Old Nan

The ancient nursemaid and storyteller of Winterfell, so old none recall her true name, who has told the Stark children their frightening tales for generations.

The fuller tale

The oldest voice in Winterfell belongs to a woman whose true name the castle lost generations ago. Old Nan came, the story goes, to nurse a Brandon Stark whose mother had died — which Brandon depends on who is counting, for she has outlived so many lords that the dead boys blur together — and simply never left, shrinking and sharpening with the decades until she is nearly as much a fixture of the castle as the heart tree. Her great-grandson Hodor carries her firewood. She has buried every contemporary she ever had, and speaks of kings the maesters file under legend as if she had scolded them personally.

Her occupation is stories, and the tale is built on them. It is from Old Nan's chair by the fire that Bran — and the audience — first hears of the Long Night that lasted a generation, the Others riding dead horses through the cold, the giant spiders of ice, the last hero, the Rat Cook who learned what the gods do to those who break guest right. The children want the scary ones and she obliges, always with the same sly disclaimer that sweet summer children know nothing of fear. The saga's deepest joke is at the maesters' expense: the institution of learned men spends the tale explaining that grumkins and snarks are not real, while every horror the old nurse ever described walks south on schedule.

She is the North's memory in a shawl — the embodiment of the story's conviction that old tales are load-bearing, that what the fireside keeps is truer than what the citadel catalogues. When the Others come, nothing the maesters wrote helps anyone; nearly everything Old Nan said does.

The page and the screen

In the books Old Nan is a steady presence of the Winterfell chapters until the sack, when she is led away with the other captives toward the Dreadfort and out of the published story — her fate, like so much of the North's, an open question mark rather than a closed account. The show gave her only a pair of first-season scenes with Bran before the death of actress Margaret John, to whose memory an episode was dedicated; her storytelling function was quietly redistributed, mostly to the Reed children and to Bran's own visions. The books also credit her with the tale's densest single info-drop — the full Long Night mythology arrives through her — where the show spread that exposition across many mouths.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Old Nan tells Bran of the Long Night, when the White Walkers came the first time. (S1·E3)
• Old Nan's tales walk beside them now: the party shelters in a lake tower while Bran practices slipping his skin, and Jojen's dreams grow darker. (ASOS 25)

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

The oldest voice in Winterfell, whose stories held more truth than the maesters allowed, vanishes from the tale in the castle's sack — carried off with the other captives toward the Dreadfort, her stories unfinished.