Forging the Blade of Black Vengeance

Oh Ethan.

This isn’t something I’ve ever considered, and usually the phrase is “quenched in the blood of my enemies” but I enjoy a good jaunt down the theoretical forging of blades, so let’s do some math.

There is about 5 grams of iron in an average male body. The average sword is between 1-2kg of iron (average being very loosely defined here) and so we can use 1.5kg as our mean for discussion. Thus, we need 1500 grams of iron.  So, the numbers would totally work if that were the only figure we were looking at:

5 grams (per enemy) x 300 (enemies) = 1500 grams

However, that’s not how biology works. Some of that 5 grams of iron is distributed in bone marrow, tissues, etc. This means that because extracting from other area than blood is tricky at best, and doesn’t meet the phrasing’s criteria, we need to work from some different numbers. We have to go by how much iron there is in blood—about .5 grams per liter. The average male has 4.7 liters of blood.

Now, based on this, we can really get to the number of “enemies” we need in order to forge a sword made from their blood.

We still need our 1500 grams of iron, which means we'll require 3000 liters of blood. If we allow for full exsanguination of a body:

4.7 liters of blood x .5 grams = 2.35 grams per enemy (GPE)

1500 / 2.35 GPE = 638.29 (enemies)

Hey Bob, I'm gonna need some more blood over here!

We'll need the blood of 639 men in order to forge our blade.

Full exsanguination isn’t actually going to be possible, and we haven’t accounted for any loss of material in the forge process either. To be safe, we're looking more like 1,000 enemies to get the blood we need.

Although, by the time we get half-way, unless our last name is Targaryan, we should be pretty well revenged.

I don't know how "neat" this is . . . in fact it sounds quite messy.