The Crag

A half-ruined seat above the sea, rich in honor and poor in gold.

The fuller tale

The Crag is nobility on a fixed income: a once-great Westerling castle half in ruins above the sea, its mines empty, its walls patched, its blood older than most of the houses that could buy it twice over. The Westerlings kept their honor when they lost their gold — in the Westerlands, an eccentric portfolio choice.

The war gives the modest seat an outsized bill. Robb Stark storms the Crag in his western campaign and is nursed there, wounded in body and worse in spirit, by young Jeyne Westerling — and leaves married, his crown’s Frey alliance broken by a boy’s honor doing exactly what his father’s would have done. The Crag is where the northern war is quietly lost, at a bedside rather than a battlefield, which the story would note is how wars are usually lost.

The page and the screen

The Crag is books-only ground. On the page Robb’s queen is Jeyne Westerling of the Crag, met and married there in the fashion above, her family maneuvered by Tywin’s hand behind the match; the show replaces her wholesale with Talisa of Volantis, a battlefield healer with no castle at all — changing the bride, the motive and the meaning: an invented love story instead of honor’s compound error.

Born here

Souls the story brings here

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

• Stevron Frey — Died of wounds after Oxcross (the books' telling)