Game of Thrones Symbolism: The Boltons

We continue our series on the deeper meaning of the Game of Thrones house symbols with a look at the House Bolton.

Catch up on the entire series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

Works Cited & Consulted:
* Martin, George R.R. “A Song of Ice and Fire.” Bantam Books.
* freeguess. “An Analysis of House Words.” /r/asoiaf on Reddit, 5 Jan. 2013.
* Empower Yourself with Color Psychology
* Color Wheel Pro
* Color Meanings
.

Transcript provided by Youtube:

00:00
[If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.]
00:05
The Bolton sigil is a red flayed body upside-down, outlined by a white X, on a black field
00:10
The flayed man encapsulates the Boltons’ ruling style: threatening and truly evil,
00:16
they don’t care about loyalty, alliances, or winning hearts and minds.
00:20
They dominate through intimidation and terror.
00:22
As the sigil boasts, the house is infamous for its centuries-old practice of torturing
00:27
and flaying their enemies, and the fact that they put this on their sigil reveals how
00:31
proud they are of their ability to inflict physical and psychological torture.
00:35
It’s hard to claim the superlative of the most despicable character in Game of Thrones
00:40
— the skeevy Walder Frey, and the abusive Joffrey Baratheon, come to mind.
00:45
But the character that can arguably put them all to shame is Ramsay Bolton, bastard of
00:49
Roose Bolton, who resided at the Dreadfort in the North.
00:52
Born as a product of rape, the violent, twisted Ramsay is ultimately the demise of his house
00:57
— he murders his father and feeds his stepmother and infant brother to his hounds, only to
01:03
be devoured by those same hounds after finally having trained Sansa to master his own brand
01:08
of cruelty.
01:09
[They’re loyal beasts.]
01:11
[They were. Now they’re starving.]
01:15
But while Ramsay stands out as a villain, it seems to run in his family — the Boltons
01:20
inherit cruelty both in nature and in nurture.
01:23
Ramsay’s father, Roose, is ruthless, but in a more cool and calculated way.
01:27
So the cruelty of the Boltons may run through Ramsay’s veins — his mother claimed he
01:31
was angry and problematic as a child.
01:33
But Ramsay’s cruelty also seems to be a product of his upbringing by a servant named
01:37
Reek who raised him and corrupted him. Ramsay later gives his captive Theon Greyjoy same name.
01:43
[What is your name?1?]
01:50
[Reek.]
01:51
Reek taught Ramsay to rape and kill the girls he had crushes on in his childhood.
01:55
And since Reek never had any proper arms training, he may also have been responsible for Ramsay’s overly
02:00
aggressive style of swordsmanship.
02:02
Before the events we see in the show, Roose had a legitimate young son, Domeric, who was
02:06
considered pleasant by the Northerners, but this amicable side of the Bolton family was
02:10
short lived. Ramsay poisoned his half brother out of jealousy.
02:14
While the Northerners are relieved to know that House Bolton is now wiped out, its memory
02:18
lives on in the abuse that is never truly over for its victims.
02:22
And as we see these characters deal with their lingering trauma, House Bolton makes us question
02:26
how abusive behavior is learned, imparted and continued over generations, far outliving
02:31
the original perpetrators.
02:33
[And you were so beautiful in your white wedding dress.]
02:43
[I have to go back inside Bran.]
02:45
The Boltons’ disturbingly interesting storylines show that while we’re horrified by these
02:50
practices, they can also be grotesquely fascinating to watch.
02:53
Most characters on Game of Thrones live in the grey zone, pulled between the
02:57
good and bad within themselves, but the Boltons and their symbols represent a willing embrace
03:01
of total evil, the absence of human empathy, and a learned violent cruelty that humans are unfortunately
03:08
capable of.
03:09
House Bolton has two mottos: the official “Our Blades are Sharp” is already pretty
03:14
menacing, but this informs the darker unofficial motto used most by Roose Bolton:
03:18
“A Naked Man Has Few Secrets; A Flayed Man, None.”
03:22
Throughout their history, the Boltons have
03:24
passed down a sharp, thin knife used for flaying, instead of a Valyrian great sword like some other Houses.
03:30
While their blades are sharp, their boasting about it illustrates how their words and
03:33
mind games are equally sharp, disturbing weapons.
03:37
The Boltons revel in the rumors that they wore their skin of their enemies as cloaks
03:40
They believe fear and terror are as effective as pure might and power.
03:45
These rumors, like the rumors of the Targaryen dragons, elevate the Boltons to an other-than-human
03:49
level: As a satanic myth that evokes dread, whereas the otherworldly Targaryens
03:54
inspire awe, as well as fear.
03:56
Their cruel abuse is psychological as much as physical, as we can see in the way Ramsay
04:01
terrorizes Theon, turning him into Reek, a shell of a man. As well as Sansa, who has already
04:06
endured the brutality of King Joffrey but comes to see that Ramsay is a whole other
04:10
level of evil.
04:11
The psychological taunting is clearly seen in the prelude to the Battle of the Bastards:
04:15
flayed men on burning X’s psych out the Stark men, and Ramsay
04:19
uses Jon’s own brother as a trap.
04:21
[Laymen of House Bolton. Too gruesome for my taste.]
04:26
The House Bolton sigil contains red, white and black.
04:29
Their red is ruthless and bloodthirsty.
04:31
The color also signifies determination and ambition — the Boltons were tired of living
04:36
under Stark rule and resolved to take the North.
04:39
White, while it can be clean and pure, is here sterile and emotionless — an absence
04:43
of human warmth and empathy.
04:45
In the books, the background of the sigil is pink, evoking imagery of peeled skin, but
04:50
the show changed the backdrop of the sigil to black, signifying bottomless terror — dark
04:55
as the petrifying rumors that surround the Bolton family.
04:58
While each of these colors can have other meanings, taken together red, white and black
05:02
evoke hardness and violence, a total lack of human softness and empathy –embodying
05:07
that what’s so scary about the Boltons is that human feeling is entirely missing from them.
05:14
[He’s your brother.]
05:16
[I preferred being an only child.]
05:18
Instead of a traditional animal, the Bolton sigil features a flayed man.
05:23
The fact that it turns a tortured human being into an animal-like prize underlines the Boltons’
05:28
lack of respect for human dignity.
05:30
They view people as beasts to be degraded, which in turn reveals that the Boltons themselves
05:35
are not human, but a perverse imitation of man.
05:39
Instead of boasting about their noble strengths, their sigil boasts their willingness
05:42
to commit extreme acts of violence and torture.
05:45
So this sigil is clearly designed to evoke terror in their enemies.
05:49
The Boltons get inside their enemies heads with the idea that they won’t just kill
05:53
you; they’ll subject you to far, far worse.
05:56
The Bolton’s stronghold, the Dreadfort, received its name from the torture that occurred
06:00
there at the hands of the Boltons. It was rumored that the flayed skins hung on display
06:04
at the castle.
06:06
Structurally unimpressive, the fort is painted flesh pink and decorated with scratch
06:10
marks and brown dried blood — additions that visualize the flayed man of their sigil in
06:15
the architecture, and serve as another tool for the Boltons’ psychological terror.
06:19
Choosing to embrace the flayed man of their sigil is also a defiant message that the Boltons
06:25
won’t obey the laws of their day.
06:26
When the Boltons bent the knee to the Starks, they promised to cease the flaying practice,
06:30
as is was outlawed in the North by Ned Stark.
06:32
But they don’t honor this pledge.
06:35
Roose defends his family’s tradition of skinning their enemies alive:
06:38
[We’re not torturing them.]
06:39
[The high road is very pretty. But you’ll have a hard time marching your army down it.]
06:44
Roose also continues the practice of the first night, an outlawed marriage tradition where
06:49
the lord or king of a region claims the right to have sex with a commoner or peasant bride
06:53
on her wedding night. You probably remember this from Braveheart. It’s a practice that may have some
06:59
historical basis in medieval Europe, though it’s not verified.
07:01
[This marriage by taking the bride into my bed on the first night of her union.]
07:06
Roose’s first night practice drove commoners to marry in secret — Ramsay’s
07:11
birth mother and her husband, a miller, were one such secretly married couple.
07:15
On finding out, Roose hung the miller and raped Ramsay’s mother, resulting in Ramsay’s
07:20
conception.
07:21
The Boltons’ insistence on continuing these brutal outlawed practices shows their refusal to
07:26
limit their sadism, their insubordination to the Starks’ authority, and why they’re
07:30
despised in the North.
07:32
Deeming themselves the Red Kings of Dreadfort, House Bolton has struggled with House Stark
07:36
for power over the North for centuries.
07:37
The feud between the Boltons and the Starks culminated in one of the most
07:41
beautiful war scenes in television history — the Battle of the Bastards in Season 6.
07:45
The significance of the battle derives from these two very different bastards of the North.
07:50
Ramsay, the legitimized bastard heir of House Bolton, was raised without love or respect. His
07:55
father paid his mother to conceal his true parentage.
07:57
Jon, though never legitimized and hated by Catelyn, was raised as a Stark boy,
08:02
alongside the other Stark children.
08:04
The battle speaks to each character’s true nature — Ramsay uses tactical strategy and
08:09
cruel but effective traps, caring nothing about appearing noble or honorable, observing
08:14
no rules of decency.
08:15
Yet his battle strategy is smart and sound, and echoes successes by great generals in history.
08:21
Jon fights with heart and honor, immersed in the middle of the fight with his men, but
08:25
nonetheless this bravery makes him Ramsay’s pawn, until Sansa — who has learned a thing
08:29
or two from her abusive husband, and knows that Jon will do exactly what Ramsay wants
08:33
him to do
08:36
— calls on Littlefinger’s Knights of the Veil and rescues the day.
08:39
While the Boltons are now extinct, we see the impact of their torture on the characters
08:43
that remain.
08:44
Theon is shaped by the trauma of Ramsay’s abuse, displaying signs of PTSD.
08:50
Sansa carries the memory with her, and seems to have reacted to her experiences
08:54
by making herself more cunning.
08:56
cynical and hard.
08:58
She masters Ramsay’s psychological torture and turns it back on him:
09:02
[Your House will disappear. Your name will disappear. All memory of you will disappear.]
09:11
And she even turns his hounds against him, getting sweet revenge.
09:14
Yet while this satisfying moment proves Sansa has the intelligence and experience to beat Ramsey
09:20
at his own game, cunning, what exactly Sansa has learned from Ramsay, or will internalize from her abuse
09:25
long-term, may have a more troubling answer.
09:27
[I’m sorry for all that’s happened to you.]
09:30
And as we watch Sansa and Theon emerge from their time in tortured captivity, we see that
09:35
the true legacy of the Boltons is still alive in the evil sadist abuse and fear that they
09:40
have spread for centuries.
09:42
[My name is….Reek.]