House Mormont
The hardy house of Bear Island, sworn to Stark: warriors and sailors, its women as fierce as its men, holding a hard rock in a cold sea.
The fuller tale
Bear Island sits cold and rocky and half-forgotten in the northern sea, and House Mormont has held it for so long by being exactly as tough as the land requires, with no particular deference to which sex is doing the toughening. Mormont women fight, sail, and rule Bear Island as readily as Mormont men, a fact the rest of the North treats as an eccentricity and Bear Island itself treats as simply how the place has always worked ÔÇö Here We Stand is the motto, and it has never specified who, precisely, is standing.
Jeor Mormont commands the Night's Watch as its Lord Commander when the story opens, an old soldier trying to hold together an order that has forgotten why it exists, while his son Jorah's disgrace ÔÇö selling poachers into slavery to pay off debts, then fleeing across the narrow sea rather than face justice for it ÔÇö hangs over the family's name until Jorah spends the rest of his life trying to earn it back in service to a queen he loves hopelessly and can never quite tell.
The house's fiercest member turns out to be its smallest. Lyanna Mormont, still a child when she inherits Bear Island's lordship, faces down grown lords twice her age with a directness that embarrasses grander houses into remembering their own courage, and dies, when the moment finally comes, exactly the way Here We Stand promises she would ÔÇö standing, facing something enormous, refusing to run.
The page and the screen
Lyanna Mormont barely exists in the published books beyond a name on a page ÔÇö the show built her entire personality, her scene-stealing confrontations with adult lords, and her eventual death in battle almost from scratch, one of the more significant original creations the adaptation added to material the novels had only sketched in outline. Readers of the books meeting her for the first time through the show were, in a real sense, meeting a character the novels have not yet written.
