Born of wildling parents slain in a raid and carried south as an infant by the rangers who found him, raised at the Shadow Tower and given the black, he served the Night's Watch as ranger for many years before forsaking his vows. The cause, by his own telling, was a cloak: torn by a shadowcat on a ranging beyond the Wall, mended by a wildling woman with strips of crimson silk, and ordered burned by his commanders on his return. He chose the cloak and the woman and went over the Wall, and the Watch hunted him for an oathbreaker thereafter.
In the years that followed he did what no man before him had managed: he stitched together the hundred warring bands of the haunted forest, the frozen shore, and the Frostfangs into a single host and named himself King-Beyond-the-Wall. He brought that host south against the Wall in the time of Lord Commander Mormont, hoping to pass through it and into the Gift before the Others came south behind him, and his march set Castle Black under siege and the Seven Kingdoms upon notice that something old and cold had stirred again in the lands of always winter.