Game of Thrones - The night's watch - La garde de nuit vost** [1080p hd]

(Jon and Samwell) Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife. 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 pledge my life and honor to the Night's Watch for this night and all the nights to come. (Martin) The Night's Watch are a sworn brotherhood that defend the Wall. The Wall is a gigantic wall of ice. It's a hundred leagues long, from coast to coast, and goes across the entire width of Westeros, which is rather narrow at that point. At its highest, it's 700 feet high, and it's located hundreds of miles north of Winterfell. It's the boundary of the Kingdom of the North. Beyond that is the wild, is the Haunted Forest, is lands where no one rules. The Wall was built thousands and thousands of years ago for reasons that had been lost in the mists of time, but legend has it was built to keep the things in the North out. There are many dangers that lurk beyond the Wall - beasts, the wildlings, which are essentially northern barbarians. But the most fearsome are the white walkers. No one has seen them for thousands of years. It's gotten to the point where some people believe they never existed, they are simply creatures out of mythology. (Mormont) You came alone, without friends or honor. You came to us rich, you came to us poor. Some of you bear the names of proud Houses, others, only *** names or no names at all. It does not matter. All that is in the past. The Night's Watch is an order of men dedicated to protecting the Wall and protecting the Seven Kingdoms from all the dangers that lurk beyond. Next time I see you, you'll be all in black. It was always my color. They're also called the Black Brothers. They dress in all black, and they live a very hard life. They're kind of a cross between an ancient monastic order and a Special Forces brigade. When you join the Night's Watch, when you "take the black", as it's called, you're joining for life. It's not a sentence of a few years. You take that oath, you say those words, and you will spend the rest of your life on the Wall. You don't understand what you'd be giving up. We have no families. None of us will ever father sons. I don't care about that. The past is irrelevant. Your commitment to the Wall is absolute. It is for the rest of your life. And you will forego such common niceties as having a home and a family. Those things are gone. Give my regards to the Night's Watch. I'm sure it will be thrilling to serve in such an elite force. And if not... it's only for life. You've got to really, really believe in it, or you've got to feel that you've got nothing left to lose. They've sworn themselves to lifelong service, so if you desert, you are executed. You want to run away south, run away. Of course, they will behead you as a deserter. Their loyalty is to the realm as a whole, not to any particular House or kingdom, which makes them very different from all the other people we encounter in the Seven Kingdoms, who tend to be more loyal to their particular families and houses than they are to this concept of the greater realm. Lovely thing about the Watch - you discard your old family and get a whole new one. Not everybody wants to be there, but everybody's put together - people who were strangers yesterday, you have to get used to being very, very close to. The people are, quite a lot of the time, unsavory people, with no loyalty, no sense of duty. People of all sorts of problematic backgrounds come together. But essentially, what it becomes is a brotherhood. It doesn't matter where you're from, it doesn't matter who you are, once you're accepted and you pass all the training that they do, then you become part of that brotherhood and everything before is washed away, and you start anew as this new person. Here... on the Wall... we are all one House. The Watch is commanded by a Lord Commander who serves for life, but is elected by the sworn brothers. Within the Night's Watch there are three orders. The stewards, who essentially take care of all the housekeeping and the upkeep. There's the order of the builders, who are charged with maintaining the Wall, maintaining the castles. And there are the rangers, who are probably the fighting corps of the Night's Watch. And Benjen Stark is the First Ranger of the Watch. The First Ranger's role is to ride out beyond the Wall, keep the wild things out from the rest of the civilized world, basically. - I'm leaving this morning. - You're leaving? I'm the First Ranger. Myjob is out there. The Night's Watch was, at one time, a place that was a very respectable place for second and third sons of respectable families to send their children. When you are the third son, you know that you are not going to be the lord of the castle, and you know that you are not going to inherit your father's lands, and the Night's Watch is a place where you could go to distinguish yourself. And there's still remnants of that. A *** boy with nothing to inherit, off to join the ancient order of the Night's Watch. If you join the Night's Watch, it's a merit-based society, mostly which don't exist in Westeros. So, at the Wall, if you're brave enough, if you're smart enough, if you're tough enough, you can advance to a high position, despite where you were born, who you were born to, and so forth. Well, Lord Snow, it appears you're the least useless person here. A charming man. I don't need him to be charming. I need him to turn this bunch of thieves and runaways into men of the Night's Watch. And how is that going? Life in the Night's Watch is hard because the Night's Watch has fallen on hard times. The Night's Watch has become an army of undisciplined boys and tired old men. There are less than a thousand of us now. We can't properly patrol the wilderness. The threats beyond the Wall seem less and less because it's been longer and longer since anything has played any threat to the kingdoms from the Wall. So, less and less people are sent up there to protect. The Night's Watch protects the realm. Ah, yes, yes. Against grumpkins and snarks and all the other monsters your wet nurse warned you about. You're a smart boy. You don't believe that nonsense. When the memory of the things that lie beyond the Wall... when the memory was fresh in people's mind, the Night's Watch was very honorable and very well respected. It's now primarily kind of a repository for thieves and rapists and ne'er-do-wells who are dragged out of dungeons and given a choice between losing their hands or going up to the Wall. Rapers. They were given a choice, no doubt - castration or the Wall. Most choose the knife. It's fallen on hard times. Your sister sits by the side of the king. Tell her we need help. It's a hard place to live. It's a cold place to live. Everyone at the Wall is equal, and you won't get anywhere unless you accept that fact first. It's ultimately the kind of a place that can very easily break people, or it can make them stronger. We're the only thing standing between the realm and what lies beyond. When winter does come, gods help us all if we're not ready. �