Game Of Thrones: 11 Most Unforgivable Cuts From The Books

11. Mirri Maz Duur's Full Speech

After five books of prophecies, plots, and increasingly unpronounceable names, we can look back at A Game of Thrones and realise how simple things once were. Granted, there were still plenty of fantastical elements with which we had to familiarise ourselves, but there was far more black and white morality in the first book than in the subsequent four. One of the most notable exceptions, however, is the character of Mirri Maz Duur. We had spent hundreds of pages watching Daenerys Targaryen grow from cowed younger sister and helpless wife to an assertive khaleesi with a son in her belly and a husband preparing to lead his Dothraki horde across the Narrow Sea to take the Seven Kingdoms for her; so, when the Lhazareen maegi Mirri Maz Duur tricks Dany into sacrificing the life of her unborn child to grant a comatose existence to Khal Drogo, it would have been easy to call her a villain and move on. But she kind of had a point. Khal Drogo and his warriors had assaulted, pillaged, plundered, enslaved, and/or murdered the innocent people of her town...and all because the Dothraki needed to accumulate enough wealth to fund the journey to Westeros. "When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and the mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then will return , and not before," says Mirri Maz Duur...and we realise that Daenerys Stormborn will in fact remain the last Targaryen. The spiteful maegi is admittedly not the most reliable source of information, but the important bit to take away is that Dany believes her. It's pretty powerful. Unfortunately, the gravitas of the scene in the book is lessened by its counterpart in the show, as seen in the Season 1 episode "Fire and Blood." While Mirri Maz Duur does mention the sun, the seas, and the mountains, she fails to include Daenerys' "womb quickening" as one of the impossible terms.