Bear Island

Bear Island lies in the Bay of Ice, northwest of Deepwood Motte and Winterfell, and it is named in A Game of Thrones. It is a cold, windswept place of forests and hills, remote from the rest of the North, where people live in wooden villages; crofters work inland while most of the islanders keep to the coasts and live off fish. The bears in its woods give the island its name and House Mormont its sigil. It is poor in resources, though its folk hold it a beautiful land of ancient trees, flowering thorn bushes and creeks. The Mormont seat is a wooden longhall behind an earthen palisade, and the carving on its gate shows a woman with a babe in one arm and a battleaxe in the other, for the women who held home and hearth against raiders while the men were at sea. Female warriors are common on Bear Island as almost nowhere else in Westeros.