Ramsay Snow was born of an act of violence his father committed against a miller's wife, and grew up an unacknowledged bastard with a hunter's patience for cruelty long before the wars gave him any legitimate outlet for it. He is said to hunt women through the woods around the Dreadfort for sport, a rumor the smallfolk repeat in the same breath as his father's leeches, and neither rumor has ever been convincingly denied. Where Roose Bolton's menace is a matter of calculation, Ramsay's is a matter of appetite — he enjoys the suffering he causes in a way his cooler father plainly does not, which makes him the more dangerous of the two to be caught beneath. A maester records, with the flat disapproval his order reserves for its worst subjects, that House Bolton's flaying men seem to have found, in this one bastard son, an heir entirely equal to the sigil's old reputation.
House Bolton
Ramsay Snow
the Bastard of Bolton
- Life
- no fixed AC year given; a young man, not yet acknowledged as his father's heir, when the story opens
- House
- Bolton (bastard-born; formally legitimized by royal decree, though the record awaits its own reckoning)
Serving House Bolton's interests in the North, and not gently, by every account that reaches the chronicle.
The arc of Ramsay Snow
This carries the character’s road through the published novels. Read on only if you do not fear to know.
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
In the timeline
SourcesACOK · TheonASOS · TheonADWD · ReekTWOIAF · The North
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House
Is Ramsay Snow alive?
Yes, alive as of A Dance with Dragons and newly legitimized as Ramsay Bolton — the chronicle keeps the fuller particulars of that reward veiled.
Who is Ramsay Snow?
Roose Bolton's bastard son, born of an assault on a miller's wife, whose taste for cruelty has made him one of the North's most feared new lords.