MARTIN: A lot of the wildlings raid south of the Wall,
which is something that the Night's Watch, you know, tries to prevent.
To everyone in the North, the wildlings are boogeymen.
They were the people who would climb over the Wall and raid your village,
and kill you and destroy your lives.
MARTIN: They'll strike south looking for valuables, gold.
They steal women sometimes and carry them back.
And the Night's Watch has to try to prevent this
or track them down and reclaim that and so forth.
I don't think the wildlings are essentially fighting for anything.
I think, beyond the Wall, they're happy. This is their land, their free world.
They raid the South for fun.
For us, one of the things that's always made the story rich
and that's always made the story interesting is that
you're not dealing ever with a case of a group of bad guys
fighting a group of good guys.
Not all wildlings are raiders.
Some of them just live very peacefully on their farms or their villages,
you know, raising sheep, raising goats.
The name "wildling" is what the people who live south of the Wall call them.
The main group of wildlings,
the ones that Jon Snow is most in contact with,
the one that Mance comes from, call themselves the free folk.
There are no nobles north of the Wall.
A man is esteemed according to what he can accomplish, or a woman.
WEISS: Their society has a lot to recommend it.
And they really do care about individual liberty.
It's so satisfying to think that you know
where a person or a group of people are coming from,
and then find out that you were wrong.
That you misjudged that person or that group of people.
And the wildlings, I think, are really a case in point here.