The Three-Eyed Raven
An ancient greenseer grown into the roots of a great weirwood beyond the Wall, keeper of all the memory of the world, waiting for the one he has been calling in dreams.
A soul born at Long ago, sworn to The Children & the Others.
The fuller tale
How it ends for them
On the screen. Ended beyond the Wall (S6┬ÀE5)
The last greenseer, a thousand years in a weirwood throne, kept the world's memory beneath the hill. The Night King touched Bran in a vision and followed the mark home ÔÇö the old man dissolved into the dark with his work half-finished.
The show kills him with a touch. When Bran, unsupervised in a vision, is found by the Night King and marked on the arm, the caveÔÇÖs protections are voided at a stroke ÔÇö the dead know where the worldÔÇÖs memory lives, and come for it. The Three-Eyed Raven spends his last hours in the only currency he has: he drags Bran into a final vision of old Winterfell and pours the succession into him mid-dream, teacher and archive at once, while outside the children of the forest and Summer and Hodor buy minutes with their lives. The Night King enters the cave and shears the old man apart at the root-throne; in the vision, Bran watches his teacher dissolve into wind and snow with the work unfinished ÔÇö the worldÔÇÖs memory handed off mid-sentence, which explains a great deal about its new custodian.
In the published books he has no death: Bloodraven sits in his roots still, BranÔÇÖs education barely begun, the Night King who kills him on screen not existing on the page at all. Readers of a certain temperament note that a man who was born in one kingÔÇÖs bed, died to the realmÔÇÖs knowledge at the Wall, and turned up a century later inside a tree has already outlived three or four endings, and may decline this one too.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The books give the figure a name and one of the sagaÔÇÖs richest backstories: he is Brynden Rivers, called Bloodraven ÔÇö a bastard son of King Aegon the Fourth, albino, one-eyed, sorcerer, spymaster, Hand of the King, the most feared man of his age, who ended a rebellion with treachery at a peace banquet, was sent to the Wall for it, rose to Lord Commander of the NightÔÇÖs Watch, and vanished on a ranging decades before the tale begins. A thousand eyes and one, the riddle-songs call him; finding that dreaded historical figure grown into a tree is one of the booksÔÇÖ great slow-fuse revelations, and it colors every lesson ÔÇö BranÔÇÖs teacher is not a neutral sage but the most cunning political operator of his century, wearing roots. The show never names him, splits the role between two actors, and invents both his death and the Night KingÔÇÖs personal vendetta; the booksÔÇÖ version has no mark on BranÔÇÖs arm, no cave-fall ÔÇö and is alive in the published books, still in his chair, still teaching.
The tellings also disagree about the bird. In the books he is the three-eyed crow, and his dream-summons are stranger and sparser; the showÔÇÖs rebranding to raven tidily matches the Westerosi post-bird and quietly drops the booksÔÇÖ implication ÔÇö still argued over by readers ÔÇö that the crow of BranÔÇÖs dreams and the man in the cave may not be exactly the same thing.