Catelyn Stark
Born a Tully of Riverrun, Lady of Winterfell by marriage: fierce in defense of her children and never quite at peace with the bastard raised beneath her roof.
A soul of House Stark, born at Riverrun.
The fuller tale
Season One
Lady of Winterfell, and the one who reads a room a beat before her husband does. Bran's fall puts her at his bedside praying to gods she was not raised with, and a stranger's dagger left for the killing finishes what the fall did not — she rides for King's Landing to warn Ned it was no accident. She recognizes the blade as Tyrion Lannister's on the strength of an old wager and takes him prisoner at a roadside inn, dragging him through the Vale to stand before her sister Lysa instead of a proper court. It costs Ned his last ally in the capital and starts a war she spends the rest of it trying to steer.
Season Two
Sent to Renly's camp to buy her son an army instead of a rival crown, she watches him die in his own tent to a shadow with Stannis's face and no visible hand behind the knife. Brienne of Tarth, the only witness who does not flee, kneels and offers her a sword on the spot, and Catelyn takes it — the first oath sworn to her rather than to Robb. She returns to the war with no alliance to show for it, grieving a man she never much liked, and spends what's left of the season arguing for the peace her son keeps refusing to make.
Season Three
She frees Jaime Lannister herself, over her son's objections, gambling that a hostage traded for her daughters is worth more than one kept in a tent, and sends Brienne to see him safely south. Robb's marriage to Talisa has already cost them the Frey swords they needed, and the wedding at the Twins meant to patch things over is a trap she reads half a verse too late — the music changes, the doors bar, and she is left with a knife at a hostage's throat and no one worth threatening with it. She kills Walder Frey's own wife with her bare hands, for whatever that is worth, before Black Walder opens her throat.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Slain at the Red Wedding (S3·E9)
She watched her firstborn murdered under a roof that had sworn them safety, with the Frey wife she'd bargained for standing witness. She opened Lady Frey's throat as her last act, and Black Walder opened hers.
On the page. Killed at the Red Wedding (ASOS, ch. 52)
She watched her son die at his uncle's wedding feast and opened old Jinglebell's throat for a vengeance Walder Frey only laughed at. They cut her throat and threw her in the Green Fork naked — and what the river gave back three days later does not forgive.
She died at the Red Wedding, under a roof whose bread and salt she had eaten, watching everything she had bargained for turn to slaughter. When the Rains of Castamere began and the quarrels flew, Catelyn's last play was pure Tully: she seized a hostage — Walder Frey's own kin — and offered a trade, her son's life for his. Frey let her cut the man's throat for nothing. She had watched Robb die by then; the Freys opened her throat a moment later. The show gives the hostage as Frey's young wife; the books give her the lackwit Jinglebell, and add that the Freys threw her body naked into the Green Fork as a mockery of Tully funeral rites.
And in the books, the river gives her back. Three days dead, fished from the water, she is granted the kiss of life by Beric Dondarrion — who passes his last resurrection to her and stays dead to pay for it. What rises is Lady Stoneheart: throat-scarred, half-voiced, unforgiving, hanging Freys and fair-weather friends from riverland trees at the head of the Brotherhood without Banners. The show cut her entirely — the single most debated omission of the whole adaptation. Readers are still waiting to learn what the mother's ghost does to the sons' war; viewers were never told she existed.
Their chapters, book by book
A Game of Thrones 11 chapters of their own
Catelyn I
In the godswood Catelyn brings Ned hard news: Jon Arryn is dead of a sudden fever, and King Robert rides north with his court.
Catelyn II
Lysa's secret letter arrives accusing the Lannisters of murdering Jon Arryn; Ned resolves to go south, and Jon will go to the Wall.
Catelyn III
Fire in the library tower — and a catspaw with a Valyrian steel dagger at Bran's throat; Catelyn's bare hands and Summer's teeth end him.
Catelyn IV
Catelyn reaches King's Landing in secret and is fetched to Littlefinger, who names the dagger's owner: Tyrion Lannister — a lie with a long tail.
Catelyn V
At the crossroads inn Tyrion Lannister walks in on Catelyn Stark; she calls on her father's bannermen and takes him — but not toward Winterfell.
Catelyn VI
Up the mountain road to the Eyrie, through the Bloody Gate — where Lysa's welcome is madness, and Tyrion is given to the sky cells.
Catelyn VII
The Eyrie's champion Ser Vardis Egen fights Bronn for the gods' verdict — and follows his shield through the Moon Door.
Catelyn VIII
Catelyn meets Robb's host at Moat Cailin and does not send him home to Winterfell — she teaches him how to spend his one throw of the dice.
Catelyn IX
At the Twins Catelyn crosses Walder Frey's bridge with a bargain: the crossing for marriage promises — one of them Robb's.
Catelyn X
In the Whispering Wood Robb springs his trap on Jaime Lannister; the Kingslayer is taken, and the price is paid in Karstark sons.
Catelyn XI
In Riverrun's great hall the lords debate distant kings until the Greatjon has had enough: “The King in the North!” — and every sword comes out.A Clash of Kings 7 chapters of their own
A Storm of Swords 7 chapters of their own, and 1 more that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Catelyn is one of the books' central point-of-view voices — the entire northern war arrives through her eyes, and her interior monologue of grief, calculation and guilt is among the saga's best sustained writing. The show necessarily flattens that into Michelle Fairley's performance, which critics rightly praised, but it also hands her material the books never wrote: the invented confession about praying for baby Jon's life is the show's, and her marriage's arithmetic shifts once Talisa of Volantis replaces the books' Jeyne Westerling as the queen her son should not have married.
The structural difference is where each telling leaves her weight. In the books she is the reader's window on Robb — he has no chapters of his own — so his kingship, his mistakes and his charm all reach us filtered through a mother's fear. Show viewers meet Robb directly and lose that doubled vision, which quietly makes show-Catelyn seem more peripheral to a war the books insist she co-authored.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.