Theon Greyjoy

Balon's last son, raised as Ned Stark's ward and Robb's sworn friend — a cocky, charming young man caught between the family that fathered him and the one that raised him.

The fuller tale

Theon Greyjoy spends the whole tale being asked the one question he cannot answer: whose son are you? Taken from Pyke at ten as the price of his father’s failed rebellion, he grows up at Winterfell as ward and hostage both — raised beside Robb Stark as near enough a brother, trained and fed and half-trusted by a family that would, in the last resort, have had to kill him. It breeds a very particular boy: cocky where he is unsure, smirking where he is hurt, desperate to be claimed by someone and owned by no one. The tragedy that follows is not that Theon has no loyalty; it is that he has two, and the war makes him choose.

He chooses badly in the most human way imaginable. Sent — at his own urging — as Robb’s envoy to Pyke, he arrives home dreaming of the prodigal’s welcome and is met instead with his father’s contempt: the mockery of his mainland finery, the gold-price sneer, the sister who has already taken his place. Somewhere between that hall and the shore, Theon burns Robb’s letter of alliance. It is the pivot of his life, and the books render it with terrible clarity: he does not betray the Starks out of hatred, but because his father’s scorn hurts worse than his brother’s trust holds, and a boy who has never been claimed will do anything for the man who finally might.

Winterfell is his attempt to be a Greyjoy, performed for an audience that is not watching. Given a raider’s errand against fishing villages, he improvises the war’s most audacious small operation instead — the taking of Winterfell with a skeleton crew — and discovers within days that seizing a castle and holding one are different professions. Bran and Rickon slip his grasp; the hunt fails; and rather than admit it, Theon has two miller’s boys killed and burned and hung up as Stark princes. It is the crime the story never lets him outrun, and he knows it before anyone else does: the smoke has barely cleared before he stops sleeping.

What the Boltons do to him afterward turns the tale’s cockiest boy into its deepest study of survival. Flayed finger by finger, broken by fear and false rescue, he is remade as Reek — a name he clings to because remembering Theon is what gets him hurt — and paraded as a tool against the very ironborn who might have saved him, talking Moat Cailin’s garrison into a surrender that ends on flaying frames. The show and books agree on the shape of the horror and split on the girl at the center of it: on screen it is Sansa Stark whose hand he takes on the snowy battlements when they jump; on the page it is Jeyne Poole, a steward’s daughter married north under a stolen name, and saving her is the first thing Theon has done in years for someone other than fear.

The road back is slow and the show walks it at length: to Pyke and a kingsmoot where he sets aside his own claim to stand for his sister; to Daenerys’s cause; to the sea fight where Euron’s boarding axes find him and he goes over the side rather than die fighting — the failure that finally teaches him what his fear is for. Jon Snow gives him the absolution the whole story has been withholding, that he need not choose, that he is a Greyjoy and a Stark both. Theon spends it immediately: he boards his uncle’s flagship under fire and cuts his sister free, and brings his handful of ironborn to Winterfell — the castle he stole — to hold its godswood in the Long Night.

That is where his meaning comes to rest. Theon is the tale’s longest, costliest redemption: not a villain forgiven, but an identity rebuilt from rubble, in a story that insists the rebuilding is possible and prices it honestly. The boy who burned the letter, the man who called himself Reek, and the ironborn captain standing guard over Bran Stark in the weirwood’s red light are all one person — and by the end, for the first time in his life, he knows it.

The page and the screen

The broad arc — betrayal, ruin, Reek, redemption — is shared, but the books tell the middle from inside his skull, and those chapters are among the most harrowing things Martin has written: the counting of fingers, the reflex of the false name, the slow theft of a self. The rescue plot differs materially — Jeyne Poole, not Sansa, is the bride he saves, smuggled off the battlements with the help of Mance Rayder’s spearwives — and so does the destination: book-Theon and his sister end the published volumes in Stannis Baratheon’s snowbound camp, his fate unwritten. Everything the show gave him afterward — the kingsmoot, the sea battles, the godswood — awaits whatever version the remaining books intend. In the published books, he is still alive.

In the show, season by season

Season Two. In The Night Lands — Nine years a ward; his father sees only a Stark in iron clothes. In What Is Dead May Never Die — Burns the letter that would have warned Robb. What is dead may never die. In The Ghost of Harrenhal — A raid on fishing villages becomes a plan to take a castle. In The Old Gods and the New — Took his home's home. It will cost him everything he had left. In A Man Without Honor — Two small bodies, burned past knowing. Better to be cruel than weak. In The Prince of Winterfell — A prince of a burned castle and twenty unhappy men. In Valar Morghulis — Rallied his men with a speech; they answered with a sack over his head.

Season Three. In And Now His Watch Is Ended — Led in circles by a smiling boy back to the same cross. In Mhysa — Reek. It rhymes with weak.

Season Six. In Book of the Stranger — Comes home to back his sister's claim, not his own.

Season Seven. In Stormborn — The sea took Reek back the moment the axes came out. In The Dragon and the Wolf — Beaten until he remembers who he is; sails to save his sister.

Season Eight. In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — Asks to guard Bran: the godswood, the bait, the debt. In The Long Night — "Theon. You're a good man. Thank you." Then he charged.

In the books

A Clash of Kings. In Wolves and Krakens — The kraken's son learns he must pay the iron price for a father's respect. In The Kraken in the Godswood — Won his home's home and lost everything it ever taught him. In Valar Morghulis — Bolton's bastard smiled, and Winterfell burned around its prince.

A Dance with Dragons. In Kings at the Wall — Reek gives away a bride wearing a dead girl's name. In The Winterfell Knot — "My name is Theon. You have to know your name."

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Theon Greyjoy comes home to Pyke and finds his father unimpressed and his sister commanding ships. (S2·E2)
• Bran waits under the heart tree; Theon Greyjoy dies a Stark's death defending him. (S8·E3)
• Winterfell wakes to find the ironmen inside its walls: Theon Greyjoy takes his foster home with twenty men, and Bran yields to spare the people. (ACOK 38)

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

The show: Fell defending Bran at Winterfell (S8·E3)

The broken man came home to the godswood to pay for Winterfell with his life. Bran told him he was a good man — then Theon charged the Night King alone, and died a Stark's death in a Greyjoy's skin.

The show gives him the death the whole arc was aimed at. In the Long Night he holds Winterfell’s godswood with a handful of men, the last line before Bran, and empties his quiver into the dead until the Night King himself walks into the firelight. Bran gives him the only payment left worth having — “Theon. You’re a good man. Thank you.” — and Theon charges alone, spear leveled, at a being that has killed everything ever sent against it. The Night King snaps the spear aside and drives it through him. He dies in the castle he betrayed, defending the family he wronged, moments before Arya ends the creature that killed him.

No book counterpart exists yet: in the published volumes Theon has just been delivered out of Winterfell alive — shattered, frost-bitten, but himself again — and waits with Asha in Stannis’s camp for a battle Martin has not yet printed. Alive in the published books, with the hardest part of his story, by any telling, already behind him.