House Mormont

Bear Island’s early history is thin even by northern standards, which is saying a great deal in a land where most houses trace themselves back through legend rather than record. The Mormonts’ own account holds that King Rodrik Stark won the island from an ironborn raider-king in a wrestling match and gave it to a follower loyal enough to hold it — a story with the shape of a boast more than a chronicle entry, and this maester repeats it accordingly.

What the island lacked in fertile soil it made up in timber, ships, and a hard, isolated pride; the black bear on green that serves as the family’s sigil is not, by most accounts, an ornament so much as an accurate description of the place and the people it produced. Bear Island has been led by men and women both across its recorded history, more evenly than most northern houses would admit to, and in recent generations rather more often by women than not.

Jeor Mormont, Lord of Bear Island, gave up both title and island to his son Jorah and took the black himself — a choice the Night’s Watch, ever short of men willing to give up more than criminals had left to lose, received gratefully and rewarded with the Lord Commander’s seat. He led the Watch’s great ranging beyond the Wall that ended, disastrously, at the Fist of the First Men, and did not live to lead the survivors home.

His ancestral sword, Longclaw — one of the vanishingly few Valyrian steel blades still in a Westerosi house’s keeping, held by the family for five centuries — Jeor gave away before the mutiny that killed him, to a young steward named Jon Snow who had saved his life and, in the old man’s evident judgment, deserved a bear’s blade more than any Mormont left living did. A direwolf’s head replaced the bear on the pommel; the maesters record no complaint from Bear Island about the substitution.

Jorah Mormont’s own history with his family’s lordship ended in disgrace some years before the War of the Five Kings began: caught selling captured poachers to a slaver to fund his young wife Lynesse Hightower’s expensive tastes, he fled across the narrow sea one step ahead of Eddard Stark’s justice rather than face the beheading the law demanded. His long exile eventually brought him to the service — and, this chronicle notes without further comment, the evident devotion — of the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen, a service that ended a second time in banishment when his old spying for the crown came to light.

The island’s lordship passed in his absence to his aunt Maege, who marched south at the head of Bear Island’s levies to name Robb Stark King in the North among the very first lords to do so. Her eldest daughter Dacey died at the Red Wedding trying, by every account this chronicle trusts, to defend Catelyn Stark with a blade in a hall where blades were no longer any lord’s protection.

Maege’s younger daughters carry the name forward: Alysane holds her own command in the North’s unsettled present, and Lyanna — ten years old, and already, by the letter she is reported to have sent refusing a Bolton summons to Winterfell, unwilling to be told what a girl her age should say to a king — has made Bear Island’s stubbornness a byword even among northmen who thought they already knew the family’s reputation well.