Rodrik Cassel
Winterfell's master-at-arms, a stout old knight with famous white whiskers who trained every Stark child to hold a sword.
A soul born at Winterfell.
The fuller tale
Season Two
Theon takes Winterfell with twenty men and beheads Ser Rodrik with four strokes.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Executed at Winterfell (S2┬ÀE6)
Winterfell's old master-at-arms rode home into Theon's occupation and spat at his former ward. Theon's first execution was botched and butcherly ÔÇö it took four strokes and a kick ÔÇö but Ser Rodrik died as unbending as he lived.
On the page. Killed in the sack of Winterfell (ACOK, ch. 67)
The old castellan led Winterfell's strength out to break the sack of Torrhen's Square and rode back into Ramsay's trap. The Bastard of Bolton's men butchered his little army in front of the walls, and Ser Rodrik with it.
The show gives Ser Rodrik the uglier, more intimate end: dragged before the captured Winterfell's gate, he tells Theon to his face that the boy is truly lost, and Theon ÔÇö dared by his own men to prove his rule ÔÇö takes his old teacher's head personally. He botches it. The sword is wrong, the stroke is wrong, and it takes four hacks and a kick to finish what a headsman does in one, while Bran screams and the household watches. In the books, Rodrik dies outside the walls he was trying to save, cut down when Ramsay's Dreadfort men fall upon his relief force mid-parley ÔÇö a betrayal so complete the books deliver it secondhand, through Theon's horrified memory. In both, his death marks the moment the North's old certainties stop applying: the yard's rules were fair, and nothing after him is.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 3 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The two tellings kill the same man at different gates. In the show, Rodrik is captured when Winterfell falls, spits on Theon in the courtyard, and is executed by him there ÔÇö Bran begging, the Bolton man Dagmer goading, and the deed done so badly it becomes the measure of everything Theon has broken in himself. In the books, Rodrik never gets back inside: marshaling the North's home levies to retake the castle, he is betrayed outside its walls when Ramsay Bolton ÔÇö riding as his ally ÔÇö turns on his little army and butchers it, the old knight included, in the slaughter Theon watches from the battlements. Show viewers remember Rodrik's death as Theon's crime; readers file it under Ramsay's, with Theon merely damned as an accessory. Both versions agree the whiskers deserved better.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.