Game of Thrones is built on patterns. People are born and die, houses rise and fall, sons take up the causes of their fathers. The spokes of the wheel turn ever onward. But some patterns aren’t thematic, they are literal. This is particularly true with the Night King and his ominous art installations. Throughout the series, the wight horde has taken time out of their march south to create two symbols: an oval with a line through it and, more frequently, a spiral.
Much digital ink has been spilled as to what these symbols mean. Are they a portent? A warning? A spell? The Night King just exploring his artistic side in his downtime since he probably doesn’t have to eat or sleep and the hours drag without hobbies?
Theories abound, but now the writer for “Winterfell,” the premiere episode of Game of Thrones final season, has clarified the Night King’s purpose. It’s a giant middle finger to his creators. In a recent interview with the New York Post, GoT‘s Dave Hill was asked about the spirals. Shockingly, he gave a straightforward answer.
“As we saw with Bran and the Three-Eyed Raven, the spiral pattern was sacred to the Children of the Forest, who created the Night King by sacrificing a captured man in a spiral ‘henge of stones.’ The Night King then adopted the symbol as a sort of blasphemy, like Satan with the upside-down cross.”
Of course, knowing the initial visual connection between the Children and the Night King’s symbols doesn’t fully explain what the Night King’s purpose is using it now. The spirals could be pulling double duty as both a kiss-off to the diminutive magical race and something else. But what?
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
This theory hinges on a human-centric view of Game of Thrones. The premise is simple. Leaving behind symbols made from dead humans and their horses is demoralizing. Stumbling upon a clearing covered in disembodied corpses sows dissent and confusion. For a human army that is barely holding it together with a series of alliances between traditional enemies, the Night King could be trying to fracture the legions of men to make them easier to defeat.
The only real problem with this theory is the Night King would have no way of knowing his symbols would be found. As his army marches south, it makes it less and less likely that a living person would find these symbols. Unless they are specifically placed using the Night King’s greenseeing for maximum psychological damage, it is more likely the spirals have nothing to do with humanity at all. Of course, this also leads to the question of if the Children of the Forest are more numerous than currently known. Since the Night King is flagrantly blaspheming their religion, does he actually mean for them to see it?
IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY
Many viewers had known for a while that the Night King didn’t invent these symbols, with GoT Executive Producer David Benioff previously explaining in an “Inside the Episode” interview that the patterns were derived from the Children of the Forest – though we didn’t get much in the way of confirmation on what any intent might be behind them until Hill’s interview. In the Season 6 episode “The Door” Bran uses the weirwood tree to travel through time in order to witness the creation of the Night King. Before the First Man is transformed by the Children of the Forest, the camera pans out and up. What it reveals is the very familiar spiral pattern. The weirwood tree sits at the center, with standing stones radiating out in seven curved arms.
Later still, in Season 7, Jon and Daenerys see both the spiral pattern and the earlier bisected oval in cave art left by ancient Children of the Forest. The cave is also the first time audiences are made aware the Children had a form of rudimentary written language. Unless, of course, the cave art was left by the First Men.
Benioff stressed that the symbols had mystical significance for the Children of the Forest. Since the Children retain magic to this day, it’s easy enough to extrapolate the Night King is using the symbols for some kind of magic as well. Jumping off the “weirwood is the center of the spiral” visual, he could be tapping into the magical energies of the earth. For what purpose is anyone’s guess, but the old gods were bloodthirsty creatures. An Iron Island legend from the book The World of Ice & Fire tells of a red-and-white demonic tree that devoured human flesh, while Chapter 29 of A Dance with Dragons reveals the First Men used to hang the entrails of condemned criminals in the branches of weirwoods.
It stands to reason then that performing rituals or spells with human remains would have more magical oomph. In this theory, the Night King is merely consolidating his power in ways that have yet to be revealed to the audience. That the oval from the first episode is removed once a man of the Night’s Watch stumbles upon it could indicate the Night King didn’t even want men to know what he was about. The location of the first symbol is never expanded upon, but both spirals have shown up in places of power. The horses at the Fist of the First Men and the latest, at House Umber’s castle, using the last son of the blood of Umber Kings of old. If the Night King is using these spirals for magic, he is not screwing around.
We asked the community what they think the spirals mean and by far, a link to not only the Children of the Forest but also magic was the most popular theory.
“It [resembles] a Norse symbol representative of the passage of time. That spiral is in quite a few different mythologies, though a lot of the time it’s anti-clockwise, not clockwise as it is in the show (the Norse version is, however, clockwise).” – AanjaCharis6
“Personally I think the symbol is more obvious and it’s just a dying sun, a sign that night is coming for the living.” – Liam Cotton
THE DRAGON CONNECTION
Many fans have noticed the spiral symbology bears a slight resemblance to the symbol of House Targaryen. If you squint, you can almost make out seven or eight points on the circle of the Targaryen sigil, with the dragon heads counting for three arms, the wing points for two, and the loops in the tail counting for the other three. In this theory, the Night King is either related to the Targaryens, shares a history with Old Valyria, or is specifically calling out the remaining “Blood of the Dragon” to do battle with his army.
Even factoring in the symbol’s origins being connected to the Children of the Forest — if you were to theorize that the Targaryens somehow also were influenced by that original Children of the Forest symbol or the Night King’s — the major hiccup here is the timeline. The Targaryens have lived in Westeros for slightly over four centuries by the time of the events of Game of Thrones. 100 of those years were spent living on Dragonstone and having little to do with the mainland. The last 300 saw the Targaryens conquer the entire continent. Which means the Targaryen house sigil is fairly new. The dragonlords of Old Valyria did not have house sigils, so the Targaryens would not have created the three-headed dragon until Aegon the Conqueror and his two sister-wives took the Iron Throne.
Meanwhile, the Night King is ancient. If the same man has been using the title since the Night King’s creation at the hands of the Children of the Forest a millennia ago, it is unlikely he is related to the machinations of the Valyrians. However, if a succession of men has been the Night King, it is within the realm of possibility that somehow a Targaryen or other Valyrian noble ended up with his icy crown. Alternately, if the Night King is the avatar of Ice Magic/Gods and the Targaryens are the avatars of Fire Magic/Gods, it could be a matter of principle, thus linking him to the dragonlords as mortal enemies.
