Eddard "Ned" Stark is a fictional character from American writer George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series, and a prominent point-of-view character in the first novel of the series, A Game of Thrones (1996) as well as the first season of HBO's television adaptation Game of Thrones.

Ned is the patriarch of House Stark of Winterfell, the ruling house and liege lord of the North, which is the largest of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. As the most trusted friend of King Robert Baratheon, Ned is widely renowned and respected throughout the kingdom for his unwavering morality, honor and justice. Although he is portrayed as the main character at the beginning of the series, the plot twist of his execution near the end of the first novel and the first season of the TV adaptation shocked both the book readers and TV viewers.

Ned is portrayed by veteran English actor Sean Bean in the first season of Game of Thrones, as a child by Sebastian Croft in the sixth season, and as a young adult by Robert Aramayo in the sixth and seventh seasons. Bean received top billing of the first season for the role, and was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television and a Scream Award for Best Fantasy Actor. He and the rest of the cast were also nominated for Screen Actors Guild Awards for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series in 2011.

Ned Stark is introduced in A Game of Thrones (1996) as the virtuous and honorable patriarch of House Stark of Winterfell, the lord paramount and warden family of the North. He is aged in his mid-30s and happily married to Lady Catelyn Tully. He is father to five trueborn children Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran, Rickon (all born to Catelyn) and a bastard son Jon Snow (whose maternal parentage remains a tabooed secret), as well as guardian to a ward boy Theon Greyjoy (who is really a diplomatic hostage but has been treated kindly as a foster son). He is a lifelong friend of King Robert Baratheon, the ruling monarch of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, who personally visits Winterfell at the beginning of the novel to invite and persuade Ned to become the new Hand of the King.

Ned was raised as a military officer from childhood and never intended to inherit the family lordship until his heir apparent elder brother Brandon (who were Catelyn's original betrothed) was sadistically executed by the "Mad King" Aerys II Targaryen, an outrageous act of tyranny that forced Ned to rise up in rebellion alongside his friend Robert and their guardian Jon Arryn and overthrow the Targaryen dynasty. Due to his upbringing, Ned possesses an unwavering conscience of honor, loyalty and justice, and as the moral staple of the story, a visceral distaste towards the manipulative power struggles of court politics. At the start of the series, he is content to remain in his homeland in the North, far from the treacherous politics intrigues of other southern dominions. His family name, Stark, is a word play that both emphasizes the resilience of his noble family and serves as an indication of his personal resistance to moral compromise. Still, his boundaries are increasingly tested over the course of the novel. Finding himself a key player in the escalating political intrigue of King's Landing, Ned struggles as his own sense of honor draws him into corrupt goings-on at court. As the story progresses, he begins to see the importance of moral and practical compromises to achieve a just end. He is ultimately forced to choose between his family's safety and doing what is right.

Sean Bean said of the character, "He's a good man trying to do his best in the middle of this corruption, he's a fish out of water, he's used to being up north in Winterfell where people are pretty straight and pragmatic, and he comes down to a place where people are playing games and backstabbing... he's a principled man who tries to hold things together. This is a journey that he makes where ultimately his loyalty causes his downfall."

Publishers Weekly noted in 1996 that, despite the honest Ned Stark's intervention in court politics, "no amount of heroism or good intentions can keep the realm under control." From his very first introduction, Ned is portrayed as a noble hero and set up to be the heart of the story. With fifteen chapters devoted to his point of view, more than any other single character in the novel, he is presented as a primary character in the series, and the main storyline of A Game of Thrones, the drama in King's Landing, is told almost entirely from his perspective. In the London Review of Books, John Lanchester writes that everything about Ned is designed to gain audience sympathy, from his strong sense of honor and moral compass to his compassion towards his wife and children. Readers are led to believe that Ned will be the main character of the series, but ultimately he is, from a literary perspective, a classic decoy protagonist. After struggling to keep himself and the kingdom on a moral path for the entire novel, the only option that remains to save his family is to put aside his honor; he does so, but is betrayed anyway. Calling Ned's execution "shocking", The New York Times noted in 2011 that the novel was "famous for dispatching a thoroughly admirable major character with whom readers have been identifying for most of the book". In an interview for Entertainment Weekly, author George R. R. Martin commented on this misdirection:

I knew it almost from the beginning. Not the first day, but very soon. I've said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense. I killed Ned in the first book and it shocked a lot of people. I killed Ned because everybody thinks he's the hero and that, sure, he's going to get into trouble, but then he'll somehow get out of it.