Editing World of A Song of Ice and Fire (section)

====Beyond the Wall====
[[File:OeraefajoekullMorning.jpg|thumb|Season 2 of the TV adaptation featured scenes set north of the Wall that were filmed on the [[Vatnajökull]] glacier in Iceland.]]
''A Clash of Kings'' takes the story to the lands Beyond the Wall, although the first five books do not explore "what lies really north ... but we will in the last two books". The TV adaptation used [[Iceland]] as filming location for the lands Beyond the Wall. Martin, who has never been to Iceland, said Beyond the Wall was "considerably larger than Iceland and the area closest to my Wall is densely forested, so in that sense it's more like Canada{{snd}} [[Hudson Bay]] or the Canadian forests just north of [[Michigan]]. And then as you get further and further north, it changes. You get into [[tundra]] and [[ice field]]s and it becomes more of an [[arctic]] environment. You have [[plain]]s on one side and a very high range of mountains on the other. Of course, once again this is fantasy, so my mountains are more like the [[Himalayas]]." In an HBO featurette, Martin stated the lands beyond the wall make up a big part of Westeros, being roughly the size of Canada.<ref group=S name=smartertravel/> The Valley of Thenn is one such location beyond the Wall, and north of that is the Lands of Always Winter, where the Others come from.

During the first season, the HBO team used places that they could decorate with artificial snow for the north of the Wall, but a bigger landscape was chosen for Season 2. "Primary filming for these scenes, which encompass both the Frostfangs and the Fist of the First Men, occurred at the [[Svínafellsjökull]] [[Ice calving|calving]] [[glacier]] in [[Skaftafell]], Iceland, followed by shooting near [[Smyrlabjörg]] and [[Vík í Mýrdal]] on [[Höfðabrekkuheiði]]. Benioff said, "We always knew we wanted something shatteringly beautiful and barren and brutal for this part of Jon's journey, because he's in the true North now. It's all real. It's all in camera. We're not doing anything in postproduction to add mountains or snow or anything."<ref group=S name=go_hbofilmed/>