Orell
A wildling skinchanger who wears the skin of an eagle, scouting the lands south of the Wall for Mance's host.
A soul born at Beyond the Wall, sworn to The Free Folk.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
On the screen. Killed at the Queenscrown; his eagle flew on (S3┬ÀE9)
The eagle-warg fought Jon Snow at the Queenscrown tower when the raiding party turned on him. Jon's sword ended the man; his last act was to fly his eagle at Jon's face and mark him for life.
On the page. Slain in the Skirling Pass (ACOK, ch. 68)
The eagle-skinchanger fell to Jon Snow's sword in the fight in the Skirling Pass ÔÇö but a piece of him lived on in the bird, and the eagle's hatred of Jon never cooled. Skinchangers die twice, the free folk say.
Both tellings kill the man by Jon SnowÔÇÖs hand and let the bird carry the grudge. In the books he dies in the Skirling Pass skirmish, cut down by Longclaw before Jon is ever taken into the host ÔÇö and his eagle flies on with a remnant of Orell riding it, screaming over every battlefield of the wildling war until (the fifth bookÔÇÖs prologue reports) MelisandreÔÇÖs fires burn it out of the sky beneath the Wall, killing him a second time and searing the warg who had taken up the reins. The show stages his death at the Queenscrown: when Jon refuses the ThennsÔÇÖ test and the raiding party turns on him, Orell attacks and dies on JonÔÇÖs sword ÔÇö slipping into his eagle as he falls, and spending his last seconds of manhood raking JonÔÇÖs face with the birdÔÇÖs talons, the scars of which Jon carries for the rest of the tale. Skinchangers die twice, the free folk say; Orell manages to make both count.
Their chapters, book by book
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Timing is the great divergence. Book-Orell is dead before the reader ever properly meets him ÔÇö killed by Jon Snow in the fight in the Skirling Pass in the second book ÔÇö and exists thereafter as a legacy: his eagle, inherited in part by the warg Varamyr Sixskins, hates Jon with a dead manÔÇÖs hatred and marks him for the host. The show resurrected him into a full speaking role ÔÇö a season of scouting, suspicion and rivalry with a face and a name ÔÇö essentially dramatizing in person the grudge the books conduct through a bird. His campfire warg-lore likewise absorbs material the books assign to VaramyrÔÇÖs prologue. One detail survives every version: an eagle with a man inside it, circling Jon Snow, wanting him dead.