Gared
A grizzled ranger of forty years' service on the Wall, one of the last men to survive a ranging into the haunted forest.
A soul born at The North, sworn to The Night's Watch.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
On the screen. Beheaded as a deserter (S1┬ÀE1)
The oldest hand on the doomed ranging, he saw what the cold had done and ran. The Wall punishes desertion with the block, and near Winterfell it found him.
On the page. Executed at Winterfell (AGOT, ch. 2)
Fifty years a ranger, and what he saw in that forest sent him running past every warning he'd ever given greener men. Ned Stark took his head at the holdfast near Winterfell for desertion, and never learned what he was fleeing.
In the published books Gared flees the horror in the haunted forest and keeps going ÔÇö past the Wall, past his vows, half-mad with what he has seen ÔÇö until Stark men take him near Winterfell as a deserter. Lord Eddard hears no useful sense from him, passes the sentence, and swings Ice himself; the storyÔÇÖs first execution, conducted by its most honorable man, kills the realmÔÇÖs only living witness to its true enemy. The show ends him earlier and colder: beheaded in the snow by a White WalkerÔÇÖs blade, his head tossed contemptuously at the feet of the comrade who will carry the warning south in his place.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The tellings trade his ending with WillÔÇÖs. In the books it is Gared who escapes the massacre, deserts, and is run down in the lands near Winterfell; the second chapter opens with Ned Stark taking his head at a holdfast while Bran watches and learns the old way. The show gives that scene to Will and keeps Gared beyond the Wall, where the White Walkers behead him and set his head rolling at WillÔÇÖs feet as a message. Book-Gared also gets a past the show omits ÔÇö Old NanÔÇÖs tales aside, he has ridden with the Old Bear himself, and his terror lands harder for coming from a man with nothing left to prove.