Craster
A savage wildling who lives alone beyond the Wall in a squalid keep, wedding his own daughters and keeping a grudging, uneasy welcome for the Watch.
A soul born at Beyond the Wall, sworn to The Free Folk.
The fuller tale
Season Three
The survivors of the Fist stagger back to Craster's; Sam saw the dead ÔÇö the Watch must warn the realm. At Craster's, the Watch turns on itself: mutineers kill their host and their Lord Commander.
Season Four
The Night's Watch mutineers at Craster's drink from the Old Bear's skull; Bran's party stumbles into them. Beyond it all, a White Walker carries Craster's last son to a cold altar ÔÇö and blue eyes open. Jon storms Craster's Keep; Locke dies with a snapped neck; Bran wargs Hodor for the second time and slips away north.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Slain at his own keep (S3┬ÀE4)
The wildling who wed his daughters and gave his sons to the cold gods called the Night's Watch guests and starved them. Karl Tanner put a knife through his mouth at his own board, and the Keep's grim hospitality ended with him.
On the page. Killed at his own table (ASOS, ch. 34)
He called the starving Watch guests and hid his stores, and Dirk opened his throat over the last of the bread ÔÇö kinslaying under his own roof, if the wives are right about who fathered the Watch's mutineers' luck.
He dies under his own roof, by guest rightÔÇÖs ugliest breach in a saga full of them. With the shattered remnant of the Great Ranging starving in his hall, Craster plays host with a miserÔÇÖs hand ÔÇö boasting of his godliness while the WatchÔÇÖs wounded die around a cold hearth ÔÇö until the taunting and the hunger strike flint. In the books a brother calls him bastard, Craster comes up raging with an axe, and Dirk opens his throat over the bread he swore he didnÔÇÖt have; on screen it is Karl Tanner who does it, driving a knife up through the old manÔÇÖs mouth mid-sneer, with a toast to being a legend. The mutiny that murders him kills Lord Commander Mormont minutes later ÔÇö and his wives, asked what should be done with them, tell the survivors to burn the dead and go. Nobody in either telling mourns him; the wood, presumably, noticed the tithe had stopped.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 1 chapter that name them
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The show makes explicit what the books leave in whispers: an early episode follows a son of CrasterÔÇÖs into the wood and shows a White Walker carrying the child away, and a later one shows the transformation itself ÔÇö the infant laid on an altar of ice, the Night KingÔÇÖs touch, the eyes turning blue. The books offer only the wivesÔÇÖ terrified hints and the keepÔÇÖs unnatural safety, and their Craster is if anything meaner in scale ÔÇö no altar, no throne room of ice, just a filthy old man with a hidden larder and an arrangement nobody dares examine. The mutiny differs in its details too: on the page the fatal insult is the word bastard flung by starving men, and it is the ranger Dirk who opens CrasterÔÇÖs throat, while the show gives the deed to Karl Tanner and lets the mutineers squat in the keep for half a season, an occupation the books never stage.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.