The Freefolk are not a noble house but the scattered, kinless people of the lands beyond the Wall, descended from those First Men who chose the haunted forest and the frozen shore over the realms that would one day belong to lords and kings. The maesters and lords of the Seven Kingdoms call them wildlings; they call themselves the free folk, and call those they look down on south of the Wall the kneelers. To be free, in their telling, is to bend the knee to no man, to follow only the leader one chooses, and to take what one can and keep what one can defend. The gods, they say, made the earth for all men to share, until the kings came with their crowns and their iron and stole it for themselves.
Their country is the cold half of the world, a great arc north of the Wall and west of the Shivering Sea: the Haunted Forest pressed close beneath the ice, the Frostfangs and the valley of the Milkwater, the Frozen Shore where wood is so scarce that men ride sleds of walrus-bone drawn by dogs, and beyond all that the Lands of Always Winter where no living man goes willingly. Within that country there are no states, no laws save custom, and few clans at all alike. Some keep villages in the haunted forest such as Whitetree; others hold timber halls like Craster's Keep and the Mead-King's Ruddy Hall. The Thenns alone keep something like a lord in their hidden valley of the Frostfangs and call him their Magnar. The Hornfoots run barefoot through the snow; the Nightrunners feud with them where the two meet; the ice-river clans are said to eat their dead; the cave-dwellers worship gods that live in the earth; the men of the Frozen Shore haul their walrus-bone sleds across the ice; and once, six hundred years ago, the great town of Hardhome on the Bay of Seals was burned to ruin and has lain accursed ever since.
The free folk keep the old gods of the weirwoods, as their First Men forebears did, and keep no maester, no septon, and no surname. Their dead are given to the fire, their children left unnamed until they have lived two winters, and their women not asked for in marriage but stolen, with horn and song and a knife at hand. A man who cannot steal his bride is reckoned no man worth having; a woman who can wield a spear well enough is reckoned a spearwife and rides with her men into battle. Among them too dwell the last of the giants of Westeros, who ride mammoths into the host, and the skinchangers and wargs who slip from their own skins into wolf and eagle and snow bear. The Old Tongue of the First Men is still spoken in places, chiefly by the Thenns, and the songs of Bael the Bard are said to be known to every camp.
For all their feuds, from age to age a fighter or a sorcerer has stitched the warring bands together and named himself King-Beyond-the-Wall. So came Joramun in the Long Night, who blew the Horn of Winter to wake giants from the earth and joined his strength to a Stark king to put down the Night's King at the Nightfort. So came the brothers Gendel and Gorne, who led their host south through the caves beneath the Frostfangs and broke upon the spears of the kings of Winter, the one slain in single combat and the other lost forever in the dark. So came the Horned King, the Bard, and the Redbeard: Bael, who walked into Winterfell with a harp on his back and walked out with a Stark maid for a bride; and Raymun Redbeard in the days of Lord Willam Stark, his head taken at last on the shore of Long Lake by Harmond Umber, called the Drunken Giant of Last Hearth.
By the events of A Game of Thrones they are gathered again, this time under Mance Rayder, a Night's Watch deserter turned king who slew three rivals and forced the submissions of Tormund Giantsbane and Styr the Magnar of Thenn to put the crown upon his head. He has called every band south of the Frostfangs to come down out of the haunted forest, not for plunder, but to flee south of the Wall, for the cold things long thought dead are stirring once more in the long night beyond the trees. His host marches with the Lord of Bones at the gate and Harma Dogshead at the vanguard, the Weeper at the eastern flank, the warg Varamyr Sixskins among his counsellors, the spearwife Ygritte among his climbers, and Mag the Mighty at the head of the giants who follow him. When the host breaks at Castle Black and Stannis Baratheon rides up from the south at the gallop, a thousand of the free folk fall and another thousand are taken, Mance among them; what scatters in the woods regroups around Tormund, and what is left after winter and the cold-things gathers at the broken stones of Hardhome under the woods-witch called Mother Mole. To the bastard Lord Commander of the Watch, Jon Snow, the survivors at last bend the knee and pass through the gate; and out of that strange peace is made a new house, House Thenn, when Sigorn son of Styr is wed at the Wall to Alys Karstark of Karhold.