Merrett Frey
One of Lord Walder's many undistinguished sons, a soft, unlucky man who never won the spurs or the respect he wanted (book only).
The fuller tale
Somewhere in the middle of Lord Walder’s endless brood sits Merrett Frey, and “middle” is the story of his life. As a boy he squired at Crakehall alongside a young Jaime Lannister and dreamed the standard dreams — knighthood, tourneys, a name of his own — and the world declined every application. Captured by the outlaws of the Kingswood Brotherhood and ransomed home with a brand for a souvenir, his health and hopes wrecked young, he came back to the Twins with nothing to show but a talent for being overlooked, and settled into the long anticlimax his family had waiting for him.
Grown, he is the Frey the other Freys tell jokes about: soft, heavy, fond of the cup well past fondness, married to a patient Darry wife and father to daughters the family gossips about. His assignment at the Red Wedding measures his standing precisely — while his kin sharpen knives, Merrett’s task is to drink the Greatjon Umber under the table so the North’s strongest man will be too sodden to fight. He performs it faithfully and miserably, cup for cup with a giant, and earns thereby his little share of the most infamous crime of the age: not a killer, merely the man who made a killing easier.
His importance is structural, and it is the books’ blackest joke that he never learns it. Martin hands this negligible man the epilogue of A Storm of Swords — the only chapter he will ever narrate — and uses Merrett’s tired, put-upon eyes to deliver the volume’s final, freezing revelation. The saga’s great atrocity is answered not through a lord or a knight but through the Frey nobody rated: a man who spent his life certain he didn’t matter, chosen by the story to matter exactly once.
The page and the screen
Merrett exists only on the page — the show never names him, folding the Frey rank and file into an anonymous mass for Arya’s vengeance to sweep away wholesale. In the books he is the instrument of a different reckoning entirely: his epilogue chapter is the reader’s first sight of what the Brotherhood Without Banners has become, and of who now leads it — a reveal the show reassigned, in much-diminished form, to no one. The two tellings thus punish the Freys through opposite doors: the show with a daughter’s knife, the books with a mother’s rope.
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Merrett Frey rides to ransom a captive from outlaws and finds a hooded judge instead: dead men hang for the Red Wedding, and the woman under the hood was once Catelyn Stark. (ASOS 82)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
Before the tale: (book only)
The books: Hanged by the brotherhood (ASOS, ch. 82)
The Freys' soft, unlucky envoy rode to Oldstones with the ransom for Petyr Pimple and found the brotherhood waiting. They hanged them together — on the word of a hooded woman whose throat wound matched her wedding.
He dies on a hanging tree at Oldstones, in the epilogue of A Storm of Swords. Sent — because no one better would go — to ransom his young kinsman Petyr Pimple from outlaws, Merrett arrives with the gold and finds the Brotherhood Without Banners has already hanged the boy. They take the ransom anyway, and hang Merrett too, on the testimony of a hooded woman he is brought to face: a gaunt figure in a torn gown, her throat opened in a wound that matches the one the Freys gave Catelyn Stark at his family’s wedding feast. He protests, truthfully, that he killed no one — he only got a man drunk. For the thing that was Catelyn, it is enough. The chapter, and the book, end with the rope. He never appears in the show at all.