Why Does Hodor Keep Hodor-ing? Neuroscience Explains

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Hodor hodor hodor. Hodor hodor? Hodor. Hodor-hodor. Hodor!

Oh, um, excuse me. Did you catch what I said?

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Fans of the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, the fifth season of which premieres this Sunday, know what I’m referencing, anyway. Hodor is the brawny, simple-minded stableboy of the Stark family in Winterfell. His defining characteristic, of course, is that he only speaks a single word: “Hodor.”

But those who read the A Song of Ice and Fire book series by George R R Martin may know something that the TV fans don’t: his name isn’t actually Hodor. According to his great-grandmother Old Nan, his real name is Walder. “No one knew where ‘Hodor’ had come from,” she says, “but when he started saying it, they started calling him by it. It was the only word he had.”

Whether he intended it or not, Martin created a character who is a textbook example of someone with a neurological condition called expressive aphasia.