For the Love of Aryas Direwolf: Rewilding and Game of Thrones

[Disclaimer: this piece contains a mild spoiler for Season Seven, Episode Two of Game of Thrones ]

Ill admit that Im an avid Game of Thrones watcher. The show strangely pulls at me because of the multiplicity of plots that weave or interweavethe hyperconnectivity of narrative flows well with our hyperconnected selves. Im lured to the story because of the of religions and worldviews that seem to be hauntings of especially Western religious histories. George R. R. Martin gets to dream up enchanted and intricate worldviews, and Im curious what religious studies or theology might see by reflecting on those stories and the ethical problems they contain. More: Im curious about the ethical dimensions of the shows image and storytelling itself, from gender to race to sexualized and other forms of violence.

But as an ecotheologian and environmental ethicist, I remain interested in the ecological stories told and the elemental worlds the characters inhabitfire, ice, ocean, and soil. Jedediah Purdy writes in his stunning recent piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books that the cosmologies of the show inspire all kinds of contemporary political analogies, where our own existential threats seem very close indeed.

The current season is already unfolding more existential threats, but a short animal scene from episode two, Stormborn, captivated me.

While traveling, Arya Stark is suddenly threatened and surrounded by a pack of wolves. Arya is alone in the snow and bare trees. Her horse nearby is panicked. Suddenly, emerging from the wood is the large direwolf Nymeria, once promised pet to Arya, baring fangs and leading a feral pack.

The scene echoes the last time viewers saw the two interact, in the first season. Arya sends Nymeria away in order to save the wolfs life from human beings. The wolf is surely to be executed and Arya lets go in hopes that it survives. The two gaze at each other in sadness and reluctance in this goodbye scene.

This time around, however, the wolf is wild and seems to threaten. Arya pleads for the wolfs recognition, for the wolf to come with on the journey undertaken. A moment of suspense hits you while you wait for the wolf to decide, and you might hope that the wolf allies itself with Arya.

Instead, the animal gazes, drops its guard, turns around with the pack, and slowly leaves Arya alone once more. The direwolf, out of grasp, returns to the wild.

Actress Maisie William, who plays Arya, is genius. Her facial expression begins in wondrous disappointment and creatively transforms into another kind of joyful recognition.

Her character is undergoing a similar journey in the serieseverything that might be expected of her in the GoT universe doesnt really apply. Settling down, confined by rigid gender roles, being a lady of a house isnt Aryas journey. The direwolf isnt domesticated by humans and Arya wont let the violence of cultural domestication visit her own future, either.

Arya says to the now absent wolf, Thats not you. Many direhard fans (forgive me there) will recognize as a riff on lines she says to her father in the first season when he tries to convince her to play certain gender roles like her sister. Thats not me, she says of herself.

The human being recognizes her life mirrored in the wolf she so loves. And it means she must let it go, once again, back to the wild and some freedom of self-determination.

So, why am I captivated here?

Stories of wolves, for one, intrigue. While this story is of a fictionalized larger-than-life direwolf, images of living wolves hold fantastical power over contemporary environmental politics. Mythical stories and current news often depict wolves as solitary, predatory, and dangerous to humans in wolven wildness. Stories often depict wolves as parasitic or threats to ranching economies. Humankind often wield dangerous stories of wolves as a way to justify animal population control.

More often than not, such stories are false. Wolves live communally as pack hunters and scavengers. They hardly ever attack human beings, and their attacks of livestock are greatly over-exaggerated.

Wolves, instead, are keystone species, species viewed as integral to the flourishing of ecological communities. As a keystone species, wolves play integral roles as predators limiting prey populations that threaten to overtake biotic community and destroy a communitys biodiversity.

Consider an oft-cited example of Yellowstone National Park also chronicled by Peter Wohlleben in his book The Hidden Life of Trees (Greystone Books, 2015). Wolves disappeared from the park by the 1920s, and a vibrant discussion emerged about whether or not to reintroduce the species. Proponents won out and reintroduced wolves into the park in 1995. From then on, the wolves kept out-of-control elk populations in check, which caused overgrazed cottonwoods and willows to grow back strong. The root systems of those trees strengthened and stabilized the banks of rivers and streams, which checked out-of-control erosion. Biodiversity and ecological stability began to re-emerge in the Park. Reintroducing wild wolves was, in fact, the key for better process of ecological stewardship and the revitalization of the park.

Writers like George Monbiot and Marc Bekoff call this process rewilding, and make strong cases for respecting and re-introducing wildness to our ecological lives, keystone species on. Rewilding, they note, requires not just reintroduction of species, but a renewed personal intimacy with the otherness of animals, of ecologies, and letting biotic communities grow back from human devastation. Rewilding is both an eco-political conviction and a personal commitment of reintroducing wildness to the human heart.

We might wonder if anything is truly wild in the age of human beings. The lines of how we consider domestic and wild animals shift and blur, constructed by humans, and their histories and mythologies complicate understandings of animal relation. Think of the environmental histories of domesticated dogs and wolves. Think of the strangely-storied relationship between the 13th century Saint Francis and a wolf terrorizing the town of Gubbio. Francis makes the sign of the cross, addresses brother wolf, and asks the wolf to stop. The wolf obliges and retreats.

Or, think of this retreating moment in Game of Thrones.

I wonder if one might oddly take this scene between Arya and the direwolf Nymeria as a kind of ecological icon to inspire thought of rewilding and justice. Might we see a contemporary visionever so fleetinga recognition of the importance of wild others, a resistance. Might we see an ethics of respecting the otherness of animals in Aryas eyes? Towards imagined and real wolves? Might we see desire for the rewilding of our imaginations, for the cultivation of a love for this wild earth? Might we ask how to better respond to the wild earth that often sees us before we see it? Might we understand that ecological ethics requires just as much letting-go of our human fantasies of control just as much as newly committed ecological action? And how? Such a potential icon might undo our imaginations in such a way and provoke thought, even if for a brief moment.