Longclaw

Given to a man who was not a Mormont, by a Lord Commander who had decided he was worth it.

The blade itself

Longclaw is a bastard sword ÔÇö a hand-and-a-half, long enough in the grip for the second hand when the work gets serious, short enough to be used from a horse or in a corridor. It is not a showpiece. The blade is a little over three feet of smoke-dark steel, rippled the whole way with the faint wavering bands that mark the FreeholdÔÇÖs work, and in the low red light of a fire at the Wall those ripples look like something moving under ice. The edge is fine to the point of unsettling. Jon Snow has cut himself on it simply putting a thumb where a thumb should not go.

The weight is the thing everyone notices first. A castle-forged bastard sword of that length is a genuine two-handed commitment; Longclaw can be swung one-handed all afternoon by a man of no particular size, and it does not tire the wrist. It shears through mail rather than crushing it. The grip is bound in soft leather that has been rebound at least twice in living memory. The pommel was a bearÔÇÖs head in pale stone for five hundred years, because the Mormonts are bears; it is a wolf now, with garnets for eyes, recut by a Wall craftsman on a Lord CommanderÔÇÖs orders. The join is not invisible. That is arguably the best thing about it.

Valyrian steel cannot be replaced. The Freehold made it with dragonfire and sorcery and the Doom took the recipe with everything else; there are perhaps a couple of hundred blades left in the world and there will never be another. A house that owns one owns it forever, or loses it forever. That is what makes what the Mormonts did with Longclaw so unusual.

Five hundred years on Bear Island

Longclaw had been in House Mormont for something on the order of five centuries ÔÇö a long tenure for a poor house on a cold rock in the Bay of Ice, and one of the reasons the Mormonts are taken seriously despite having almost nothing else. Bear Island is small, timbered, and short of everything. Its lords fight in mail their grandfathers wore. The sword was the householdÔÇÖs single object of real value, and the familyÔÇÖs insistence on keeping it rather than selling it during any of the several centuries in which selling it would have solved every problem they had says as much about them as anything in the histories.

JorahÔÇÖs disgrace

Jeor MormontÔÇÖs son Jorah brought the family into disgrace ÔÇö slavers, debts, a wife with expensive habits and a sentence he did not stay to hear ÔÇö and fled across the narrow sea. He left in a hurry and he left without the sword. Accounts differ slightly on whether the Old Bear physically prevented it or whether Jorah simply had no time; either way, Longclaw did not go to Essos, and the MormontsÔÇÖ opinion of the man who nearly took it there was expressed by his father taking the black rather than share a hall with the story.

So Jeor Mormont came to the Wall as an old man and brought the sword with him, and there it stayed: an heirloom belonging to a family whose heir was an outlaw, in the hands of a man sworn to hold no lands and father no children. On paper it should have gone back to Bear Island. Jeor kept it, and kept it for years, and appears to have spent those years deciding what to do with it.

Given to a bastard

The decision came after a bad night in the Lord CommanderÔÇÖs own chambers. A dead man walked into the tower, and Jon Snow got there first, and the thing that finally stopped it was fire ÔÇö a lamp, a curtain, a burning room ÔÇö because steel had done nothing at all. Jeor Mormont gave Longclaw to him afterwards, along with the observation that a Mormont sword should stay in Mormont hands, and that he had decided the boy would do.

Then he had the pommel recut. The bear became a white wolf with red stones for eyes, and the sword stopped being a Mormont blade in any sense the heralds would recognise. It is an act of adoption performed in metal, done by a man who could not adopt anyone, for a boy who had spent his whole life being told what he was not. Jon has been notably careful with it ever since. He does not lend it, he does not display it, and he has offered it back at least once to people with a better claim.

What the sword turns out to be for

The Watch had spent centuries treating the old stories as nursery talk. Longclaw is one of the objects that turns them back into a supply problem. Valyrian steel does to the enemies beyond the Wall what ordinary iron does not ÔÇö the shattering of a White Walker at Hardhome, at the end of a very bad day on a beach full of people trying to get into boats, is the moment the arithmetic changes for everyone watching. There are two known substances that work. One of them is buried in the ground in quantity. The other is a fixed number of heirlooms scattered across a continent, mostly in the hands of families with no intention of going north.

That is the joke the story keeps making with this collection. The swords were kept for prestige for a thousand years by men who thought the wars that mattered were in the south.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

The chronicle records no ending here ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.