Eddard Stark
Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North, and the most honorable man in the realm — a soldier who wants nothing so much as to go home. Raised his bastard boy alongside his trueborn children.
The fuller tale
Ned Stark carries the old North in a southern age: the man who passes the sentence swings the sword, guest right is holy, and a word given is a debt owed. He was never meant to carry any of it — a second son, fostered at the Eyrie with Robert Baratheon under Jon Arryn's eye, being shaped for a comfortable life as somebody's bannerman while his brother Brandon learned to be Winterfell. The Mad King's fires rearranged all that in an afternoon, and the quiet son came home a lord, a widower-in-spirit, and the head of a rebellion's northern half.
His war was Robert's Rebellion, and he fought it out of duty rather than appetite — raising the North, riding at the Trident, and breaking with his best friend over the murdered Targaryen children when Robert called dead babies a mercy. The war's end gave him its cruelest errand: he found his sister Lyanna in a tower in the Dorne, at the price of five companions and a promise she extracted with her last strength. He came home with her bones, a bastard son he named Jon, and a secret he told no one — not his king, not his wife. The single lie of an honest man's life, kept so well it bends the entire story around it.
For fifteen years he was what a Warden of the North should be: unglamorous, present, just. He raised five trueborn children and the bastard beside them, let his daughter keep a fencing teacher and his sons their direwolves, and executed the Watch's deserters himself because the old way says the lord must own the deaths he orders. The North under Ned Stark is the tale's one picture of government actually working — which is why the story opens there, and why everything after feels like a fall.
Robert's offer of the Handship is a summons Ned cannot honorably refuse and cannot possibly survive. In King's Landing he does exactly what he was brought to do — he finds the truth of Jon Arryn's death and the royal children's parentage — and then handles it like a northman: he warns Cersei to run before he tells the king. Mercy, in that city, is a resignation letter. The pieces move against him with terrible speed — Robert dying under a boar, Littlefinger's dagger at his throat in the throne room, the gold cloaks he paid for turning their spears — and the most honorable man in the realm ends in a black cell, listening to Varys explain that pride is a luxury fathers cannot afford.
What the tale does with Ned afterward is the measure of what he was. Every Stark child's arc is an answer to his: Robb inherits his war, Sansa his patience, Arya his sword-and-sentence justice, Bran his memory, Jon his impossible promises. His notion that honor is something you do rather than something you have outlives every cynic who called it naive — Littlefinger, Cersei and Tywin all die of their own cleverness, while Ned's stubborn decency keeps winning arguments a decade after he leaves the story.
He is also, quietly, the story's great question mark. The promise at the tower of joy, the mother he never named, the fever-dream fragments of blue roses and bloody swords — Ned took the tale's central mystery into the dark with him, and the realm spent a generation calling him dishonorable for the one act of perfect honor no one knew about. He would probably have considered that a fair trade.
The page and the screen
Book Ned is a point-of-view character, and it changes everything: fifteen chapters inside a mind the show can only photograph. Readers get the fever dreams of the tower of joy years before any adaptation could film it, the guilt that flares whenever Jon's mother is mentioned, and the slow horror of a man watching his own investigation close around his neck. Sean Bean's performance builds the same man from the outside — wearier, grayer, aged up along with the rest of the adult cast — and the show trades the dreams for exposition, which is why viewers met the tower of joy six seasons after readers did.
Smaller divergences accumulate. In the books the fight outside the brothel ends with Ned's leg crushed under his dying horse, not a Lannister spear through the knee, and his last weeks are spent in a poppy haze that makes the black-cell scenes with Varys hit differently. The books also thread rumors around him the show drops entirely — half the realm believes Ashara Dayne was Jon's mother, and Ned lets them, because a slander that protects a promise is cheap at the price.
In the show, season by season
Season One. In Winter Is Coming — The king's justice, then the king's reluctant Hand. In The Kingsroad — Puts Lady to the sword himself, as the old way demands. In Lord Snow — Sits his first small council and hates every minute. In Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things — The seed is strong — he just doesn't know it yet. In The Wolf and the Lion — Throws the Hand's badge at his king rather than kill a girl. In A Golden Crown — Reads Baratheon history and finally does the sum: black of hair. In You Win or You Die — Warns Cersei to run. Mercy is his undoing. In Baelor — Sees Arya on Baelor's statue, says one last word: "Baelor."
In the books
A Game of Thrones. In A Hand's Summons — "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword." In The Hand Investigates — The seed is strong. Every Baratheon in the book is black of hair. In The Eyrie and the Heart — Sits the throne one day and sends Beric Dondarrion for the Mountain's head. In The Wine and the Boar — Honor over the realm, every time, to the last. In The Green Fork and the Whispering Wood — "Baelor," he says to a girl on a statue. Then the sword.
Their journey
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Beheaded at the Great Sept of Baelor (S1·E9)
The books: Beheaded at Baelor's sept (AGOT, ch. 66)
He confessed a treason he never committed on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor, to buy his daughters' lives. Joffrey wanted a head anyway, and Ice — his own greatsword — came down before Sansa's eyes while Arya watched from a statue's plinth.
The deal was straightforward: confess to treason, take the black, and his daughters live. Ned — coached by Varys, begged by Sansa — spent the last thing he owned and lied to the crowd on the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor, proclaiming Joffrey the true king. Joffrey then discovered the one thing no one had planned for: a king does not have to keep his mother's bargains. He called for Ser Ilyn Payne, and the sword that took Ned Stark's head was Ice — his own greatsword — while Sansa screamed from the platform and Arya watched from the plinth of Baelor's statue until Yoren of the Night's Watch turned her away from it.
The two tellings differ only in small, sharp details — the books give Arya's view from the statue and Yoren's growled 'boy' as he pulls her into the crowd; the show gives Ned's last searching look for his daughter and a fade to sound. The aftermath is identical and enormous: the North rises, the realm splits five ways, and a story that had seemed to be about whether the hero could survive politics announces that it was never that kind of story. His head went on a spike; his bones went north, in time, to the crypts where Starks belong.