Jorah Mormont

An exiled knight of Bear Island, the disgraced son of the Old Bear, serving as sword and counsel to a young Targaryen princess across the sea — and falling under her spell.

The fuller tale

Jorah Mormont was the heir to Bear Island — a hard, poor, honorable corner of the North where the men fear the sea and the women, as the saying goes, fear nothing. He should have had his father’s life: the longhall, the raiding ironborn, the quiet respect of the northern lords. Instead he had one great day and spent the rest of his life paying for it. At the siege of Pyke during the Greyjoy Rebellion he was among the first through the breach, and King Robert knighted him in the ashes; at the tourney of Lannisport that followed, giddy with the only glory he would ever taste, he crowned Lynesse Hightower queen of love and beauty and, incredibly, won her hand.

The marriage ruined him with the thoroughness of a long siege. Lynesse was Oldtown luxury transplanted to an island of gorse and bears, and Jorah beggared his house trying to keep her — feasts, silks, borrowed money against a poor lord’s income — until the day he sold poachers to a Tyroshi slaver to cover his debts. Slaving is death in the North; Ned Stark himself rode to Bear Island with Ice, and Jorah fled rather than face him, first to Lys, where his wife eventually left him for a merchant prince, and then into the sellsword’s Essos. The books linger on the shape of it: a man undone not by malice but by wanting, for once, to be splendid.

The tale meets him at Daenerys’s wedding, presenting books to the bride and, quietly, reports to Varys — for the pardon that would take him home, Jorah has agreed to spy on the last Targaryens. What follows is the story’s slowest, most painful redemption: somewhere between the poisoner in the market of Vaes Dothrak — where he saves Daenerys’s life with seconds to spare — and the birth of the dragons, the informer becomes the most devoted man in her service. He teaches her the Dothraki, the politics of the cities, the value of doubt; she gives him, for the first time since Lynesse, a thing to be faithful to. That the faith is hopeless — he loves her; she needs him — is the engine of everything he does after.

The betrayal surfaces in Meereen, as betrayals do, at the worst hour and from the mouths of enemies. Twice banished — the show gives the exiles their full weight — Jorah does the thing that defines him: he refuses to stay gone. He is kidnapped into usefulness alongside Tyrion Lannister, fights his way through Slaver’s Bay’s fighting pits under a slaver’s brand, and lays his prizes and his shame at her feet until she runs out of ways to send him off. In the show he carries greyscale out of Valyria’s ruins — caught saving Tyrion among the stone men — and her command, find the cure and return to me, becomes the errand of his life, discharged at the Citadel under Samwell Tarly’s terrified, meticulous knife.

What makes Jorah more than the queen’s sad-eyed shadow is that his counsel was always the good kind. He is the voice for mercy at Yunkai, the man who talks her out of crucifixion-for-crucifixion arithmetic more than once, the adviser who wants her to be the queen the songs would make of her precisely because he knows what the other kind looks like — he has been the other kind. The bear who sold men watching the mother of freedmen learn to rule: the tale rarely says it aloud, but his redemption and hers are the same project, and each is the other’s evidence that it can be done.

He is also, quietly, the tale’s great study in unrequited love done with dignity. The story hands him every humiliation the trope allows — the friend-zone of empires, rivals younger and bolder, the woman he loves ordering him from her sight — and Jorah answers with service rather than resentment, which in this story of entitled men reads as nearly heroic. Khaleesi is the first and last word of his vocabulary, and by the end no one in either telling doubts he means by it something no throne could repay.

The page and the screen

The largest divergence is medical: Jorah’s greyscale is a show invention, transplanted from the books’ Jon Connington, who contracts it saving Tyrion from the stone men of the Sorrows. With Connington cut from the show entirely, his disease, his devotion, and something of his doomed-loyalist flavor were folded into Jorah — an elegant compression that also handed the show its Sam-and-Jorah Citadel sequence, which has no book counterpart. Book Jorah’s road is grimmer and less romantic: sold at auction to the Yunkish lord Yezzan zo Qaggaz alongside Tyrion and the dwarf girl Penny, branded on the cheek with a demon’s mask, escaping in the chaos of the pale mare to join the Second Sons as the siege of Meereen tightens.

The books’ Jorah is also a rougher character — older, blunter, and pushier in his affections, including an unasked-for kiss the show declined to keep — and he remains alive in the published novels, a sellsword with a slave’s brand waiting on a battle that has not yet been fought. His show ending, dying at his queen’s feet in the Long Night, is the series’ own composition from start to finish.

In the show, season by season

Season Four. In The Mountain and the Viper — One old parchment undoes years of penance.

Season Five. In Kill the Boy — Pulls Tyrion from the water; hides a grey patch on his wrist.

Season Eight. In The Long Night — Fell shielding his queen, sword in hand, at last content.

In the books

A Dance with Dragons. In The Griffin and the Rhoyne — Drags a gift to Meereen: the most wanted kinslayer alive. In The Harpy's Bargain — Branded a slave, fighting in a pit for the right to be near her failure.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• In Selhorys Tyrion buys an hour with a sad-eyed whore and walks out into Ser Jorah Mormont's fist: “I'm taking you to the queen.” (ADWD 19)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The show: Fell defending his queen (S8·E3)

The exile who betrayed his queen, was banished twice, and came back both times died in the snow at Winterfell with his sword in his hand, taking blow after blow meant for Daenerys. He fell at her feet; a dragon mourned over them both.

In the show Jorah dies at the Battle of Winterfell, in the Long Night of the eighth season, exactly where every viewer always knew he would die: between Daenerys and the swords coming for her. When Drogon is driven from the sky and the queen is left standing in the open among the dead, Jorah cuts his way to her and plants himself, taking wound after wound through the last hour of the battle, Heartsbane — Sam Tarly’s family blade, passed to him in the smithy of the man whose family judged him — in his hands. He falls only when the battle is already won, dying in her arms in the snow while Drogon lands and curls a wing around them both: the bear, the dragon, and the queen, the whole hopeless devotion granted one perfect image.

In the published books Jorah Mormont is alive — branded, exiled, unransomed and unredeemed, riding with the Second Sons in the war for Meereen, still carrying his ruin toward whatever ending Martin intends. Book readers note the elder Mormont’s dying wish at Craster’s Keep — find my son, tell him to take the black — as a road sign the novels may yet honor; the show, having given Jorah a better death than the Wall could, let the old bear’s wish go unkept.