What followed wasn’t entirely dissimilar to an old-timey presidential convention: Aspiring High Kings give a stump speech (often some variation of “Let’s kill these people and steal their stuff”) and then present the crowd with a gift symbolizing their candidacy. According to tradition, any captain could put their name forward at a kingsmoot, as long as they were backed by three champions.
The kingsmoot was the invention of an ancient priest, Galon Whitestaff, who decreed that Ironborn should not make war on each other, thus unfiying the fractious archipelago into a single kingdom ruled by a single monarch. (A few women have served as ships’ captains throughout Ironborn history, but it’s unclear whether any of them ever participated in a kingsmoot.) But then again, you could say the same thing about early American democracy, so who are we to judge, really? Of course, it’s worth noting off the bat the kingsmoot isn’t true democracy: Only ships’ captains can take part, which mean no commoners, no thralls, and probably no women. What’s Next for Jon Snow on Game of Thrones? These gatherings take place after the death of the king of the Iron Islands - or when everyone agrees the current king is so terrible they need a new one - but they only be called by the drowned priests, the itinerant preachers who spread the good word of that Lovecraftian god throughout the islands. The practice started thousands of years before the events of Game of Thrones, when the petty kings of each island would come together in a great council to choose the next High King of the Iron Islands. The Ironborn are terrible in almost every way that people can be terrible.Īnd yet, despite all this, they’re also the only people in Westeros with a cultural legacy of democracy: The kingsmoot, which, as the priest of the Drowned God informed Yara Greyjoy Sunday night, is the process by which the Ironborn choose their kings.
The Ironborn look down on anyone who does any actual work, or buys anything with money real men, they say, pay the iron price for what they want - which is to say, they take it from someone who’s weaker than them. Their tradition of taking “salt wives” is just a polite name for a crude form of sexual slavery, and they’re also the only people in Westeros to practice plain-old slavery, too, in the form of the thralls who live and die mining the ore that gives the islands their name. The Ironborn worship the culture of the “old way,” a time when they were free to terrorize the western coast of the Seven Kingdoms, and they continue to rape and pillage wherever they can get away with it. Yes, the social mores of a fantasy feudal society make nearly everyone on Game of Thrones an asshole, but even by the standards of their time and place, the residents of the Iron Islands stand out in Westeros for their moral monstrousness.
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