Alys Rivers, Part 1: A Badly Behaved Witch Makes History
This is the first in a series of posts discussing the Alys Rivers, as depicted in Fire and Blood and The World of Ice and Fire, and the ways in which she both personifies and subverts long-standing concepts of what witches are and can be. This post contains a storm of spoilers from Fire and Blood. If you are Unsullied by that particular tome and want to watch future seasons of House of the Dragon in a state of purity, this post will destroy your virtue. If you don’t care about sullying your mind with spoilers, read on, and if you need a refresher on the spectacularly witchy career of Alys Rivers, I suggest checking out History of Westeros’ excellent episode on the woman herself:, as well as theirs and Radio Westeros’ Dance of the Dragons episodes. For a very quick run-down, her Wiki of Ice and Fire entry ably summarizes the canon.
Witch stories are always about power. But of course they are: witches themselves are seekers and wielders of magical power, whether for better or for worse. But aside from this, what makes a witch a witch? Beyond being a magic-maker- and there’s lots of words for those, both on Planetos and in our world- what makes a witch distinct from, say, a sorcerer or a magician? Definitions vary across cultures and time periods, but in Western culture, the witch is usually female, and she is usually “other,” existing outside the bounds of society in some way. Since the Romantic era in the early 19th century, the “otherness” of witches has evolved into a more positive quality, often a symbol of resistance to tyranny, and witches don’t always retain their aura of danger. But in the period of the European witch-hunts, between roughly 1400-1750, this was not the prevailing view of witches; instead, witches were the hidden internal enemy seeking to destroy good order from within, universally feared and reviled as the enemies of righteousness. Witches were feared for their abilities to affect fertility, attack the well-being of the state, revenge themselves on their enemies, destroy men with their unbridled sexuality, and harm their opponents through the sheer power of their words. Their lust for power led them to an alliance with darkness, bestowing them with the magical ability to do harm and achieve their desires while seeking to destroy their own society, supplanting the forces of law, religion, and kingship. Usually, this harm was believed to involve crimes against ordinary people, but sometimes witches were believed to move against princes themselves. If, by these standards, we look for the witchiest of all Westerosi magic-makers, Alys Rivers’ eventual title of Witch Queen of Harrenhal is well-earned. And like many women who have elbowed their way into the historical record, Alys does so by behaving very badly indeed.
“Well-behaved women rarely make history.” I’m willing to bet you’ve seen this quote somewhere - on a bumper sticker, a t-shirt, a coffee mug - and maybe you even own something emblazoned with it yourself. My own example, a t-shirt acquired long ago at a historical reenactment, has a cutlass-wielding lady pirate above the quote, but it has to be said that neither pirates nor witches were the quote’s original subject. There’s been so much confusion on this score that the historian who originally wrote it, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (a doyenne of early American women’s history if ever there was one), published an entire book on the phrase. As she rightly pointed out, Ulrich actually stated “well-behaved women rarely make history” in her late 1970s article on the “good girls” of 17th-century Puritan New England: the goodwives, gentlewomen, and well-behaved maidens who barely made it into the historical record because they didn’t misbehave. Ulrich’s entire point was that in order for women’s deeds to be found worthy of record at all, they had to be found exceptional in some way by the men writing down all this history, usually because they broke the rules of good behavior. Practicing witchcraft, or seeming to in the eyes of one’s neighbors, was an especially spectacular form of rule-breaking. So, of course, was having children out of wedlock, having an affair with a man of much higher social rank, or running an outlaw band after seizing a strategically important castle- though the first two are generally more common misdeeds in the real-world historical record.
As it often was in our world, so it is in Westeros. You certainly don’t find many wet nurses, serving women, woods witches, bastard daughters, and lowborn paramours mentioned by name in the histories or, for that matter, in the songs. Even noblewomen tend to enter with prominence only when they are involved in controversy, and their temerity in entering the record is not usually well-rewarded in depictions of their personal characters; Alicent and Rhaenyra are both cases in point. One of the things that I most enjoyed about House of the Dragon was its resounding ability to call out my own internalized misogyny by revealing the complex landscape of its female characters’ lives. It forced me to realize that I had accepted the maesterly/septonish/comic dwarf tabloid-y narratives of Fire and Blood and their flat, unflattering portrayals of these women at face value. Embarrassing, for a gender historian who studies witchcraft, but a much-needed call-out regardless. I question the maesterly narrative about Alys, and I’m excited to suggest how it might be subverted to tell a witch story that, as established in the book, pushes beyond conventional tropes.
“Who was this woman?” asks Grand Maester Gyldayn when introducing Alys Rivers in the narrative of Fire and Blood. “A serving wench who dabbled in potions and spells, says Munkun. A woods witch, claimed Septon Eustace. A malign enchantress who bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youth, Mushroom would have us believe.” Who, indeed? As is often the case with real historical individuals who are female, poor, lowborn, or otherwise marginalized (illegitimate children being a case in point), we’re uncertain when Alys was born or even who her parents were, because she wasn’t considered important enough for anyone to record these details accurately. It’s also impossible to construct an accurate sense for her motives and character, because the narrative we have is interested mainly in her misdeeds, and seems largely mystified about her motivations - while remaining quite vague regarding the actual details of her conduct. The sources upon whom Gyldayn is drawing in Fire and Blood also seem poorly positioned to acquire accurate information about Alys. It’s unclear how Septon Eustace, a septon of the Faith of the Seven who lived and served at court in the Red Keep, could have had much insight into what happened inside the walls of Harrenhal. This is also true of Mushroom, who had also served in King’s Landing and was attached to Rhaenyra’s court at the time when Alys enters the narrative, and of the future Grand Maester Munkun, who drew upon the work of Grand Maester Orwyle, himself a courtier. It’s possible that Orwyle and Munkun received information about the situation at Harrenhal from the maester who served there, which may indicate that their accounts are more reliable, though not unbiased; for example, it makes sense that a maester might notice a servant’s interest in potions but fail to note other details. They may also draw on military records from Daemon and Aemond’s respective campaigns, which may or may not actually mention Alys. Eustace and Mushroom both served at court when Lord Lyonel Strong and his sons Harwin and Larys were at court, so they could theoretically have been aware of the existence of a bastard daughter of House Strong, but it seems unlikely that they would have learned much about her at that time. However, Eustace and Mushroom have different origin stories for Alys. Eustace agrees with Munkun that she was “sired by Lord Lyonel Strong in his callow youth, making her a natural half-sister to his sons Harwin (Breakbones) and Larys (the Clubfoot).” However, “Mushroom insists that she was much older, that she was a wet nurse to both boys, perhaps even their father a generation earlier.”
I’ll delve into the implications of Mushroom’s statements about Alys in due course, but this does bring us to the question of Alys’s age. “Alys Rivers was at least forty years of age during the Dance of the Dragons, that much is known; Mushroom makes her even older. All agree she looked younger than her years, but whether this was simple happenstance, or achieved through the practice of the dark arts, men continue to dispute.” It makes sense for Munkun to estimate her age as about forty, since he’s assuming that she was an older half-sister of Harwin and Larys and probably bases her age off of theirs or their father’s. But who testified that she looked younger than her years? Is this the testimony of Harrenhal’s maester? An oral tradition collected in the Riverlands years later? The memory of a knight who served under Aemond and Criston Cole who passed his memories down to his grandchildren? It could be any of these, or none; the histories do not tell us. What all three of these sources agree on, however, is that Alys was a lowborn woman, probably of bastard birth, who possessed a reputation for magical ability and was probably connected to House Strong; she was also a resident of Harrenhal when the castle was taken in both 129 and 130 AC, by the forces of Daemon Targaryen (for the Blacks) and Aemond Targaryen (for the Greens) respectively.
If three historical sources agree, there’s a decent chance of accuracy; beyond these details, however, it’s pretty much impossible to assess the accuracy of these men’s statements because their sources are in turn obscure. If this were a real-world history of an accused witch from, say, the 16th century, these five bits of information wouldn’t be an unreasonable amount to recover from written sources. What we do know about women accused of sorcery often comes from court records (potentially stretching back years before they were accused of witchcraft and encompassing other offenses), or sensationalized pamphlets published after they were tried (Mushroom could have had an entire career writing these). Historians can expand on this if they have access to other sources that mention the woman in question, like the baptism, marriage, and death records of local churches. It’s unclear if Westerosi authorities keep such records, or if old gods worshippers - which Alys herself may be - might easily slip through the cracks of officialdom. If I were researching Alys’s story, I would look for documents like Harrenhal’s account books, which could tell us if Alys was being paid as a servant, provided a servant’s livery (uniform), or if there had ever been a child by her name supported by the Strongs. If the maester kept records regarding births, deaths, or medical treatments, these might also provide insight. Since I’m unable to jump into a fictional universe and start rooting around in Westerosi archives (alas!), I’ll have to assess the less-reliable but very interesting stories provided for us by Gyldayn and his sources.
This brings us to the question of the male authors’ own cultural bias in the depiction of Alys’s fertility and sexuality, as well as the confusion and alarm surrounding her later domination of Harrenhal. Given the nature of the sources, the images of Alys recorded by these men are also likely filtered through theirs and their sources’ knowledge of her later careers as both Aemond’s paramour (and possible wife) and then as the “witch queen” of Harrenhal. As to her wants and personality, we have no idea, because just as it often is in real-world history, her voice (and, I suspect, much of her legacy) has been entirely obscured by the general tide of Westeros’ historical narrative. This narrative, preserved by maesters in service to the Crown and the prevailing social order, has a vested interest in trying to minimize the history of any woman who seduced a dragon-riding prince, founded her own fiefdom, and survived outside the bounds of the conventional order for some time - a woman who evidently played her own game of thrones more effectively than many princes and princesses of the realm played theirs. One of the most effective ways to both sensationalize and control such a woman’s story is to place relentless focus on her biology. In my next post, I’ll turn my attention to Gyldayn and his sources’ depiction of Alys’s roles as a mother, wet nurse, and royal paramour, and how the narrative’s focus on her body shapes her depiction as a witch.