Olly
A farm boy taken in at Castle Black after wildlings destroyed his village, who becomes Jon Snow's young steward.
A soul born at A village beyond the Gift, sworn to The Night's Watch.
The fuller tale
Season Five
"For the Watch." Olly's knife is the last of many; Jon Snow bleeds out in the snow.
Season Six
Jon hangs the four mutineers ÔÇö Olly last ÔÇö then lays down his cloak: "My watch is ended."
How it ends for them
On the screen. Hanged at Castle Black (S6┬ÀE3)
The boy whose village Styr's Thenns butchered put the last knife in Jon Snow's heart, and hanged for it beside Thorne when the Lord Commander returned. Jon cut the ropes himself and never spoke of him after.
He ends at the end of a rope, and the show does not flinch from it. Olly delivers the last knife in the mutiny ÔÇö luring Jon into the yard with a lie about his uncle, then stepping through the ring of officers to drive the final dagger in with tears on his face ÔÇö and when Jon Snow returns from the dead, the boy hangs beside Thorne and the other conspirators, the youngest neck on the beam. He offers no last words; he just stares at Jon until the box is kicked away. Jon cuts the bodies down himself, and it is OllyÔÇÖs face ÔÇö the steward, the orphan, the mutineer, still a child ÔÇö that ends his time as Lord Commander: he hands Edd his cloak and rides away from the Watch that made them both. There is no Olly in the books to meet any fate.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
Olly is a show invention with a precise job: to give a face and a comprehensible grief to what the books distribute across an institution. On the page, no boy shoots Ygritte ÔÇö her arrow is anonymous ÔÇö and no child stands among JonÔÇÖs assassins; the conspiracy is grown men of the WatchÔÇÖs old guard, stewards and officers led by Bowen Marsh, weeping as they strike for the Watch. The show gathered all that institutional resentment into one small, wounded figure the audience had watched grow up, so that the final knife would come from the last hand Jon ÔÇö or the viewer ÔÇö could hate. It worked well enough that Olly became one of the most reviled characters in the adaptation, which is its own tribute: he is the WatchÔÇÖs grudge given a childÔÇÖs face, and children are harder to forgive.