The children of the forest were a mysterious non-human race who dwelt in Westeros during the Dawn Age, long before the coming of the First Men. Smaller than men yet far from childlike, they had nut-brown skin dappled like a deer's, large slitted eyes of gold and green, and hands tipped with three fingers, a thumb, and sharp black claws. The giants named them woh dak nag gram, "the little squirrel people," but in the True Tongue they called themselves those who sing the song of earth. They built no cities and wrought no metal, living off the land from caves, crannogs, and hidden tree villages, hunting with weirwood bows and obsidian weapons as wood dancers. They worshipped the old gods of forest, stream, and stone, and it was their hands that carved the watching faces upon the weirwoods. Rarest among them were those born with mossy green or blood-red eyes—greenseers, gifted with the greensight and, once bound to a heart tree, granted lifespans of centuries.
When the First Men crossed the Arm of Dorne, the two peoples warred for thousands of years over the felling of the weirwoods, until at last they made peace in the Pact sworn upon the Isle of Faces, granting the open lands to men and the forests to the children, who taught the First Men to revere the old gods. In the Long Night that followed the Age of Heroes, the children joined the First Men under the last hero in the Battle for the Dawn against the Others, and legend holds they lent their magic to Bran the Builder in the raising of the Wall. Thereafter they began their slow withdrawal, retreating beyond the Wall and giving the Night's Watch a hundred obsidian daggers each year. Diminished further by the steel-bearing Andals who burned their sacred groves, the children passed out of the sight of men, and have not been seen for hundreds of years.