Maester Luwin

The maester of Winterfell, healer, teacher, and counselor to House Stark, who has served the family faithfully for a lifetime.

The fuller tale

Luwin forged his chain at the Citadel like every maester, but his has a link most lack: Valyrian steel, the mark of one who studied the higher mysteries — magic, in plain speech. He studied it, found it a drained and empty well, and drew the reasonable conclusion that the age of wonders was over; the tale then assigned him to the one castle in Westeros where he would be proven wrong about everything, kindly, a little at a time. It is the sharpest irony the story runs on a minor character: its most sympathetic skeptic posted to the address where dragons' cousins sleep in the crypts and the gods still answer through the trees.

As Winterfell's maester he is healer, tutor, accountant, midwife and conscience — he delivered every one of Lady Catelyn's children and taught them all their letters afterward. The tale leans on his steadiness constantly: it is Luwin who manages the castle through Bran's coma and Catelyn's collapse, Luwin who tutors two small lords through a war neither can understand, Luwin who tells Bran, gently and wrongly, that the wolf-dreams and the three-eyed crow are only dreams. His wrongness is never foolishness; it is the honest limit of a good education, and the story treats it with more tenderness than it treats most people's rightness.

His finest hours are his worst ones. When Theon takes Winterfell, Luwin stays — counseling the boy he helped raise against each next mistake, pleading with him at the end to run to the Wall and salvage something of his life. He serves the Starks by serving their enemy honest advice, which is the maester's oath kept at its hardest angle: he belongs to the castle, and the castle needs someone sane inside it. Between Theon's twenty men and Ramsay's torch, sanity's supply runs out; the grey rat of Winterfell, as no one who knew him would dare call him, spends himself to the last coin getting the boys clear.

The page and the screen

Book and show agree on Luwin almost completely — a rarity — differing mainly in density: the books give him years more screen-time, so to speak, including the delicate business of raising Jon Snow's status with Catelyn (he is the one who suggests the Wall) and a long record of small mercies the show had no room for. His end is staged differently in emphasis: the show gives him a final scene with Osha and a mercy asked for off-camera, while the books let Theon's chapters carry the horror of the sack and its cost. Donald Sumpter's performance made him the show's definitive grey-robed decency; readers would only add that the books' Luwin is funnier than anyone expects a maester to be.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Theon's own men sack him; Winterfell burns behind them; Maester Luwin dies at the heart tree. (S2·E10)
• Bran and Rickon share a dream of their father in the crypts; when they go down with Maester Luwin, the raven's letter is already flying north. (AGOT 67)
• Out of the ashes of Winterfell: Maester Luwin dying beneath the heart tree gives his last counsel, Osha gives him mercy, and the wolves go separate ways. (ACOK 70)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Killed in the sack of Winterfell (S2·E10)

The books: Died beneath the heart tree (ACOK, ch. 70)

Speared by ironborn in Winterfell's godswood during the sack. He lived long enough to counsel the boys he'd raised one last time, and asked Osha for the mercy of a quick end beneath the heart tree.

Luwin dies of the sack of Winterfell. When the Dreadfort men — Ramsay's, wearing rescue's colors — put the castle to the torch, the old maester is speared in the godswood and left to die slowly beneath the heart tree, where Osha and the boys find him as they flee the ruin. He spends his last strength as he spent all the rest of it: on the children. He tells Bran and Rickon to split up, tells Osha which roads to trust and makes her swear to protect them, and — the books add — gives Theon's shattered conscience one final push toward the Watch. Then he asks Osha for the gift of mercy, a quick end under the tree where the old gods he never quite believed in could watch. She gives it. Both tellings agree on nearly every detail, which is its own kind of tribute; some deaths neither version dared improve.