Torrhen Karstark
A son of Lord Karstark, a young northern warrior riding in Robb Stark's host.
A soul born at Karhold, sworn to House Karstark.
The fuller tale
Their story
Torrhen carries a heavy name lightly — Torrhen was the King Who Knelt, the last King in the North, and naming a son for him is the kind of long memory Karhold specializes in. A younger son of Lord Rickard, tall and grim in the family mold, he rides south in his father's three hundred when Robb calls the banners, one young lance among thousands in a war that will be remembered by other men's names. The tale gives him no speeches and no politics; he is simply the North's rank and file wearing a face — a lord's son doing exactly what every generation of his house had done, following the direwolf wherever it led.
His place in the story is the price tag he becomes. Riding in the van at the Whispering Wood — the books put him in Robb's own guard — he is part of the stroke that wins the war's most elegant victory, and part of its cost. Afterward his name is spoken almost exclusively by his grieving father, in tones that curdle from sorrow to grievance to something worse: Torrhen dead becomes the seed of the Karstark rupture, proof for Lord Rickard that Stark wars spend Karstark sons. Few characters so minor sit so near the war's turning point — the boy himself barely appears, and his absence dismantles half an army.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell in the Whispering Wood (S1·E10)
Rode in Robb's van into the Whispering Wood, where the Kingslayer was taken. Jaime Lannister cut him down sword in hand, a Karstark son spent for a Lannister prisoner — a price his father never forgave.
On the page. Fell in the Whispering Wood (AGOT, ch. 64)
He rode in Robb's guard into the Whispering Wood and the Kingslayer's sword found him in the press. A Karstark son traded for a Lannister captive — the beginning of his father's long unraveling.
Torrhen Karstark fell in the Whispering Wood, in the night battle where Robb's trap closed on Jaime Lannister's column. When the Kingslayer, seeing the battle lost, made his last try — cutting through Robb's personal guard to reach the boy king and end the war at a stroke — Torrhen was one of the men who stood in the way, and Jaime's sword killed him there, sword in hand, a pace or two from the most valuable prisoner of the war. The books kill his brother Eddard beside him in the same moments. It was, by every military accounting, a good death in a great victory; his father ran the accounting differently — a son traded for a captive kept politely in chains — and the difference between those two ledgers eventually cost Robb Stark the Karstark army and Lord Rickard his head.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
The tellings differ only in arithmetic and staging: the books kill two Karstark brothers in the Whispering Wood — Torrhen and Eddard both, in Robb's bodyguard, dying within reach of Jaime — while the show economizes to Torrhen alone, dispatched in Jaime's failed lunge for Robb himself. The books also leave a brother standing: Harrion Karstark, captive of the Lannisters, whose survival keeps Karhold's succession alive as a plot thread the show never needed. In both versions Torrhen's real narrative life is posthumous, lived in his father's mouth.
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.