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.
The fuller tale
Jeor Mormont did the thing almost no lord in living memory had done: he gave up a lordship on purpose. Bear Island passed to his son Jorah, and the Old Bear took the black — not in disgrace, not fleeing a headsman, but because he judged the Wall worth the rest of his life. That choice explains everything about how he commands. The Night’s Watch of his tenure is a shell — a few hundred men holding three castles out of nineteen — and Mormont runs it without illusions, husbanding his thieves and poachers like the last coins of a great inheritance.
His grief is a family matter. Jorah shamed the house by selling poachers to slavers and fled the realm rather than face Ned Stark’s sword, and the Old Bear carries that wound the way he carries his raven — constantly, and with a grimace. It is why Jon Snow matters so much to him. In the sulky, talented bastard of Winterfell, Mormont sees a second chance at a son worth the name, and he grooms him with a soldier’s subtlety: naming him steward instead of ranger, keeping him close, teaching him that command is worry with a cloak on.
The gift of Longclaw makes the adoption official. After Jon puts himself between the Lord Commander and a dead man walking — a wight with black hands and blue eyes, loose in the heart of Castle Black — Mormont has the bear’s-head pommel of his house’s ancestral Valyrian blade recut as a wolf and hands five hundred years of Mormont steel to a Stark bastard. He offered the sword to Jorah once. He does not say what it means to give it again; the Old Bear’s tendernesses all arrive disguised as gruffness, usually with the raven muttering “corn” over the top.
His answer to the dark is the Great Ranging — the boldest thing the Watch attempts in the whole tale. Rangers are vanishing, wights are rising, and Mance Rayder is massing every wildling alive; so Mormont marches the strength of the Watch beyond the Wall to learn the truth of it, staging through the grim hospitality of Craster’s Keep to the bare stone summit of the Fist of the First Men. It is the right decision and a ruinous one, which is the Watch’s speciality: the answers he seeks come to the Fist in person, in the cold, with the dead marching in front.
What Mormont understands before anyone else is the scale of the thing. While the realm counts crowns — “these are the wars that matter,” he growls, or words to that effect, at every southern distraction — the Old Bear is counting the dead. His legacy is not a battle won but a message passed: the men he shaped, Jon and Sam above all, carry his war forward after his watch. The Watch that eventually holds the gate against the Long Night is, in every way that counts, the one the Old Bear rebuilt out of scraps.
The page and the screen
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.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Slain at Craster's Keep (S3·E4)
The books: The mutiny at Craster's Keep (ASOS, ch. 34)
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.
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.