Mance Rayder
The King-Beyond-the-Wall: once a crow of the Night's Watch, now the man who has done the impossible and united a hundred quarreling wildling peoples under one banner.
A soul born at Beyond the Wall, sworn to The Free Folk.
The fuller tale
Season Three
King-Beyond-the-Wall by choice of the free folk rather than birth, and the only man in the story who deserted the Night's Watch and made something bigger out of it than the life he left behind. He has spent years doing what no one before him managed — talking a hundred warring clans into one army — for a single unglamorous reason: the White Walkers are coming, and the only way through matters more than pride about how it is done, over the Wall or around it, before winter shuts the door. When his riders bring him a captured Night's Watch deserter claiming to have killed one of his own officers to prove himself, Mance sees through the story almost immediately and lets Jon Snow live anyway, curious what a boy raised on the Watch's version of the world will do once he is inside a different one.
Season Four
He commits everything to one push at the Wall — giants, mammoths, a hundred ladders going up the ice at once, thousands of fighters he has spent years assembling for exactly this — and the plan almost works. Castle Black holds by the width of a bell tower and dumb luck, and rather than throw away more of his people on a wall that will not fall tonight, Mance agrees to meet Jon Snow south of it and talk instead of fight, willing to let the whole campaign end in a negotiation if it saves the free folk he brought this far. Stannis Baratheon's cavalry arrives in the middle of the conversation and ends the debate for both of them, and Mance is taken prisoner, offered his life for a bent knee he will not give even with the fire already being built.
Season Five
Stannis offers Mance Rayder his life for a knee; Mance chooses the fire, and Jon's arrow ends it early.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Burned before the Wall (S5·E1)
The King-Beyond-the-Wall refused the knee to Stannis and was bound to a pyre before the whole watching Wall. Jon Snow's arrow found his heart before the fire could claim its due — the last kindness between enemies.
On the page. Burned before the Wall — or so it seemed (ADWD, ch. 11)
Before the whole Wall the King-Beyond-the-Wall burned in a cage of ice and wood — or so every watcher swore. The red woman's glamour burned Rattleshirt in his skin; the man himself went to Winterfell with six spearwives and a harp. So it seemed, and seeming is her trade.
In the show he dies for a word. Stannis offers the captive King-Beyond-the-Wall his life for a bent knee and the free folk’s spears for a kneeler’s pledge, and Mance — courteous, regretful, entirely immovable — explains that the moment he kneels, everything he built is unbuilt. Melisandre gives him to her god before the whole watching Wall: bound to the pyre, he holds his composure until the flames climb, and it is Jon Snow’s arrow, loosed across the yard against every order, that reaches his heart before the fire can finish its work. The wildlings remember the mercy; Stannis, pointedly, remembers the disobedience.
In the books the pyre is a magic trick. The man who burns screaming in Mance’s face and Mance’s chains is Rattleshirt, wrapped in Melisandre’s glamour; the true Mance survives as her hidden asset and is spent on the Winterfell infiltration, last reported — by Ramsay Bolton, hardly a disinterested witness — as a prisoner in a cage. Alive in the published books, his final fate unwritten: of all the divergences between page and screen, Mance’s is the widest still open.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 2 chapters that name them
A Storm of Swords 2 chapters that name them
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The tellings part company at the pyre, and the divergence is total. The show burns Mance in its fifth season’s first hour and means it; the books burn a glamoured Rattleshirt in his place, Melisandre’s ruby-magic dressing the Lord of Bones in the king’s features while the real Mance — hidden under the bone-lord’s rattling shirt — is quietly kept in service. Book-Mance then rides to Winterfell posing as the bard Abel, six spearwives at his back, to steal Ramsay Bolton’s bride out of the heart of the Bolton stronghold — one of the fifth book’s great covert operations, and it ends with the Pink Letter claiming he sits in a cage wearing a cloak of spearwives’ skins. Whether that letter tells the truth is one of the saga’s liveliest open questions; what is certain is that Mance Rayder is alive in the published books, and the show’s clean, honorable ending is an invention.
The characters differ in flavor as well as fate. Book-Mance is a performer to the bone — he once climbed the Wall in a rebuilt cloak to walk Winterfell’s feast hall as a minstrel and look Robert Baratheon in the eye, purely because he could. The show pares away the theatricality and the harp and gives the essentials to a quieter, grimmer man whose greatness is all in his stillness — the version who tells Jon Snow the freedom to make his own mistakes was all he ever wanted.
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.