Grenn

A big, slow-witted, good-hearted farmer's son turned brother of the Night's Watch, one of Jon Snow's first friends at the Wall.

The fuller tale

Grenn arrives at the Wall the way most of its men do: unwanted. A farmer’s son from the Reach, abandoned or orphaned into the black, he is big, slow of speech and easy to mock — Ser Alliser dubs him Aurochs for his bulk and his wits, and the name is meant to draw blood. What the yard discovers, slowly, is that the joke has a floor: Grenn absorbs mockery without cruelty, learns without vanity, and is entirely without malice in an institution assembled largely from malice.

He is one of the first stones in Jon Snow’s new life. After Jon humiliates the other recruits in the yard, it is Grenn and Pyp he teaches instead of taunts, and the little brotherhood that forms — Jon, Grenn, Pyp, Sam — becomes the Watch’s honest heart. Grenn’s decency has weight because it costs him: he stands up for Sam against Thorne’s bullying when standing up has a price, and he swears his vows before the old gods beside Jon in the haunted forest, a farm boy adopting a faith because his friend keeps it.

The Great Ranging makes a veteran of him. He digs at the Fist of the First Men, survives the dead when they come, and staggers back through the snows with the remnant — one of the few who witness the whole shape of the Watch’s true war and live to stand a wall afterward. By the night Mance’s host reaches Castle Black, the aurochs of the training yard has become something the Watch is always short of: a brother who has seen the worst and holds his ground anyway.

The page and the screen

Book-Grenn survives the series as published — through the Fist, the mutiny’s aftermath and the defense of Castle Black, still cheerfully enduring the old nickname, last seen going about the Watch’s business. His show death at the inner gate is an invention, and a pointed one: the screen version gathers the story’s affection for the Watch’s ordinary men into one stand and spends it all at once. Readers should also note the book’s fuller comedy of his friendship with Pyp — the pair function as a double act through three novels — where the show, with less time, sketches it in glances.

Where they stand, season by season

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Fell holding the gate (S4·E9)

Held the inner gate of Castle Black with five brothers against a giant of the free folk. The gate held. None of the six stood up afterward; they said the words as they died.

The show gives him the death of a much grander name. When Mance’s giant, Mag the Mighty, forces the tunnel under the Wall, Grenn and five brothers are sent down to hold the inner gate — six men against a king of the giants in a corridor of ice. Jon finds them afterward: the gate held, the giant dead, and all six brothers fallen where they stood. Grenn led them in the vow as they died — the shield that guards the realms of men — and the tale offers no cleaner statement of what the Night’s Watch is for. He is alive in the published books.