House Hoare of Orkmont

Drowned priests remembered Harrag Hoare as the model of a king raised by a kingsmoot — Aeron Damphair was still preaching the example centuries later. Harrag sailed his longships against the coasts of the northern king Theon Stark, seized the Stony Shore, and put the Wolfswood to the torch.

His son Ravos inherited the taste for raiding but not his father's luck: Theon Stark killed him himself. Harrag's grandson, Erich the Eagle, kept harrying the northmen now and then, though never with the same force as the early years.

Under Qhored Hoare the ironborn's reach went further than it ever had before or since: wherever a man could smell salt or hear the surf, so the saying went, that land was his. Taken literally the claim falls apart — neither Oldtown nor Lannisport was ever ironborn — but even as exaggeration it shows how far the legend traveled, with the Reach entering the story as a conquest once thought possible.

After Qhored the kingdom could only shrink. Bear Island was lost in a wrestling match against Rodrik Stark, who gave it to the Mormonts, and what remained of the Hoare domain narrowed down to the islands themselves and a strip of coast in the riverlands.

When the Andals crossed the narrow sea, the Hoares switched sides: they allied with them, with the Orkwoods, the Drumms and the Greyjoys, to bring down King Rognar II Greyiron. Legend has it the ironborn danced the finger dance to choose their new king and the luck fell on Harras Hoare; another version, less poetic, says Harras simply married the daughter of an Andal warlord and took the crown that way.

Whichever it was, the marriage cost his descendants dearly: the drowned men and several rival lords never forgave that 'Andal stain' — an outside wife, the Faith of the Seven inside the court — and held it against every Hoare king who followed.

After Harras came a run of kings whose nicknames left little to guess: Wulfgar the Widowmaker, Horgan Priestkiller, Fergon the Fierce, Othgar I Bloodless, Othgar II, and Craghorn Redsmile. None of them fully erased the doubt hanging over Harras's blood.

That line ended with three kings in a row named Harmund, each weaker than the last; the third was overthrown by his own brother, Hagon the Heartless. By then House Lannister had already sent its bannermen to crush the ironborn, and Castle Hoare was left in ruins.

The ironborn answered that defeat with a new expansion: they stripped the Storm Kings of all their riverlands, and their kings began styling themselves Kings of the Isles and the Rivers. Harren the Black wanted a castle to match the title and ordered Harrenhal built beside the God's Eye, far from the sea that had made his ancestors rich and strong.

The work took forty years to finish, and it was finished the very day Aegon Targaryen and his sisters landed in Westeros. Aegon burned the castle with Harren and his sons still inside it, and with them House Hoare went out entirely. Harren's brother, by then Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, kept his vows even after his whole family ceased to exist.

Harren's blood did not vanish entirely: at the kingsmoot of 300 AC, Tarle the Thrice-Drowned argued that Lord Maron Volmark, descended from Harren the Black through his mother, should be the new king of the Iron Islands.