Alys Rivers: The Witch’s Body

This is the second in a series of posts discussing 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.

“Though her own children had all been stillborn, the milk that flowed so abundantly from the breasts of Alys Rivers had nourished countless babies born of other women at Harrenhal. Was she in truth a witch who lay with demons, bringing forth dead children as payment for the knowledge they gave her? Was she a simpleminded slattern, as Eustace believes? A wanton who used her potions to bind men to her, body and soul?”

- Fire and Blood: The Dying of the Dragons - A Son for a Son, page 413

Immediately upon introducing Alys and repeating the speculative theories surrounding her heritage, Archmaester Gyldayn recounts this slew of additional rumors surrounding Alys’s character and conduct, all of which focus on her fertility and her sexuality in combination with her magical ability. In short, all these rumors are focused primarily on Alys’s physical body and what she did with it: children, milk, breasts, nourished, babies, lay, children, simpleminded, slattern, wanton, body, with the additional X factor of supernatural power mixed in. From her immediate entrance in Fire and Blood, Alys Rivers is depicted as all about sex, childbearing, magic, life and death in juxtaposition to one another, and the earthiness of the mortal human body. All of these are powerful themes that have an eternal hold on the human imagination, for how can they not? We are all flesh and bone, we’re all born, we will all die, and most of us know carnal desire. Who has sex with whom; who is able to procreate, bear and nurture children; and whose offspring live or die are all questions of power and desire that are natural sources of longing and anxiety - and thus ripe for supernatural influence and interpretation. Witch-figures are indelibly associated with all of these themes, so it’s not terribly surprising that they enter immediately with Alys, like a cloak swirling around her body. 

Gyldayn states several times that Alys Rivers was a wet nurse, a lactating woman who provided nursing services for women unable or unwilling to nurse their own infants. However, his emphasis on the extent of Alys’s wet-nursing career seems a bit odd, in terms of both biology and culture. For starters, being a wet nurse was not usually a full-time career move, because lactation is not an indefinite state, and maesters should know this. Historically, in a western European context, wet nurses were usually rural women who were either hired by a noble household before a child’s birth (Juliet’s nurse in Romeo and Juliet is a perfect example of this) or who took a newborn into their home for nursing during the first year or two of life (most children were likely weaned around 18 months). This was a service used mainly by aristocratic and some middle-class women; most lower-class women nursed their own infants, unless they worked in especially demanding labor like textile production, which did not allow for on-site nursing breaks. Wet nurses were ideally supposed to be married women, often farmer’s wives, who had already nursed and weaned a child of their own, were in good health, and were of respectable reputation. There were many superstitions surrounding nursing, especially beliefs that the wrong milk could damage the child; for example, that animal milk would impart animal qualities, or that a woman who had borne a bastard would pass on her lax morality on to the child she nursed. We don’t know what superstitions Westerosi smallfolk have about nursing, but the latter belief sounds quite plausible in a Westerosi context due to their considerable bias against illegitimacy. Later on in real-world history, once we enter the era of newspapers in the 18th century, advertisements are sometimes listed either by wet nurses or in search of one; I remember one example in which the woman specifically stated that she had lost her own child but was still lactating. In a pre-breast pump era, nursing another child may well have been a physical relief, and it may have helped some individuals to recover emotionally as well. All of this may provide some parallel insight into Alys’s circumstances, but there are still many questions unanswered. Why were there so many women at Harrenhal who needed nursing services? Were they highborn women, or smallfolk struggling to nurse for health reasons or due to overwork? Was she nursing children whose mothers had died? And how was she able to keep lactating with such apparent consistency? In order to be nursing infants regularly, Alys would likely have to be conceiving with regularity as well, even though lactation often suppresses conception. For a peasant wife, a near-constant cycle of births and lactation would not have been uncommon during her fertile years - but we have no indication that Alys was in fact a wife. Was she married, perhaps even more than once, and no one bothered to record her spouses’ existence? Or are her stillborn children bastards, and if so, why did she bear so many? Was she truly in a constant pregnancy-lactation cycle, perhaps induced by sorcery and involving unnatural fertility and child murder? Or was she simply a woman who lost several infants and/or pregnancies, nursed other children as circumstances required, and worked as another type of servant most of the time? 

This brings us to the allegations that Alys’s stillbirths were supernatural, that she had sex with demons and exchanged her unborn or newborn infants’ lives for magical knowledge. This rumor presumably references Alys’s powers as a seer, which are directly attested to only once in Fire and Blood, by Alys’s lover Aemond Targaryen: 

“She saw you in a storm cloud, in a mountain pool at dusk, in the fire we lit to cook our suppers. She sees much and more, my Alys.” - Fire and Blood: The Dying of the Dragons - Rhaenyra Triumphant, page 502

It’s interesting to note here that we don’t know who recorded Aemond’s final conversation with his uncle Daemon; it’s possible that there were witnesses to this battle unmentioned in the maester’s text, or that Alys herself was responsible for relaying this story to posterity. Aemond’s description suggests that Alys’s sight resembles Melisandre’s, but can work through water and air as well as fire. Given that she’s a Riverlander descended from the First Men, I wonder if Alys’s sight may also work through the element of earth, perhaps through weirwood trees as a type of greensight, though there’s no mention of her having prophetic dreams like Jojen’s or the dragon dreamers, nor is it implied she’s a warg. There’s little indication in the books that foresight is bestowed through contractual obligations with gods or demons; rather, it’s usually depicted as an inherent ability that can be awoken or developed as a skill. We do know that old gods worshippers made blood sacrifices to weirwoods, and that Melisandre uses some form of sex magic to create the Stannis-shaped “shadow-babies” for political assassinations. It might be that this rumor about Alys’s stillbirths arose from her creation of shadow-babies at some point, especially since she later exhibits similar powers while defending Harrenhal. It's unclear what she would have used such magic for in her days as a servant, and it might be that this reflects her post-Witch Queen reputation more than her early career. The idea that she slept with demons might also be a garbled exaggeration of her relationship with Aemond, who may have seemed near-demonic to the smallfolk whose lives and homes he destroyed. Ascribing demonic associations to dangerous nobles is not unknown in real-world history, and the ways in which her relationship with Aemond may have shaped Alys’s own reputation are worth examining in full later on. 

Regardless of Alys’s true abilities and how she used them, it’s worth noting that the accusations of demonic sex and child murder were viewed as archetypal witch behaviors during European witch-hunts; these are accusations that sent thousands of real people to their deaths. Western European beliefs about witchcraft in the Late Medieval-Early Modern eras were a motley blend, stretching back to the ancient world and evolving through the Middle Ages into a particular concept of what a witch was and did. By the early 1400s, the witch developed into a child-murdering, cannibalistic heretic who had sex with demons in exchange for the magical power to do harm, taking part in orgiastic feasts of Devil-worship that inverted Christian religious practices. This expanded upon the more traditional, everyday fear of witches as harmful magic-makers and emphasized that they were servants of evil seeking to destroy the order of things from within, an ultimate enemy whose destruction was a necessity. Historians have tracked the development of this belief and its entry into the legal systems of different kingdoms, as well as into the Church and popular culture, over the course of the late Middle Ages. One of the watershed moments in its development was the trial of Dame Alice Kyteler (yes, Alice as in Alys), who was tried in the Anglo-Norman town of Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1324-25. She and her accomplices were accused of a variety of harmful magic in order to gain wealth, including murder, heretical demon-worship, and brewing potions from the clothes of dead infants and the fat of human corpses. Dame Alice was also accused of having sex with a personal demon. If all of this is sounding a bit familiar, I strongly suspect that Dame Alice Kyteler is one of the two major real-world inspirations behind Alys Rivers. She did manage to escape execution, though one of her supposed accomplices did not. 

In addition to sex with demons, witches were viewed as especially harmful to children. Witch trials in Continental Europe regularly involved accusations (and confessions) of cannibalistic infanticide practiced at witches’ sabbat gatherings, and while this belief was less usual in Britain, accusations across Europe expressed fears that witches harmed and murdered children and babies by magical means, often as revenge against the parents. The use of infant body parts or fat as an ingredient in potions also shows up in both trial records and literature. This set of ideas are also closely intertwined with anti-Semitic beliefs used to justify the persecution of Jews, part of a network of beliefs defining the dangerous “other” viewed as a threat to society. It also reflects another uncomfortable reality, which is that while the majority of Europe’s accused witches were female, so were a majority of witchcraft accusers, and tensions between women were often a source of accusations. Although some midwives were indeed accused of witchcraft, women who cared for other women’s infants and young children were even more vulnerable to accusation. The idea that Alys nursed “countless babies within the walls of Harrenhal” while also sacrificing her own infants for supernatural power is strongly reminiscent of many of these accusations, making her simultaneously into a murderous mother, much like the classical sorceress Medea, and a maternal caregiver who may or may not be trustworthy. In short, it depicts her as unnatural, dangerous, an inversion of proper maternal behavior, one who devours as well as nurtures in her quest for power. 

This also touches on the real-world associations between accused witches, abortion, and infanticide, which in turn were associated with fornication. In addition to witchcraft persecution, the Early Modern period did see a rise in official anxiety surrounding infanticide as a means of covering up illegitimate births. Prosecutions for this type of infanticide didn’t usually overlap with witchcraft accusations directly, but they did result in the executions of young women who were believed - rightly or wrongly- to have murdered their newborn infants intentionally or by neglect. Abortion also sometimes arises in association with witchcraft accusations, as when a confessing accused in Elizabethan England described using herbal abortifacients to end an illegitimate pregnancy years before, implying this was part of the slippery slope that led her to Devil-worship and magical crimes. The way abortion was defined and discussed in this time period is complex; although Christianity does have a long history of condemning the practice, many Europeans believed that life began at quickening, when a child first moved in the womb. The use of herbal emmenagogues and abortifacients to “bring on women’s courses” are well-documented in herbals of the period. Westerosi culture seems to have a similar set of ideas surrounding the use of moon tea, which is not explicitly condemned but is often associated with women hiding illicit sexual relationships. Alys supposedly sacrificing her unborn or just-born, likely illegitimate infants to demons fits both the extreme anxiety that shows up in infanticide trials and fears that witches ritually attacked, used, and murdered infants. 

If Alys repeatedly got pregnant out of wedlock, she doesn’t seem to have had much use for moon tea, though if her identity as a woodswitch and brewer of potions are correct, she would presumably know how to make it. For the most part, her fertility is not shown as controlled but rather depicted as being too much, an unnatural extreme: she has nursed “countless children,” Mushroom claims she was a wet nurse for decades, nursing multiple generations and presumably remaining fertile for twice as long as a normal woman; she seems able to conceive relentlessly (but bears only one living child); she flaunts her naked, pregnant body in the Harrenhal godswood and rides alongside Aemond with her belly “swollen with child.” Her fertile power is depicted as almost overwhelming, constantly exploding through boundaries of good behavior and perhaps of nature itself. This unbridled power, which cannot be contained within the normal bounds of marriage, age, or social class expected in Westeros or our world, is part of her witchiness, her power to unsettle the observer and overturn order. The focus of Gyldayn and his sources on Alys’s fertility probably reflects their discomfiture with this, but it also manages to deflect attention away from even more uncomfortable questions, such as what her relationship Aemond really was, how exactly she seized control of Harrenhal, and how she managed to control the largest castle in Westeros and lead a large band of outlaws for a period of at least several years. The focus on fertility also restricts Alys to the traditionally feminine arenas of reproduction, motherhood, and nurturing, even if she’s seen as an extreme or unnatural example of these roles.

 The preoccupation with Alys’s fertility also focuses attention on the “frail” female body, subject to all of the restrictions and mysterious ailments of childbearing and nursing and menstruation, and often cited as an impediment to female rule. Season One of House of the Dragon tapped into this view of female frailty quite effectively in Episode 6, The Princess and the Queen, when Alicent undercuts and humiliates the lactating Rhaenyra in a council meeting, pointing out that milk is soaking through her gown in front of a table of powerful men. In real-world history, writers from Hippocrates and Aristotle onwards claimed that the female body was a weaker, warped inverse of the male body, which had developed wrongly due to an insufficiency of heat and warmth, and a great deal of medical- and philosophical-inspired ink was spilt on demonstrating this. Our current scientific knowledge demonstrates that human development follows pretty much the opposite track, but this ancient legacy dies hard, and similar notions do seem to prevail in Westeros. In fact, the most succinct summary of this view in the books comes from Alys’s lover Aemond: 

“Rhaenyra may call herself a queen, but she has a woman’s parts, a woman’s faint heart, and a mother’s fears.” - Fire and Blood: The Dying of the Dragons - Rhaenyra Triumphant, page 466

He seemingly overlooks his own mother’s attempt to revenge the loss of his eye (with words in the book, with words and dagger in the TV adaptation), though if questioned, I suspect Aemond would respond as both men and women did throughout history: Alicent must be an exception, exhibiting a particularly “masculine” set of virtues uncommon to most women. Queen Elizabeth I’s statement, “I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king,” is probably the most famous example of this thinking. Elizabeth, who famously never married or had children and touted her virgin status, used the political philosophy of “the king’s two bodies” to argue that her kingly body superseded her womanly one. Elizabeth and her advisors made creative use of their society’s gender roles, weaponizing many of them as unique arguments for the Queen’s rule while espousing the notion that she was, in the words of her own epitaph in Westminster Abbey, “Mother of her country, a nursing-mother to religion and all liberal sciences, skilled in many languages, adorned with excellent endowments both of body and mind, and excellent for princely virtues beyond her sex.” A maternal figure, then, but exceptional - because she resembled a prince, not a princess. 

While the focus on Alys’s physical body tries to pack her back into the familiar gendered boundaries from which that unruly body and its mane of flowing hair are constantly escaping, it also emphasizes her social class. There’s no disagreement among the sources that Alys is a servant, an at least half-lowborn and likely bastard-born member of the smallfolk who is in service at Harrenhal in some capacity. She is also labeled a woodswitch, tying her to the earthiness of folk beliefs and peasant practices. Septon Eustace claims she is a “simple slattern,” suggesting lack of intelligence and complexity as well as manual labor and dirt of a physical and possibly moral variety. It instantly reminds the reader of Alys’s social class and her lack of privileges to do what she in fact does: seize and rule a major stronghold. It implies that there’s something filthy and undesirable about her physical body, and that her body can’t also contain a clever mind. Reading this alongside the wet nurse-related commentary, I was reminded of a long-ago male colleague’s comment about a female co-worker who had gone into her office to use a breast pump: “What if she’s just pumping her brain away in there?” - as though lactation couldn’t happen in the same body as rational thought. (Happily, I no longer work with this guy, though I’m sure someone else has to.) Western culture sees intellect and soul as divided from, and even incompatible with, the physical body and earth, both of which must be dominated and subdued, and it comes as no surprise that the intellect and soul are regarded as masculine and the body and earth as feminine. This thinking goes back to the Greeks but truly came to the fore in the Early Modern era, driving the Enlightenment to follow. If this idea lurks in Westeros, the maesters - the men writing this story down - would be its most likely intellectual proponents, but the Faith of the Seven also demonstrates some real discomfort with physical bodies and sexuality. The celibacy of the Night’s Watch, the Kingsguard, and the Citadel, revered institutions in different ways, are intended to be practical but can contribute to the belief that bodies are unclean or faulty, and must be strictly controlled in order to avoid shame. 

Shame, however, doesn’t appear to be Alys Rivers’ style. In spite of the sexist ways in which the male narrators focus on her body, and although we don’t hear much of her actual voice in the text, Alys exhibits no apparent shame regarding her body or her behavior anywhere in the recorded histories. If anything, being female, highly physical, sexually active, and a mother appears to make her stronger and more powerful rather than less, and all four traits combine with the threat of magical violence to form the core of her power. It’s difficult to discern from the slew of conflicting rumors what magical powers Alys was really exercising and why, or whether her fertility is a natural quality (often exemplified by House Strong) or supernatural. Gyldayn’s text also can’t tell us whether Alys’s intentions are malign from the beginning, whether she changes over time, or whether her motives and character are, as Davos Seaworth would put it, of mixed parts. Given that we’re in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, I suspect the truth is complex and thoroughly muddled in shades of grey. We cannot yet know what Alys’s prior relationships may have been, how she feels about the children she has borne and cared for, or how she feels about her own body. My hope for future seasons of House of the Dragon is that the show’s creators will lean into this complexity and continue to shake the maester’s narrative until it rattles. The show certainly leaned into vivid, emotional engagement with childbirth, nursing, and pregnancy loss, which suggests that these aspects of Alys’ life will be treated with complexity and respect. Of course, there’s no childbirth or lactation without the sex that precedes it, and witches are often depicted as highly sexualized beings regardless of age - and so it’s to Alys’s reputation as an enchantress of men that we must now turn.