Rickon Stark

Prince of Winterfell

House / Order	House Stark
Race / Culture
Status	Alive (in the novels)
Origin	The North
Born	295 AC (approx.)
Died	—
Weapon
Fate	Sent into hiding on the island of Skagos with the wildling woman Osha and his direwolf Shaggydog
Portrayed by

I want my mother. And I want Robb. I want Old Nan and Hodor and the rest.

Rickon Stark is the youngest child of Lord Eddard Stark and Lady Catelyn Stark of Winterfell. A small, wild, and grief-stricken boy through the events of the early novels, Rickon is bonded to the black direwolf Shaggydog, the fiercest of the Stark pups, and his fate becomes one of the quietly significant threads in the scattered survival of House Stark.

Background

Rickon was barely more than a toddler when his father Eddard left for King's Landing to serve as Hand of the King, taking sisters Sansa and Arya with him. Left behind at Winterfell with his brothers Robb and Bran, Rickon grew increasingly unsettled as one family member after another departed or fell. He and his direwolf Shaggydog both turned wilder and harder to control as the war consumed his kin, as though the boy sensed the catastrophes befalling the Starks before word of them ever arrived.

Flight from Winterfell

When Theon Greyjoy seized Winterfell, Rickon and Bran hid in the castle crypts with the wildling woman Osha, the stableboy Hodor, and the marsh-born siblings Jojen and Meera Reed. After Theon staged the apparent deaths of the two young Starks, the boys emerged and the group fled the ruined castle. There Bran and Rickon parted ways: Bran went north beyond the Wall in search of the three-eyed crow, while Osha took Rickon and Shaggydog away to keep at least one Stark heir safe, eventually making for the wild island of Skagos off the northeastern coast.

Significance

Rickon's whereabouts become a matter of consequence as the surviving lords of the North seek a trueborn Stark to rally behind. Davos Seaworth, on a mission for Stannis Baratheon, is charged with sailing to Skagos to find the boy and bring him back, recognizing that a living son of Eddard Stark could reunite the North under the Stark banner. As of the latest published novel, Rickon's recovery remains an open and potentially pivotal thread.

Character

Rickon is the least developed of the Stark children on the page, glimpsed mostly through the eyes of his siblings, yet he embodies the rawest grief of the family's scattering, a small boy left behind and steadily losing everyone. His bond with the savage Shaggydog mirrors his own untamed sorrow.

In the television series

In HBO's Game of Thrones, Rickon is portrayed by Art Parkinson. The series gives him a sharply different and grimmer fate, having him killed by Ramsay Bolton before the Battle of the Bastards; in the novels he survives, his story still unresolved.

Appearances