Hodor
A simple, gentle giant of a stableboy in service to House Stark, immensely strong and immensely kind, who can say only one word: 'Hodor.'
A soul born at Winterfell.
The fuller tale
Season One
A servant of enormous size and few words — one word, in fact, said in every register from cheerful to frightened but never varied — who carries things and people around Winterfell without complaint. When Bran falls and loses the use of his legs, Hodor becomes his legs instead, hauling him through the castle strapped into a wicker frame on his back, patient with a boy who has every reason to be miserable company and mostly isn't, because of him.
Season Two
When Theon takes the castle, Hodor is one of the few certainties left — he carries Bran into the crypts and then out of them, and out of Winterfell entirely, north into open country with no more plan than staying alive and staying together. He does not understand the politics that burned the castle down and does not need to; he understands that the boy on his back needs carrying, and keeps walking.
Season Three
Somewhere on the road north Bran slips into his head without meaning to, and for the first time Hodor is not entirely himself — he goes rigid and starts saying his own name like it is being pulled out of him, which frightens everyone traveling with him more than it frightens Hodor, who does not remember it afterward. He keeps carrying Bran anyway, unbothered by a thing he cannot explain and was never going to be asked to understand.
Season Four
Tied up and threatened at Craster's Keep, Hodor is the one Bran reaches for when the situation stops being survivable any other way, and the size that has only ever been used for carrying gets used, briefly and thoroughly, for killing. At the cave under the weirwood he fights the dead alongside Summer and Meera with whatever comes to hand, still saying only his own name through all of it, the one word doing service as war cry and complaint and everything in between.
Season Six
The end of it arrives out of order: as the Night King's dead reach the cave, Bran reaches backward through Hodor's whole life at the same moment he needs him most, and in a vision decades removed a boy named Wylis collapses at Winterfell, repeating an order that has not been given to him yet until it wears down into a single word. In the present, Hodor holds a door against the dead so Meera can drag Bran clear, holds it long after holding it stops being survivable, and dies keeping it shut. The name he has answered to his whole life turns out to have been assigned to him, years in advance, by the exact moment that kills him.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Held a door (S6·E5)
Wylis the stableboy became Hodor in a single terrible moment threaded backward through time: Bran warged him in the past and present at once, and the boy heard his own death as a command. He held the door. He held it to the end.
Hodor dies holding a door. When the Night King's assault breaches the three-eyed raven's cave, Meera drags Bran's sled for the rear passage while Bran — mind still deep in a vision of Winterfell's past — wargs Hodor to carry them out. At the back door, with the dead clawing through, Meera screams the only plan there is: hold the door. And the command travels. In the vision, young Wylis collapses in Winterfell's courtyard, seizing, hearing his own death decades early — hold the door, hold the door, Hodor — the words grinding down into the one he will say for the rest of his life. Every 'Hodor' ever spoken was the echo of this moment arriving. He holds the door until the dead have torn him apart, and the sled gets away. In the books he is still alive, still hodoring, the door as yet unheld — readers know only that the word is a fuse, not when it burns down.
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 books' Hodor is Walder, not Wylis, and the origin of his condition remains unexplained on the page — the great door-holding reveal, with its time-looped seizure threading a future command back through a boy's whole life, exists only in the show, though the showrunners have said the destination came from the author himself. How the books arrive there, if they do, may differ in mechanism: book Bran's warging of Hodor is more extensive and more explicitly troubling, and Hodor is still alive in the published volumes, sheltering in the greenseer's cave. The show also gave him one flourish the books never did — a glimpse of young Wylis at Winterfell in Bran's visions, a talkative boy with his whole voice still ahead of him.
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.