Edd Tollett
Dolorous Edd: a steward of the Night's Watch with a gift for grim humor and expecting the worst of everything, usually correctly.
A soul born at The Vale, sworn to The Night's Watch.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell in the Long Night (S8┬ÀE3)
Dolorous Edd, last Lord Commander of the old Night's Watch, died in the Long Night doing exactly what he'd always grumbled he would ÔÇö saving Samwell Tarly. A wight's blade took him from behind; he rose with the dead before the battle was old.
He dies in the Long Night at Winterfell doing precisely the thing he would have grumbled hardest about: saving Samwell Tarly. In the crush of the dead inside the walls, Edd hauls Sam up from under a pile of wights, turns to cover him ÔÇö and takes a blade through the back, dying on his feet with his usual expression of weary vindication barely disturbed. He rises with the dead before the night is out and is put down with the rest when the Night King falls, then laid on the pyres with the honored dead of the living. He is alive in the published books.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Book-Edd is alive and complaining as the published story stands ÔÇö Jon posts him to command at Long Barrow, garrisoned with spearwives, a billet Edd accepts with predictable despair ÔÇö and he has no death to his name on the page. The show promoted him further than the books yet have, to acting Lord Commander after JonÔÇÖs departure, and then spent him in the Long Night. His humor translates almost untouched between tellings; several of the screenÔÇÖs best Edd lines are book lines with the serial numbers rubbed off, which is its own kind of fidelity.
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.