Hodor

Hold the door.

Hodor is Old Nan's great-grandson and a slow-witted stable-boy at Winterfell. His real name is Walder, but everyone calls him Hodor because that is the only word he can say.

Lore & Background

After Bran Stark is crippled in A Game of Thrones, Hodor carries him in a sling on his back, and when Winterfell is sacked and burned he escapes north with Bran, Jojen, Meera, Rickon and Osha. He is one of only three characters, with Aemon Targaryen and Walder Frey, to appear in both the novels and the Tales of Dunk and Egg.

Reader's Guide

Bran watches as the link between past and present gives young Wylis a seizure in which he repeats Meera's command to hold the door until it slurs into Hodor. George R. R. Martin gave the origin of the name to Benioff and Weiss himself. Kristian Nairn played Hodor from the pilot to "The Door".

In the television series, where his younger self is named Wylis, Bran wargs into Hodor to snap Locke's neck. In "The Door" Bran, caught in a vision of the past, wargs into Hodor in the present and through him into the boy Wylis; Hodor holds the cave door against the wights so Meera can carry Bran away, and dies.