“Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.”
-Oath of the Night’s Watch, Game of Thrones, G. R. R. Martin
The life and deeds of Alexander the Great, king of Macedon and conqueror of the Persian Empire, inspired myths and fanciful imaginings long after his death in 323 BCE. Among these was the legends of the Gates of Alexander. Though not begun by Christian authors, the legend eventually became popular among Christians interests in political and especially apocalyptic prophecies.
According to the story, while campaigning in the East, Alexander came upon a coalition of particularly savage and powerful armies. Rather than fight them, he ordered that in a mountain pass a wall be built, made of iron with magic worked into the structure itself, with a gate that could not be opened – at least, not until the appointed time. The peoples on the other side, according to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors, were the prophetic and mysteriously powerful armies of Gog and Magog. It was said that the gates, often thought to lie in the Caucasus Mountains, would be broken at the start of the End Times. The fierce and bloodthirsty armies would pour out of their prison to ravage the civilized lands, terrorizing all good and holy peoples. Fanciful historians throughout time have attempts to give historical identities to these hordes, from the Scythians to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Whoever they were, their emergence would mean that the End had finally come.
The fact that the identity of Gog and Magog changed throughout the life of this apocalyptic legend is important. As people tried to place recognizable features and names to the mysterious Gog and Magog, they revealed what they considered to be things or peoples they considered suspect, reprehensible, or enemies waiting for a chance to slaughter without mercy. They projected their biases across Alexander’s Gates, painting the hordes beyond to resemble those they hated and distrusted in the world around them. This habit is not unique to the Alexander legend.
Emperor Hadrian erected a wall across northern England in the 2nd century to establish the limit of Roman military power. While it remained fortified, though there was violence between Romans and locals (the same was true wherever Rome had an armed border), there was also the peaceful movement of people and trade. It was a semipermeable barrier. Hadrian’s Wall might have been seen as the end of the Roman Empire’s political authority, but it was not the edge of the world – those who lived on it did not expect to fall off if they crossed it. Despite this historical reality, the myth of Hadrian’s Wall as a boundary between the civilized and the barbaric, order and chaos, peace and war, or life and death, has remained a popular idea. Movies like The Last Legion (2007), Centurion (2010), The Eagle (2011), and King Arthur (2004) use Hadrian’s Wall in this very manner. Even when some peoples on the other side are presented in a more sympathetic light, the lands north of the wall are still shown as threatening for any Rome to enter. The Great Wall of China has been used in similar ways.
In art, prophecy, and popular culture, these walls must stand – or else! But “or else” what? Or else death and destruction, the ruining of a proud, noble culture? Roman legions left off manning Hadrian’s Wall because of tax problems and internal issues back on continental Europe. Their wall fell because they abandoned it; it was not overwhelmed by “barbarians.” China’s Great Wall has been reworked and expanded many times over the centuries to keep out the nomadic steppe peoples. But when the Mongols came in, they made China the center of the largest empire the world has even seen. These are the historical realities, and they clash with our expectations of what happens when a wall is breached. Why is that? Because, for a variety of historical, cultural, or psychological reasons, when we see walls, we have the propensity to imagine they are protecting us from something. The great the wall, the greater the danger, or so we assume.
The best example of a wall in popular culture today is the Wall in HBO’s Game of Thrones. It is a 600-foot-tall wall of ice, stretching from sea to sea, blocking off the northern barbaric peoples from the civilized southerners (an image G. R. R. Martin lifted and exaggerated from ideas surrounding Hadrian’s Wall). The oath that the Night’s Watch (the defenders of the) take dehumanizes those on the other side. “I am the watcher on the walls. I am the shield that guards the realms of men.” Are not their enemies also men? Martin’s books and the TV series is good enough later on to (somewhat) humanize the “Free Folk” north of the Wall. Ultimately, though these people are raiders and live lives antithetical to the rigid hierarchies of their southern neighbors, these people are not apocalyptic enemies destined to bring complete ruin to Westeros (though some guarding the Wall have thought so). They are people, and Martin loves making villains sympathetic while tainting heroes.
And yet there is a 600-foot wall. There must be a great evil on the other side. And indeed there is. An army of the dead, raised by ancient, cursed souls, are waiting on the other side. They are bringing nothing but death. They will fight, they will kill, and the world will end. With this enormous edifice taking a central role in the setting, we the reader and viewer expect something equally powerful and existentially threatening to match our half-formed mental image of evil that can only be stopped (but not killed) if imprisoned in a far-distant land behind such a wall.
To put it another way: where there is a wall, we will imagine it protects us from a danger whose power is in proportion not to the reality behind it but to its size in our cultural identity. As the wall stands, we will gradually develop reasons to resent those on the other side of it. Certainly, reasons will be given why such a wall was built to begin with, but the founding motivations, good or bad, will vanish as the years pass. Whatever the original builders had in mind, only one fact will remain: there is a permanent wall separating us from them. Sooner or later, this will lead to only one conclusion: “The wall exists because those on the other side are evil. They are barbarians. They are the bringers of death and destruction. They are chaos while we are order. If the wall ever falls, all will be lost.”
In the human mind, such walls are signs of a rotting edifice, hiding, not protecting, those who build them. For even if the motivations be pure, the end is dehumanization. The greater the wall, the more those on the other side will be seen as harbingers of the apocalypse, as enemies of humanity, even though they, too, are only human. And yet the gates will stay barred, with a sign above them reading, “Do not open until Doomsday.”
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”-“Mending Wall,” Robert Frost
Stables of the Apocalypse 