Jeor Mormont
The Old Bear: Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, who set aside Bear Island and his lordship for the black cloak. Gruff, shrewd, and fiercely devoted to his brothers.
A soul born at Bear Island, sworn to The Night's Watch, House Mormont.
The fuller tale
Season One
Lord Commander of an order that used to matter and now scrapes by on criminals, poachers, and boys nobody wanted, and he knows exactly what he has and what he needs. He notices Jon Snow's aptitude before Jon does himself, and makes him steward over Jon's furious objections — not as a reward, he explains, but because a commander needs someone reading over his shoulder. He receives Benjen Stark's failure to return beyond the Wall as the crisis it is and starts planning a ranging in force. A wight gets into his own chambers at Castle Black in the dead of night, and it is Jon who saves his life, a debt Mormont does not intend to leave unpaid.
Season Two
He pays that debt at the start of the ranging, giving Jon his family's Valyrian steel sword rather than let it rust in a chest for a son who has disowned him. He leads several hundred men beyond the Wall — the largest muster the Watch has fielded in a generation — hunting for Benjen Stark and answers about the things Craster whispers of in the deep snow. At the Fist of the First Men he makes camp and waits, aware he is stretching his men past what the Watch was ever built to survive, and sends Jon out scouting with Qhorin Halfhand because he trusts Qhorin's judgment more than his own optimism. The wait ends with the dead coming over the ridge.
Season Three
The retreat from the Fist becomes a death march, and by the time the survivors reach Craster's Keep his authority is worth less than the last of the food. He holds the line on discipline anyway — no thieving, no killing the man whose roof they are sheltering under — because it is the only thing he still has to give them, and the men who have started calling him an old fool in low voices do not want to hear it. Karl Tanner and the others rise up at Craster's table with knives instead of arguments; Mormont goes for his sword too late, and dies telling men he has commanded for years exactly what they have become.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Slain at Craster's Keep (S3·E4)
The Old Bear held the shattered remnant of his ranging together as far as Craster's Keep, and there his own starving brothers turned their knives. He died with a mutineer in his fists, urging Sam to reach the Wall with word of what was coming.
On the page. The mutiny at Craster's Keep (ASOS, ch. 34)
The Old Bear brought the ranging's survivors as far as Craster's Keep, where hunger and mutiny finished what the Others began. He died with Dirk's blade in him, telling Sam to find his son Jorah and tell him to take the black.
In both tellings the Old Bear survives the Others only to be killed by his own order. The remnant of the Great Ranging staggers back to Craster’s Keep, starving, frostbitten and mutinous, and Craster’s stinginess strikes the spark: the brawl over bread becomes murder, Craster dies at his own board, and when Mormont commands the men to stand down the knives turn on him. On screen it is Rast — the whining bully he’d dragged to the Wall — who drives the blade into his back; Mormont dies throttling him, ordering Sam to reach the Wall with word of what marches behind them.
The books stage the same betrayal with different hands: Dirk’s blade does the work, and the Old Bear lingers long enough for last words that are all about his son — Jorah, the wrong done to the house, the black cloak that would wipe it clean. Either way it is the Watch’s oldest shame enacted in miniature — the order that guards the realms of men murdering the best man in it over supper — and both tellings make sure the mutineers are paid in full before the tale is done.
Their chapters, book by book
Where the page and the screen part
The tellings agree on the man and diverge on the furniture. The books give his command more texture — the election politics beneath him, the endless quartermastering, a raven that may be rather more than a bird (readers who suspect a skinchanger’s hand in the Watch’s affairs have circumstantial evidence to burn). The show trims the Great Ranging’s scale — the Fist of the First Men falls to the dead on screen in a cold open’s worth of chaos, where the books make it a drawn-out horror recounted in fragments by survivors. His last instructions differ too: on the page his dying thought is Jorah — find my son, tell him to take the black — while the show, having sent Jorah to Daenerys years before, gives his final breath to the Watch and the warning Sam must carry.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.