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 Two
Season Three
Bran wargs Hodor at the Gift while Jon breaks from the wildlings below.
Where they stand. Queenscrown.
Season Four
Jon storms Craster's Keep; Locke dies with a snapped neck; Bran wargs Hodor for the second time and slips away north.
Where they stand. Craster's Keep.
Season Six
Bran, training with the Three-Eyed Raven, walks in a Winterfell where Hodor was Wylis and could speak. In The Door ÔÇö Wylis, holding one door across forty years. The dead pour in. Summer dies, the Raven dies, Leaf dies ÔÇö and Hodor holds the door as a boy's whole life collapses into one word.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Held a door (S6┬ÀE5)
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 ÔÇö mind still deep in a vision of Winterfell's past ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö hold the door, hold the door, Hodor ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö 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 ÔÇö 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.