I’ve been wanting to meta about the Mormont women and their similarities to Jorah and Jeor for a long time, and since we won’t be getting any Mormont women in season 3 of Game of Thrones this seemed like a good time to discuss it.

Sometimes I see people claiming that Jorah is a stain on his family, that they’re much better than him, that Mormonts are awesome “except for Jorah”, etc. It’s fine not to like him - there are plenty of good reasons not to, because he has a ton of flaws, and has made a LOT of mistakes. But I think he shares a lot of his flaws with his kinswomen (and his father), and I’d like to explain why.

(Someday I will probably also do a meta on the Mormont women independently, because I certainly don’t think they can ONLY be viewed in relation to Jorah; it’s just that we see a lot more of him and his character development in the series so there’s more to analyze if I use him as a lens here.)

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I. First off, a few of the flaws I think the Mormont women (and Jeor) display throughout the series, and how they’re similar to Jorah’s flaws.

Romanticism

One of Jorah’s worst flaws - and probably the one that causes the most trouble in the series - is that he tends to let his heart (er…yeah, let’s go with “heart”) override his better judgment.

At first glance it might seem like that makes him a bit of a black sheep among the rest of his kin. But does it really?

For comparison, let’s look at one of everyone’s favorite badass Mormont moments - Lyanna’s letter to Stannis.

Its contents are as follows:

Bear Island knows no king but the King in the North, whose name is STARK.

At this point the King in the North is dead and everyone knows it. It makes sense for Stark bannermen to remain loyal to House Stark as their vassals, as they always have, but there wasn’t a King in the North for 300 years before Robb Stark took on the title, and since he’s dead there isn’t one now (remember, everyone in Westeros but Sam, Osha, Hodor, the Reeds, and Coldhands thinks Bran and Rickon are dead too).

So why remain loyal to a dead king and a lost title?

Because Lyanna is a fucking Mormont, that’s why.

Her cousin Jorah is, at the time, fighting his way back to Meereen even after Daenerys has banished him from the city. Sure, it’s partly because he loves her, but also because it’s his duty to serve, protect, and obey his Queen. (What he says to the Widow of the Waterfront isn’t false, it’s just that there’s more to it than that and she knows it.) It doesn’t matter that she’s banished him, that he’s lied to her, or whether he loves her romantically or not. He swore a vow, and in his heart she’s the one true ruler of Westeros. When he tells her ”My sword that was his is yours, Daenerys, And my heart as well, that never belonged to your brother”, he’s not saying he wants to fuck her and he didn’t want to fuck Viserys. He’s saying he’s happy to pledge to die for her because he believes in her as a ruler, as opposed to when he swore his service to a man he considered “less than the shadow of a snake”. And his vows are permanent - Kings/Queensguard serve for life (he said he’d follow her “whatever may come”, not “ok well unless you don’t want me around anymore.”) He can’t bring Tyrion to Cersei and gain a pardon even though going back to Westeros is what he’s wanted for years because Cersei isn’t his queen - Dany is.

(This is especially true if we note that in the TV show he swears a bloodrider’s oath to her, meaning that his life is bound to hers. “Blood of my blood.” If she dies, he dies. Banishment doesn’t really hold a candle to that.)

He’s on an errand that will likely lead to his beheading because of his loyalty to a ruler who has explicitly said she never wants to see him again. Lyanna is risking the wrath of Stannis Baratheon and his army to declare her loyalty to a dead king.

Because they believe in what they believe in even when they shouldn’t, even when it’s more logical not to. Because here we stand.

What’s more romantic than that? Sure, it’s not “romance” in the way we think of it, or in the way Jorah feels/felt about Lynesse and/or Dany, but clinging to the memory of your dead king - of a rightful king, whose right to rule you believe in so much that his death doesn’t diminish it - is a pretty damn romantic notion if you ask me.

Stubbornness

Again, ten-year-old Lyanna verbally defies the lawful king of Westeros. Don’t think I need to explain that one.

And then there’s Jorah, actual King of Being Stubborn at Inappropriate Times. The best example here I think is in Meereen, when Dany is confronting him with his betrayal in front of the whole court.

He’s clearly in the wrong here. No matter what his reasons, no matter how much actual shit Dany has made him wade through in the past week, he has still lied to her and - whether intentionally or not - put her life and the life of her child in danger.

A simple apology would be the minimum logical response here. And yet he comes before the queen angry, refuses to beg or apologize, insists that he’s “told [her] true, half a hundred times”, is actually arguing with a woman he knows perfectly well has the Targaryen temper and has the power - and a pretty good reason - to kill him. Who else but a fucking Mormont would be that stubborn when they’ve just committed treason?

To be fair there are plenty of stubborn people in Westeros (especially lords with their inflated sense of pride), but the words of House Mormont are basically “fuck you, we do what we want.”

“Here We Stand” can be a noble thing - standing to defend your lord/king/queen, for example - but it also means standing by your actions, and in Jorah’s case it sometimes means doing that even when you’re in the wrong.

And then there was that time Maege told her liege lord’s son that he was too young to give her commands and offered to let him marry her granddaughter who was, I believe, seven at the time.

So yeah “Here We Stand” can be a problem when it manifests as saying whatever the hell you want…

Love/family over honor

My absolute favorite of the very few Maege moments we get in the books is in the beginning of ASoS:

Before she could think to question Robb, however, she found herself surrounded by a circle of well-wishers. Lady Mormont took her hand and said, “My lady, if Cersei Lannister held two of my daughters, I would have done the same.”

The “same” that Maege is referring to is Catelyn’s decision to release Jaime Lannister in what is a desperate, risky, and not largely well-thought-out attempt to see two of her remaining children again. This was a decision Catelyn made out of grief, believing her two youngest sons had been killed, and though I personally agreed with it it was not by any means good military strategy. In fact, it’s technically an act of treason.

And yet Maege Mormont, one of Robb’s bannerman and thus a person who likely is expected to participate in military strategy, admits she would have done the same thing if her children were in danger. This is a woman who can see what’s logical and what’s expected, but loves her children enough that she knows she would do anything - even commit treason - to save them.

Much as her nephew brought shame to the family name by committing treason in a desperate, risky, and poorly planned attempt to keep the woman he loved from leaving. Though obviously the happiness of one’s wife and a potential threat to the life of one’s child are very different things, we can see how Jorah’s bankrupting the family and breaking the law were extreme versions of what motivated Catelyn to free Jaime Lannister.

Jorah perhaps takes the Mormont traits to an extreme degree, but they’re still Mormont traits.

Maege also happens to have not one but five children with unknown fathers. We can assume that means they’re all illegitimate, since if they weren’t there would be little reason for Maege to insist her girls were fathered by bears. The only other possibility is that she is married, but to someone she doesn’t want anyone to know about.

(And btw, you’ll notice that no one - fucking no one - calls Maege’s kids “Snow”. Ever.)

Neither situation - having children out of wedlock or marrying someone unsavory - is honorable, especially now that Maege is the Lady of Bear Island and a minor noblewoman in her own right. Nobles are not supposed to do things like that. Jorah, when he was still on track to inherit his father’s title, married a Glover at a young age even though they weren’t really attracted to/in love with each other because nobles in Westeros are supposed to marry for duty, not love.

The Jorah we see in canon doesn’t really give two shits about duty over love anymore, though, and neither does Maege. (Jeor definitely does, given what he says to Jon about choosing duty to the Night’s Watch over his family, so that’s a place where he represents one opinion and his sister and son have a very different one.)

One might say that Jorah chooses love over his family, too, since he’s ruined their name to keep Lynesse, but bear in mind that once you’re married to someone they are your family. She wasn’t some girl in a brothel he liked, she was his wife for a good 4-5 years before they left Westeros; this was LynesseMormont, the Lady of Bear Island, and also potentially the mother of the next Lord of Bear Island, had everything turned out differently. Part of Jorah’s duty to his family as the head of their house would have been to produce a male heir to be the next in line, and his second wife would have been a second chance to fulfill that duty.

He does ultimately sacrifice even that for love, but that doesn’t mean that family and duty aren’t important to him at all. It just means he has them prioritized in a different order than someone like Ned Stark would (and I think Ned’s choosing honor over love contributes to his downfall as much as Jorah’s making the opposite choice contributes to his.)

Practicality over moral right

I’ve already touched on this in a previous post, so I’ll try to be brief here.

Jorah gets a lot of flak for his advice to Dany in Astapor; the idea, I think, is that because he tells her to buy a slave army he somehow approves of or condones slavery. (I realize that he also sold slaves in Westeros - that, too, was a means to an end…albeit a much more selfish end, but I think the point I’m about to make is still relevant.)

Jeor Mormont, in his role as Commander of the Night’s Watch, has for many years relied on the aid of a man who weds his daughters and murders his infant sons. Why? Because he approves of incest, misogyny, and infanticide? Of course not. It’s because his job isn’t to judge Craster for his actions or bring him to justice - his job is to keep his men alive long enough to protect the Wall and the Seven Kingdoms from harm.

Jorah’s job is to protect Dany from harm and to help her conquer the Seven Kingdoms. If that requires the use of a slave army - or, presumably, incest and infanticide - that’s what he’s going to do.

And his father would do the same.

(Adding practicality and romanticism creates an often confusing set of motivations for these characters, by the way, and in the post I linked to I’ve touched a bit on how these things play out when it comes to Jorah’s decisions, but I just want to note that this is one of the most interesting things about Mormonts to me: in dire circumstances, which of these traits is going to win out?)

II . Now that we’ve examined some negative Mormont traits, let’s look at some of the positive things that connect Jorah to his family.

Alysane

Ah, the She-Bear. Aly gets more page time than her mother and her older sister but not nearly as much love, so let’s talk about her for awhile.

Asha describes her reasonably closely in ADWD:

Her proper name was Alysane of House Mormont, but she wore the other name* as easily as she wore her mail. Short, chunky, muscular, the heir to Bear Island had big thighs, big breasts, and big hands ringed with callus. Even in sleep she wore ringmail under her furs, boiled leather under that, and an old sheepskin under the leather, turned inside out for warmth. All those layers made her look almost as wide as she was tall. And ferocious. Sometimes it was hard for Asha Greyjoy to remember that she and the She-Bear were almost of an age.

*referring to the fact that Aly’s men call her “the She-Bear”

Aly is tall like the rest of the Mormonts (except Maege), stocky but muscular (like Jorah and Maege), and scary enough that Asha forgets how young she is.

The language used to describe Aly is often similar to how Jorah is described. Words like “fierce”, “ferocious”, “gruff”, “dangerous” - obviously Martin uses these to emphasize the bear connection (something he does CONSTANTLY, what with Dany thinking of Jorah as “my bear”, “my old fierce bear”, etc., and Asha referring to Aly as “the She-Bear” as often as she uses her actual name), but it also reminds us of their connection to each other as kin. Dacey, by contrast, doesn’t look or act bear-like at all. Catelyn calls her “pretty”, “willowy”, “graceful”…it’s hard to imagine anyone ever applying those words to Aly, Jorah, Jeor or Maege.

So Martin doesn’t have to use the same language to describe Aly and Jorah…and yet he does.

We can picture Aly well enough now, so let’s move on to what she says about her family and her life:

“Do you have brothers?” Asha asked her keeper. “Sisters,” Alysane Mormont replied, gruff as ever. “Five, we were. All girls. Lyanna is back on Bear Island. Lyra and Jory are with our mother. Dacey was murdered.” “The Red Wedding.” “Aye.” Alysane stared at Asha for a moment. “I have a son. He’s only two. My daughter’s nine.” “You started young.” “Too young. But better that than wait too late.” A stab at me, Asha thought, but let it be. “You are wed.” “No. My children were fathered by a bear.” Alysane smiled. Her teeth were crooked, but there was something ingratiating about that smile. “Mormont women are skinchangers. We turn into bears and find mates in the woods. Everyone knows.” Asha smiled back. “Mormont women are all fighters too.” The other woman’s smile faded. “What we are is what you made us. On Bear Island every child learns to fear krakens rising from the sea.”

This is the most exposition we ever get about the Mormont women, the structure of their family, and what their lives are like on Bear Island. Again, Aly shows how much she values her family (and since she has ignored Lyanna’s letter and joined up with Stannis, she clearly values their safety more than loyalty to the King in the North) and like her mother has refused to marry for duty and instead went ahead and had kids at a young age because she wanted to and she does what she wants.

And she’s so stubborn about it that instead of explaining that choice, she and her mother just tell everyone a crazy story about skinchangers. (They could actually be skinchangers, since those certainly exist in ASOIAF, but uh I doubt it.)

So again: stubbornness, family over honor, practicality over moral right (siding with Stannis). Looks like we have a Mormont here.

Another interesting passage, from Asha’s third chapter:

“My lady asked you to let her go,” said Aly Mormont. “You would do well to listen, ser. Lady Asha is not for burning.” “She will be,” Suggs insisted. “We have harbored this demon worshiper amongst us too long.” He released his grip on Asha’s arm all the same. One did not provoke the She-Bear needlessly.

Again we see Aly being intimidating. The last sentence reminds me of the scene in Vaes Dothrak where Jorah confronts the wineseller; he doesn’t make any threats or even carry a weapon, but Dany notes that his hands are “weapon enough”. General air of intimidation - definitely a Mormont trait.

Also notable here is the way Asha has begun to refer to Aly. At this point, she’s has completely stopped calling her “Alysane” - it’s always “Aly Mormont” or “She-Bear” in this chapter, as opposed to the previous one. There’s an excellent post on the point at which Dany switches from “Ser Jorah” to “Jorah”, and I think that something similar is happening here. They’re clearly beginning to like each other a bit, even though they really shouldn’t, since Asha is Stannis’ prisoner and, again, Mormonts are raised to fear and hate Greyjoys.

This also happens between Jorah and Dany while they’re riding through the Dothraki sea; Jorah’s not supposed to get attached to the Targaryen girl he’s spying on for Varys. Her father burned Jorah’s liege lord alive and killed his son, and Jorah himself fought under the Stark banner to depose Aerys. A Stark bannerman befriending one of Aerys Targaryen’s children is about as crazy as a She-Bear befriending Balon Greyjoy’s daughter.

There are a lot of parallels between Aly and Asha’s friendship and Jorah and Dany’s, in fact. At various points Asha mentions that she has come to find Aly’s loud snoring (Tyrion, in Volantis, also makes a note of Jorah’s snoring) comforting, and in the long conversation I typed out above Asha also notes that “her teeth were crooked, but there was something ingratiating about that smile”, which echoes Dany’s line in AGoT:

The knight smiled. Ser Jorah was not a handsome man. He had a neck and shoulders like a bull, and coarse black hair covered his neck and arms so thickly that there was none left for his head. Yet his smiles gave Dany comfort.

Both Aly and Jorah are hardly beauty queens, but there’s apparently something about them - something so obvious that two women who barely know them happen to pick up on it - that gives them a calming presence. That’s an odd and specific personality trait (and I think Maege displays it as well, when she tries to comfort Catelyn on the ride to the Twins) - too much so to be a coincidence, I think.

There are other points when Asha and Aly echo Dany and Jorah, but going through them all individually would be a meta in its own right so I’ll stop here.

Suffice it to say that I think Aly - the Mormont woman we see the most of as far as actual conversation and development in the text - is similar to Jorah to a striking degree.

Here We Stand (together) (as a family) (no matter what)

There’s also no evidence in the text that Jeor and the women hate Jorah for what he’s done. In fact, I intend to prove the opposite.

They certainly have good reason to hate him. He has bankrupted them, left Maege and her daughters to pick up the pieces, and shamed his father and his kin by breaking the law and fleeing punishment.

Yet Jeor’s dying words are:

“Tell Jorah. Forgive him. My son. Please. Go.”

Not only does he forgive Jorah, with his dying breath he wants to make sure that someone tells Jorah he’s forgiven. It’s one thing to decide you forgive someone, and another thing entirely to tell one of your men to cross a continent to let them know it. Certainly it’s quite the opposite of hating them.

And of course there are the things he says about Jorah in AGoT:

“The things we love destroy us every time, lad. Remember that. My son loved that young wife of his. Vain woman. If it were not for her, he would never have thought to sell those poachers.”

The way he’s phrased the first part - one of his best-known lines - love is the subject of the sentence; it is doing the destroying and taking the blame, not Jorah (and the fact that Jeor knows how love can control a person’s actions supports the idea that over-romanticism is a family trait).

Not only that, he’s blaming Lynesse. Jorah wouldn’t have thought to sell the poachers if not for her? That’s a pretty big leap right there. It was still Jorah who did the selling, and who fled the country, but Jeor still loves his son too much to admit that what happened was as much his own fault as the fault of the “vain woman” he married.

And when he gives Longclaw to Jon he makes sure to mention that Jorah “brought dishonor to House Mormont, but at least he had the grace to leave the sword behind when he fled.” Highlighting the one good thing Jorah did here, despite the fact that he’s ruined the family name that Jeor must have worked hard to cultivate.

So Jeor obviously still loves his son quite a lot. We don’t know much about how the women feel about him, though, except for the following passage in which Dacey and Maege discuss Lynesse with Lady Catelyn:

“My nephew Jorah brought home a proper lady once,” said Lady Maege. “He won her in a tourney. How she hated that carving.” “Aye, and all the rest,” said Dacey. “She had hair like spun gold, that Lynesse. Skin like cream. But her soft hands were never made for axes.” “Nor her teats for giving suck,” her mother said bluntly.

Of course they haven’t said very much about their feelings about Jorah here, but we can glean some of it from what they have to say about Lynesse.

For one thing, they’ve brought Jorah and Lynesse up completely unprompted. Catelyn has asked if all the women on Bear Island are warriors, Dacey mentions the carving of the mother with an ax that is on their gate, and then Maege jumps in with “my nephew Jorah”.

(Note that she both says his name and calls him her nephew. While it’s possible that that isn’t significant - it might just be the shortest way to clarify the person she’s referring to - she also could have just as easily referred to him as “one of my kinsmen” or “my brother’s son”. If a person truly resented and was ashamed by another person, it would be a bit odd for them to speak their name out loud - again, totally unprompted - as well as their direct familial relationship. Jeor does this too; when he speaks of Jorah it’s always “my son”, as opposed to when he calls Lynesse “that young wife of his” and “vain woman”.)

It’s also weird for someone to remind their King’s mother about an event that brought shame to their House. If Maege had brought it up to complain about Jorah, disassociate herself and her daughter from him, or exhibit bitterness towards him in any way, that would make more sense. But she doesn’t, and neither does Dacey. Their focus is entirely on his wife, and so are all the negative comments.

They’re trying to say that Lynesse never belonged on Bear Island, that she never would have been one of them, that her marriage to Jorah was never going to work out. And they’re placing the blame on her nature, not on anything that Jorah has done. He did bring her home, which they clearly think was a mistake, but no mention of the fact that he also sacrificed everything to please a woman who was so obviously never going to be pleased with his family and the way they lived.

This sounds almost exactly like the way Jeor talks about Jorah and Lynesse, so we can assume that most if not all of the Mormonts blame Lynesse (wrongly, in my opinion, but that’s not the point) for his fate more than they blame Jorah.

That’s blind love, loyalty, and stubbornness in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.

I’d go so far as to say that all of the Mormonts still love each other, and given that I suspect pride is also one of their common flaws I’m betting any one of them would be happy to grant a black eye to anyone who insulted one of their kin.

So how can Jorah be a stain on his family if his family still loves him?

III . In Conclusion

It’s easy to love Dacey and Maege and Aly and Lyanna, because we barely see them in canon. They don’t have time to make mistakes and reveal their flaws, because Martin hasn’t spent very much time writing them. Most of what they are in the text is badass warrior ladies, and who doesn’t love that?

It’s much harder to look at the Mormont who gets the most screen/page time, look at his laundry list of flaws and mistakes, and understand how he relates to the rest of his kin.

There are plenty of good reasons not to like him (and certainly no one can deny that he’s brought shame to his House), but you should consider that perhaps the fierce kickass she-bears that we all love might have, given a different set of circumstances, made the same mistakes that Jorah has.

(Thanks to Lisa and Cassie for correcting/approving this message)