Bear Island

Seat of House Mormont

A cold island of woods and fisherfolk in the Bay of Ice, seat of House Mormont — poor in gold, rich in axes, and stubborn beyond all sense.

The fuller tale

Bear Island sits in the Bay of Ice a week’s sail from anywhere, all gnarled oaks, mossy stones and fisherfolk who measure wealth in axes because there is nothing else to measure it in. House Mormont rules from a timber hall, and by the island’s oldest carving — a woman in a bearskin with a babe at her breast and an axe in her hand — its women expect to do their own fighting, the raiders of the Iron Islands having never once sent advance notice.

For a poor island it exports an outsized share of the story. It gives the Watch its Old Bear and the tale one of its longest roads to redemption in Jorah, the heir who sold poachers to slavers and spent the rest of his life paying for it — the island’s hard code is the measuring stick both men carry everywhere they go. And in the war’s later years Bear Island supplies the North’s conscience in miniature: when the great houses hedge, the smallest levy in the North answers first, and is worth more than its numbers every time the tale does the accounting.

The page and the screen

Lyanna Mormont — the ten-year-old lady whose scorn realigns northern politics scene by scene — is the show’s creation, conjured from a single sharp letter in the books in which Maege’s daughter declares that Bear Island knows no king but the King in the North, whose name is Stark. Book readers get the She-Bear instead: Alysane Mormont, fighting through the snows with Stannis’s southern host, part of a matriarchy the show compressed into one small, furious face.