Rickard Karstark

Lord of Karhold, a proud, grim northern bannerman of distant Stark blood, who marches his sons to war under the direwolf banner.

The fuller tale

The Karstarks are Stark blood at one thousand years' remove — descended from Karlon Stark, a younger son rewarded with lands for putting down a rebellion, whose keep of Karl's Hold wore down into Karhold and whose descendants wore Stark into Karstark. Lord Rickard, the tale's Karstark, looks the shared ancestry: long-faced, grey, grim, with a spade beard and a northman's economy of warmth. He answers Winterfell's call the way his house always has — instantly, in strength, three sons and near three hundred horse riding south under the white sunburst — and his early war is exemplary. That is what makes what follows a tragedy rather than a villainy.

The Whispering Wood ruins him in the hour it makes Robb famous. In the battle that captures the Kingslayer, two of Rickard's sons — Torrhen and Eddard in the books, Torrhen on the show — die at Jaime Lannister's hand, cut down within reach of the prize. From that night the war has two Rickard Karstarks: the bannerman who keeps his men in the field, and the father who sits apart at the fires, waiting for the crown to weigh his sons at their worth. Every Stark decision after — sparing Jaime for a trial, Catelyn's releasing him outright to ransom two girls — lands on him as the same message: a Karstark's blood is coin, and other men are spending it.

Grief curdles into insubordination by degrees the tale is careful to show. He hunts the escaped Kingslayer with murder openly on his mind; he tells his king to his face that vengeance is owed him; and when the war leaves him nothing else, he takes it in the worst currency available — two captive Lannister boys, squires of fourteen and fifteen, killed in their cell to answer for the sons Jaime killed in battle. Even his own men bring him to justice reluctantly. He stands before Robb unrepentant, arguing the old blood arithmetic — kin for kin — and the tale gives him the dignity of meaning every word of it. Rickard Karstark is what happens when the North's proudest virtue, remembering, is left alone in the dark with a loss too big for it.

The page and the screen

The show compresses the Karstark ledger — one son dead in the Whispering Wood instead of two, unnamed Lannister boys instead of the books' Tion Frey and Willem Lannister, murdered in Riverrun's cells — but keeps the moral shape intact. The books extend the aftermath in ways the show skipped entirely: Rickard's heir Harrion sits a Lannister prisoner, his uncle Arnolf schemes to betray Stannis and steal Karhold, and his daughter Alys flees to the Wall to escape a forced marriage, giving Jon Snow one of A Dance with Dragons' warmest subplots. The show's sequel to the Karstark grudge is simpler and colder: the house rides with Ramsay Bolton at the Battle of the Bastards, and a later generation's small children stand in Winterfell's hall to be forgiven. Two tellings, one lesson — the wound Robb dealt at Riverrun never stopped bleeding.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Rickard Karstark murders two Lannister squires in their cells; Robb takes his head and half his army. (S3·E5)
• Rickard Karstark butchers two captive squires in their cell for vengeance; Robb answers as a king must and takes his head — and half his host rides home. (ASOS 21)

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

The show: Beheaded for murder (S3·E5)

The books: Executed by the King in the North (ASOS, ch. 21)

He butchered two captive Lannister boys in their cell to answer his sons' deaths, and dared his king to do something about it. Robb Stark took his head at Riverrun with his own hand — justice that cost him half his army.

Robb Stark held the trial in his own person, as Ned had taught him: the man who passes the sentence swings the sword. For the murder of two captive boys, Rickard Karstark was condemned by his king — over the pleading of nearly every adviser Robb had, all of them making the same argument, that the Karstarks were half his infantry and dead lords pay no debts. Robb hanged the seven who did the deed and took Rickard's head himself, in the show at a block in the rain, in the books in Riverrun's godswood, where it took more than one stroke. The condemned man's last words were the same in both: a curse, and a title revoked — kill me and be cursed, you are no king of mine. The Karstark strength marched home the next morning, and every historian of the war, in-world and out, marks the same entry: justice done perfectly, and the cause it belonged to poorer by half an army. Walder Frey merely finished what Riverrun's headsman's-block began.