Ramsay Bolton

Roose's baseborn son, a grinning, sadistic young hunter with a pack of hounds and a taste for cruelty that even his cold father finds difficult to leash.

The fuller tale

Ramsay is what the Dreadfort's old sigil looks like when it stands up and walks. Born of Roose Bolton's rape of a miller's wife — the books have Roose tell the story himself, evenly, as a matter of estate management — he was raised at a mill with his mother and a servant called Reek, then brought to the Dreadfort when his existence became convenient. What arrived was a broad, fleshy young man with his father's pale eyes and none of his father's temperature control: where Roose is winter, Ramsay is a grease fire, hungry, theatrical, and delighted with himself. His amusements are the family's ancient ones practiced openly — the hunt, with girls for quarry and hounds named for the caught; the flaying knife, wielded as a hobbyist.

His masterpiece of cruelty is Theon Greyjoy. Taking the ironborn prince captive in Winterfell's fall, Ramsay spends the interval between the tale's second act and its fourth reducing him — flaying fingers, taking pieces, drowning the name Theon under the name Reek until the prisoner flinches from his own reflection. The project is not interrogation; it manufactures nothing of use. It is craftsmanship for its own sake, and the story presents it as exactly that: the difference between Ramsay and every other torturer in the tale is that the others want something, and Ramsay has it already — the doing is the want.

Warfare, as he practices it, is the same hobby at scale. He takes Moat Cailin from the ironborn with a promise of safe passage and flays the garrison that accepted it; he burns Winterfell's countryside and blames the burning; and his relief of the Dreadfort's interests is always staged as rescue — Ramsay arrives, banners snapping, to save people from disasters he arranged. His father legitimizes him when war thins the trueborn line, and Ramsay Snow becomes Ramsay Bolton, heir to the North — a promotion the books show him receiving with the one emotion he shares with his father: an heir's cold arithmetic about what, and who, stands between him and permanence.

The marriage that anchors his last act — Sansa Stark in the show, the false Arya in the books — is his function in the story distilled: the Boltons need a Stark to launder stolen Winterfell, and Ramsay turns the transaction into an atrocity because transactions bore him. It is also the beginning of his arithmetic failing. Cruelty as governance makes the North remember; the girl escapes over the wall with the broken man Ramsay built, and the two of them carry his account north to Castle Black, where it is presented to a brother with an army of wildlings and, eventually, the Vale's knights behind the hill.

The Battle of the Bastards is his self-portrait in tactics: Rickon spent as bait, his own wounded arrowed on the field, a shield-wall closing on encircled men like a slow vice — cruelty as generalship, and winning, until the Vale arrives and the ledger flips in a quarter of an hour. Ramsay's ending begins the moment he retreats behind Winterfell's walls with the giant at the gate. He is the tale's argument that sadism is not strength: stripped of his father's restraint, his army, and finally his hounds' patience, what remains in the kennels is only a man who mistook other people's fear for his own invincibility.

The page and the screen

The books' Ramsay is less pretty and more feral — fleshy, dry-skinned, dressed in dandy's velvets he wears badly, described by his own father as never truly bathing the blood off — where the show cast a boyish charmer and let the grin do the work. His bride differs materially: not Sansa but Jeyne Poole, the steward's daughter passed off as Arya Stark, a fraud the whole northern court is forced to swallow in silence. And he is alive in the published books, holding Winterfell beside his father as Stannis closes in — the author's infamous Pink Letter, taunting Jon Snow with claims about the battle's outcome, is either Ramsay's hand or someone impersonating him, an authorship puzzle readers have argued for decades. The show also trimmed his gang of Bastard's Boys and invented Myranda, the kennelmaster's daughter, to give his sadism a co-conspirator with dialogue. Both tellings agree on the essentials; the books just refuse to make him fun to watch.

In the show, season by season

Season Six. In Home — A stepmother, a baby brother, and hungry hounds: heirs resolved. In Battle of the Bastards — "My hounds will never harm me." Seven days unfed.

In the books

A Dance with Dragons. In The Winterfell Knot — A lord now, minus his bride, his Reek, and his temper.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Littlefinger's plan lands: Sansa Stark will marry Ramsay Bolton, in Winterfell. (S5·E3)
• Winterfell hosts a wedding in the snow: Ramsay Bolton takes “Arya Stark” — Jeyne Poole in a stolen name — and Reek gives the bride away into horror. (ADWD 33)

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

The show: Killed at Winterfell (S6·E9)

He lost the Battle of the Bastards, his house, and his hounds' loyalty in a single afternoon. Sansa Stark watched from outside the kennel as the starved beasts he'd raised remembered they were hungry.

The show settles Ramsay's account in his own kennels. Beaten half-conscious by Jon Snow in Winterfell's yard — Jon stopping only because beating him to death would have been a mercy Sansa outranked — he wakes tied to a chair among the cages, and Sansa explains the arrangement: his words are going to disappear, his house is going to disappear, and his hounds have not been fed in seven days. Ramsay's last confidence — my hounds will never harm me — survives approximately one sniff. Sansa walks away down the corridor to the sound of his loyal beasts remembering they are hungry, and permits herself the smallest smile of the entire series. In the books Ramsay is alive, un-mauled and holding Winterfell; whatever the remaining volumes intend for him, the show's kennel door is an invention readers can only hope the author finds equally fitting.