despise, but by force of personality, persuasion, and the shared terror of the Others gathering in the cold lands beyond.

When Jon Snow was sent beyond the Wall, he infiltrated Mance's host as a turncloak. Jon found the King-Beyond-the-Wall to be shrewd and personable, and Mance, suspecting his loyalties, tested him repeatedly. Mance also undertook a daring solo reconnaissance of Winterfell disguised as a singer during a wedding feast.

War at the Wall

Mance led his vast host against Castle Black, assaulting the Wall from north and south. The defense held against tremendous odds until the host of Stannis Baratheon arrived and shattered the wildling army from the rear. Mance was taken captive. Stannis intended to burn him as a king who would not kneel, and a man was indeed burned in his cage before the watchers.

In truth, the red priestess Melisandre had used a glamour to disguise the Lord of Bones in Mance's likeness for the burning, secretly sparing the real Mance. She and Jon Snow then dispatched the disguised Mance, with a band of spearwives, on a covert mission south to Winterfell to rescue a girl believed to be Arya Stark from the Boltons. As of the latest published novel, his fate after that mission is uncertain.

Character

Mance Rayder is a leader of rare gifts, valuing freedom, music, and the lives of his people over crowns and conquest. His title of king is, by his own account, a thing he wears lightly, a necessary fiction to bind a free people who bow to no one. He stands as a bridge between the world of the Watch and the world of the free folk, understanding both.

In the television series

In HBO's Game of Thrones, Mance Rayder is portrayed by Ciarán Hinds. The series has him truly burned at the stake by Stannis, with Jon Snow mercifully ending his suffering by arrow; it omits the glamour and the covert mission of the novels.

Appearances

• A Storm of Swords
• A Dance with Dragons