Jojen Reed

A solemn young crannogman of House Reed, gifted (and burdened) with green dreams that show him things yet to come.

The fuller tale

Jojen Reed is thirteen going on ancient. A son of Howland Reed — the crannogman who stood with Ned Stark at the tower of joy and never came out of his swamps to tell anyone about it — he was marked young: a childhood fever nearly killed him, and left behind the green dreams, the old blood's gift of seeing what has not yet happened. The gift has terms. Green dreams are true, unwelcome, and non-negotiable; Jojen grew up knowing things no child should be certain of, and it made him the solemn, unhurried creature the Stark boys meet — a boy who speaks like a small grey-eyed prophet because that is precisely what he is.

He and his sister Meera come to Winterfell to renew their house's oath to the Starks, but Jojen's real errand is Bran: his dreams have shown him the winged wolf bound in chains, and he has come to break them. It is Jojen who names what Bran is — warg, greenseer — Jojen who teaches him to open his third eye instead of fearing it, and Jojen who points the whole party north when every sane road runs south: the three-eyed crow waits beyond the Wall, and Bran's chains will not break anywhere else. The journey that follows runs on his certainty and pays its tolls out of his health — the boy who knows the way grows greyer and weaker with every league of it.

What makes Jojen quietly devastating is what he carries without saying. The books hang a shadow over him that readers learned to dread — a boy who dreams true and grows sadder the farther north he goes is a boy who has seen something about the journey he declines to share. His stated creed covers it either way: a man can only be brave when he is afraid, and the day of a person's death was written long before. He walks toward whatever he has seen at the same steady pace he walks toward everything, and the tale offers no clearer picture of courage as a discipline rather than a mood.

The page and the screen

The tellings part company at the cave. In the published books Jojen is alive — drained, homesick and increasingly fatalistic in the greenseer's caverns, where his gloom has fed one of fandom's most notorious theories about what exactly goes into the weirwood paste Bran is fed; the books have confirmed nothing. The show settled his account on camera instead, at the cave's very threshold. It also aged both Reeds up and trimmed their folklore — the books' Jojen arrives wreathed in crannog strangeness, green-dreaming Winterfell's fall in detail (the sea coming to Winterfell, the drowned men in the halls) that the show never staged. Show Jojen is a gentle guide; book Jojen is that and something eerier, a boy the narrative itself seems careful around.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• The harvest feast fills Winterfell's hall; among the guests come Meera and Jojen Reed of Greywater Watch, who swear the old oath of the crannogmen. (ACOK 17)

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

The show: Fell beyond the Wall (S4·E10)

The boy who dreamed the future knew he would not survive the journey north, and went anyway. Wights dragged him down within sight of the three-eyed raven's cave; his sister gave him mercy, and the children's fire took the rest.

In the show, Jojen dies within sight of the end of his own road. As the party crosses the frozen clearing before the three-eyed raven's cave, wights erupt from the snow itself, and Jojen — too weak by then to fight — is dragged down and stabbed, again and again, before the children of the forest can reach him. Meera gives her brother mercy with her own blade, and the children's fire-bombs take his body as the survivors are pulled into the cave he spent his last strength delivering them to. He knew, the scene is framed to suggest, and came anyway. In the books no such scene exists: Jojen Reed is alive in the greenseer's cave as of the published volumes — though so visibly failing, and so heavy with unspoken foresight, that readers have been braced for years.