Winterfell

Brandon the Builder

Person Age of Heroes

Every Stark counts his line back to Brandon the Builder. He lived in the Age of Heroes, after the Long Night, and the tales give him both Winterfell and the Wall. Some say giants helped him lift the stones. An old ballad has him seeking out the children of the forest and learning their true tongue to ask for their aid.

The tales do not stop at the North. The stormlords say he helped Durran Godsgrief raise Storm’s End, and in Oldtown it is told that a king of the Hightower hired him to build the Hightower, or hired his son. The maesters suspect that the deeds of many early kings have gathered under one name.

It is said too that he gave the Night’s Watch the land south of the Wall, the grant still called Brandon’s Gift. Starks have named sons for him ever since.

Read next

  • The Wall

    A wall of ice seven hundred feet high and three hundred miles long, raised in the Age of Heroes against the Others.

  • House Stark

    The Starks, Kings of Winter and Kings in the North for thousands of years, and Wardens of the North since the dragons.

  • The Gift

    The land below the Wall given to the Night’s Watch for its upkeep, fifty leagues deep in two grants.

  • The Walls

    Two rings of grey granite, the outer eighty feet high and the inner more than a hundred, with a moat between them.