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.
A soul born at Winterfell.
The fuller tale
Season One
Winterfell's oldest resident, blind and shrunken and older than anyone can say for certain, kept on now less as a nurse than as a teller of stories nobody quite believes. She sits with Bran after the fall that leaves him crippled and tells him the tale he is too young for — the Long Night, and the Others who came down out of the dark eight thousand years ago with blue eyes and cold hands, and the Night's King who betrayed the Watch for love of one of them. She means it as a bedtime story, something to pass a sickroom hour. Nobody in earshot, least of all her, seems to notice how much of it is about to come true.
How it ends for them
The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.
Their chapters, book by book
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
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.
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.