Who Was This Woman? Finding a Westerosi Witch

Sometimes, characters decide to take up residence inside my head for lengthy periods of time. Sometimes they’re real historical figures, sometimes entirely fictional, and they are frequently uninvited or at least unexpected. It’s a subtly different experience from the arrival of characters I’m writing in my own original work, or that I’m creating onstage in service of a particular dramatic text and a director’s vision. These processes can overlap, of course, but the unbidden arrival of some especially loud, charismatic, and demanding character constitutes its own particular brand of creative chaos, one I’ve never truly considered resisting. It’s a sign that things are about to get interesting, that an obsession is likely imminent, and that I’m gonna have to make some stuff, even if I have no idea what. The characters who get under my skin like this are forces to be reckoned with; gifts bearing strange fruit, wild and never particularly biddable. Few have been wilder or less biddable than Alys Rivers. 

It might at first seem odd that a character who is described so little and so enigmatically in the source material (in this case, Martin’s Fire and Blood) should spend so much time running riot inside my head. For me, though, this makes perfect sense: I’ve spent much of my career portraying real women from history who are as tenuously documented in real-world history as Alys is in the maester’s accounts. As I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog, the lives of the underprivileged, including of course non-elite women, are usually poorly attested to in written histories. Women often entered the historical record by virtue of misbehavior and chance, and when setting out to portray long-dead women of whom too little is known, the actor and historic interpreter has to take up the scraps of the historical record and draw from there. It’s like pulling on loose threads in an old coat, drawing out strands of color to work with. In this way, although Alys was an agitating personality to live with for months at a time, she was also no different than real or composite historical characters I’ve portrayed over the years. 

One of our first shots shows Alys’s hands up close, including a ring made out of a handmade iron nail; cold iron is a seen as apotropaic (counter-magical) in many cultures, and I imagined that someone living at Harrenhal and experiencing visions might feel the need to keep some cold iron about their person. I hadn’t really intended to show her hands up close, but most of these shots were not pre-planned; the shoot was an intuitive process between me and the photographer. Undertaking this sort of project obviously requires the right sort of photographer, and Fae Phoenix Photography is the only collaborator I could ever imagine entrusting with Alys, thanks to their understanding of landscape, magic, and storytelling. I can’t think of anyone else to whom I could say “This character is Morgan Le Fay slowly becoming Baba Yaga”  or “If this woman were a tree, she’d be a yew tree” while knowing that I am entirely understood. We shot both sections in more-or-less chronological order at two local nature reserves, wandering through the woods and finding the right spots to interact with the landscape and the light, which was blessedly stunning. There was a brush fire along the river a couple of weeks before the shoot, providing a section of Vhagar-scorched Riverlands in which to work, with no hint of the busy road and cars racing along right behind us. The watery, woodsy, rocky landscape of southern New England is very much as I imagine the Riverlands to be, and I took special delight in letting a landscape that I deeply love play its own role.  

When it came to making my vision of Alys physical, I decided not to build new costumes for the purpose, and instead turned to my existing closet of historical clothing and costumes to find her image. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the result, but I was a little startled by how well it worked on multiple levels. Alys ended up wearing primarily early 17th century clothing that I constructed for a one-woman show in which I depicted none other than iconic Mayflower passenger Priscilla Mullins Alden. I’m pretty sure that the only thing these women would have in common is a high pregnancy rate, hard work, and absent menfolk, but Priscilla’s base layer is the same as that of any non-elite Englishwoman of her time (the red skirt was especially common), and is just as practical for Westerosi smallfolk. The black gown that Alys wears as a widow would have been among a 17th century Englishwoman’s best clothes; good black fabric was expensive, and associated with status and dignity. In the mind’s eye of 16th and 17th century people, witches wore clothes much like these, because witches dressed as most women did - and later generations based their stereotype of “witch clothes” on this earlier image, right down to the high-crowned hat! So yes, Alys is wearing the ancestor of the black dress you might more readily associate with the Wicked Witch of the West. It also slips readily into the visual style set by Season One of House of the Dragon, which used some late 16th-early 17th century costume inspiration, and aspects of this style also look a bit…Targaryen. It’s mainly the shoulders, as well as the color, and this association dawned on me only after I chose the costume. If Alys is the widow she claims to be, she would have the right to be styled Dowager Princess Alys Targaryen at this point, so the association seems appropriate to her arc. Alys’s “witch queen” crown is made of weirwood branches, and potentially could be a wedding crown from which all the leaves have fallen, though it also resembles the antlered headdresses worn by the Green Men on the Isle of Faces, near her home at Harrenhal. It’s now hanging on the wall of my home office, looking uncomfortably like a prop from the first season of True Detective, which I suppose brings us full circle back to G.R.R.M.’s roots in Lovecraftian cosmic horror (as do the very Lovecraft country locations of the shoot). I also included a few items made by local craftspeople here in the Salem, Massachusetts, area: a black star-shaped ring (which I refer to as the Darkstar ring) by Hypnovamp Jewellery; a handmade whisk broom by Amuck Broom Company (a servant-witch should have a broom, no?),  and the “Original Sin” animist reliquary by Old Growth Alchemy Lab, containing apple seeds and a snakeskin. The worship of the old gods of Westeros is intensely animist, and I wanted to include this aspect of Riverlands history in Alys’s story. 

The star sapphire she wears at her throat is my own addition - there’s no hint of this in the book - but I’ve long had my own suspicions that this particular gemstone might not go to rest with its original owner. I wondered if Alys might make some use of it, not unlike Melisandre’s mysterious red gemstone in the main series. History of Westeros’ episode on Alys raised similar suspicions, and I decided the question was too juicy not to play with. The star sapphire seen here is a vintage imitation that is the exact size of a human eyeball (yes, I measured before purchasing). It’s another riff on a real-world historical fashion: the late 18th-early 19th century “lover’s eye” trend for gifting jeweled portraits of the beloved’s eye as a token of regard or a mourning memento. Is the star sapphire a particularly intense form of memento mori, an appropriately extra Targaryen love token, a dangerous magical talisman, or all three? You decide…