Hoster Tully
Lord of Riverrun and the Riverlands, who married his daughters to the realm's two great Hands and has grown old and ailing in his ancestral seat.
A soul of House Tully, born at Riverrun.
The fuller tale
Season Three
Riverrun sends Lord Hoster down the river burning; Edmure can't hit the boat.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Died of long illness (S3┬ÀE3)
The old Lord of Riverrun died abed of the long sickness while the war he never wanted burned across his rivers. His funeral boat carried him down the Tumblestone with fire arrows for a farewell ÔÇö the third of them, at last, well shot.
On the page. Died abed, given to the river (ASOS, ch. 46)
The Lord of Riverrun died slowly of the sickness in his belly while the war burned his rivers, calling out 'Tansy' for a wrong done long ago. Edmure fired three arrows over his funeral boat; the Blackfish's fourth wasn't needed.
In the show he dies of his long illness offscreen between seasons, and the third episode of the third season is his farewell: Riverrun gives its lord to the river in the old way, his body sent down the water in a burning boat. EdmureÔÇÖs flaming arrows fall short again and again until the Blackfish takes the bow from his hands, and the scene doubles as a portrait of the family he left ÔÇö the earnest heir who cannot quite manage, and the old soldier who does not stay to watch the shaft land.
The books tell it much the same, a chapter or two deeper: he dies abed at Riverrun in A Storm of Swords with Catelyn near, after months of poppy-dulled twilight, and the funeral boat goes down the river trailing fire while his sworn men watch from the walls. Both tellings agree on the essential mercy ÔÇö of all the lords of the Trident, Hoster Tully alone was allowed to die of nothing worse than time.
Their chapters, book by book
A Storm of Swords 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
Show viewers never meet Hoster alive: he exists as a funeral ÔÇö one episode, one boat, one bow passed from nephew to great-uncle. The books keep him dying across two volumes, and give him one of the seriesÔÇÖ buried tragedies: in his fever he mutters the word ÔÇ£Tansy,ÔÇØ an apology forty years old, for the moon tea he forced on an unmarried, pregnant Lysa and the choices he made for her afterward. That guilt reframes the entire Arryn storyline ÔÇö much of what Lysa becomes was manufactured at Riverrun, by a father certain he was doing his duty.
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.