Robb Stark
The Stark heir, a boy of fifteen with a direwolf named Grey Wind and his father's sense of duty. Fostered his half-brother Jon and his father's ward Theon like brothers.
The fuller tale
Robb was raised to be the next Lord Stark and got four years' warning that history had other plans. Eldest of Ned and Catelyn's five, auburn-haired and blue-eyed in the Tully mold, he grew up in a boy's paradise — sparring with Jon and Theon in the yard, a direwolf pup named Grey Wind at his heel — and in the space of a single year buried his childhood: father arrested, sisters hostage, and fifteen-year-old Robb calling the banners of the North because there was no one else to do it.
The shock of him is that he was good at it. The lords who came to Winterfell to take the measure of the boy found the Greatjon's fingers in a direwolf's jaws and a lord who laughed about it, and the Lannisters found something worse: a general. He split his host at the Twins, fed Tywin a decoy on the Green Fork, and took the Kingslayer prisoner in the Whispering Wood in the war's most elegant stroke. By the time his bannermen rose in the great hall at Riverrun, swords out, roaring the old words — the King in the North! — he had never lost a battle. He never would.
He also never won the war, and the tale is precise about why. Robb inherited his father's honor without his father's caution, and every defeat came off the battlefield: he executed Lord Karstark for murdering captive boys and lost the Karstark strength, sent Theon to Pyke and lost the North behind him, and — the fatal one — broke his sworn marriage pact with House Frey for love. The bridge he bought with a betrothal he repaid with an apology, and Walder Frey was not a man to whom one apologized.
The marriage itself is the tale in miniature. In the show he loses his heart to Talisa of Volantis across a season of field hospitals; in the books he beds and weds Jeyne Westerling in a single wounded, grieving night at the Crag, because he had just heard his brothers were dead and because a Stark does not dishonor a girl and walk away. Either way the meaning holds: the one time Robb Stark acted on want instead of duty, the price was everything. His father's son to the last — it was honoring the girl, not taking her, that killed him.
What Robb means to the larger tale is the gap he leaves. He is the war's great might-have-been — the king the North still measures kings against, the reason 'the North remembers' is a threat rather than a lament. Jon is compared to him, Sansa negotiates in his shadow, and the lords who crown Starks twice more are trying to buy back the thing that died with him. The books add a live ember the show never lit: before the end, Robb drew up a will naming an heir, and unsealed, unread and unaccounted for, it is still out there in the story's unwritten remainder.
The page and the screen
Robb has no point-of-view chapters in the books — he is seen almost entirely through Catelyn, a boy-king glimpsed by a worried mother — and the show's decision to follow him directly is its single biggest structural change to his story. It needed a bride who could share scenes, so Jeyne Westerling of the Crag, a westerlands girl wed in haste and left behind at Riverrun, became Talisa of Volantis, a battlefield surgeon who marries him on screen and follows the army. Book Robb is also younger — fourteen when the war starts — and his queen never comes within a hundred leagues of the Twins.
The other divergence is the will. Book Robb, knowing Sansa is a Lannister hostage and believing Bran and Rickon dead, legitimizes an heir in front of witnesses — most readers assume Jon — and sends Maege Mormont and Galbart Glover toward Greywater Watch with copies. The show discards the entire thread and routes the North's future through Sansa and Jon's politics instead. It is the clearest case in the whole adaptation of a book plotline still loaded and waiting while the show simply walked around it.
In the show, season by season
Season One. In Winter Is Coming — The heir who stays home when the pack splits. In The Pointy End — "Then it will be swords for the North." The banners answer. In Baelor — Trades two thousand men for a Kingslayer. In Fire and Blood — "The King in the North!" — swords in the firelight at Riverrun.
Season Two. In The North Remembers — Three victories, no crown recognized. In Garden of Bones — Wins every battle; meets a field nurse named Talisa among the wounded. In Valar Morghulis — Marries for love; the toll on the bridge goes unpaid.
Season Three. In Kissed by Fire — Justice cost him the Karstarks; only one bridge can save the campaign. In The Climb — The Freys will have their wedding after all. Edmure pays the toll. In The Bear and the Maiden Fair — A son on the way and one wedding between him and home. In The Rains of Castamere — "Mother." The last word of the King in the North.
In the books
A Game of Thrones. In The Wolf Calls the Banners — Fifteen, and lords twice his age fall silent when he speaks. In The Green Fork and the Whispering Wood — Two thousand men on the Green Fork bought him a Kingslayer. In Fire and Blood — A boy king with an unbeaten sword and a broken family.
A Storm of Swords. In Wolves at the Crossing — Won every battle; married the one defeat that matters. In The Red Wedding — The Young Wolf, unbeaten in the field, murdered at the table.
Their journey
Where they stand, season by season
Mentioned in the chronicle
- Melisandre leeches king's blood from Gendry over three names: Robb Stark. Balon Greyjoy. Joffrey Baratheon. (S3·E8)
- Three leeches fat with king's blood go into the fire: the usurper Robb Stark, the usurper Balon Greyjoy, the usurper Joffrey Baratheon. (ASOS 37)
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Murdered at the Red Wedding (S3·E9)
The books: Murdered at the Red Wedding (ASOS, ch. 52)
The Young Wolf broke a marriage pact with Walder Frey, and the old man's revenge was a wedding. Under guest right, with the doors barred, Roose Bolton drove the blade home: 'The Lannisters send their regards.'
The Red Wedding was Walder Frey's revenge dressed as a reconciliation: Edmure Tully would marry a Frey girl in Robb's place, the slight forgiven, the alliance mended. Robb came to the Twins under guest right, ate the bread and salt, and watched the bedding carried out — and then the doors were barred, the musicians in the gallery produced crossbows, and the Rains of Castamere played. Quarrels took him; his men were cut down around the tables; and Roose Bolton delivered the last thrust himself, with a line the North has never stopped repeating — the Lannisters send their regards. In the books the words are 'Jaime Lannister sends his regards,' and the boy king dies rising from the table with a quarrel already in him.
The desecration afterward was the point. The Freys hacked the head from Grey Wind — who died raging in the kennels, feathered with bolts — and sewed it onto Robb's body, parading the wolf-headed king to mock everything the North had crowned. Catelyn died moments after her son; Talisa, in the show, before him, the knives finding her belly first. The massacre broke the northern cause in an evening — and bought its authors a curse with compound interest, paid out over the rest of the tale by a daughter of the man they'd killed two books earlier.