Game of Thrones, Dealing with White Walkers…

Game of Thrones is back, and if you are anything like one particular boss here at DesignSpark, you woke up at silly o’clock to watch the first episode, or if you are relatively sane, you saw it at normal earth time, for the UK at least. It’s been away from my TV for too long!

White Walkers…those in the know will be well aware of these nasty fellows that reside way beyond the giant ice wall that separates the seven kingdoms of Westeros from the north.  They are a terrifying bunch, a pasty lumpy looking white coloured glowing blue eyed breed, who steal Wildling babies for fun and also have the ability to raise the dead, handy when your vast army consists of dead people! A bit like those dead chaps from The Walking Dead, but far faster, tougher and meaner, but equally as smelly.

This ice wall is reportedly 300 miles long and 700 feet high, a considerable effort to construct one would imagine, and done so for a good reason…to keep the White Walkers out and to a lesser degree the Wildlings who also reside on the colder side of that wall. Wildings are just normal people...just a bit wilder than most. Legend has it the wall is over 8000 years old, built using dodgy cranes, giants and a lot of magic by the old ancestors of Westeros after a particularly nasty war with these White Walker chaps. They are often said to be a legend in more modern Westeros times, behind every legend, however, is a grain of truth.

All those years ago someone who was handy with a knapping stone fashioned blades for spears and daggers from a substance known as Dragonglass, or Obsidian to us laymen. Dragonglass is a naturally occurring volcanic glass, very hard and very brittle and when it fractures, those edges are immensely sharp. It also turns out, handily enough, that Dragonglass blades are very useful for killing White Walkers….something Samwell Tarly found out for himself whilst defending his love from the ravages of nasty White Walker. He had found a bundle of these Dragonglass blades on a previous excursion, but had little idea of their future worth, it was more by accident that he found their intended purpose, luckily.

On our side of the imagination, Obsidian blades are used in surgery, producing a cutting edge many times finer than any surgical steel. Rivalling diamond in the fineness of its edge at 30 angstroms, a unit of measurement equal to one hundred millionth of a centimetre, for example, most household razor blades are 300-600 angstroms. Obsidian can cut it with the sharpest materials nano-technology can produce, compared under a microscope to a surgical steel scalpel blade. Obsidian cleaves tissue in a fine and continuous edge, being 100 to 500 times sharper than steel, whereas a scalpel incision looks like the results of a chainsaw.

The resultant healing of an incision made with Obsidian is different too, with a very noticeable difference in the reduction of scar tissue and with accelerated healing. Great care must be taken when using these scalpels are the there is no ‘bite’ as if found with the steel variety, you literally would not know you have cut yourself they are that sharp! 

The only downside is their brittleness when lateral forces are used, so great care must be used. Errett Callahan, an expert knapper and archaeologist, makes these blades for surgical, use, you can read more about him here.

Back over to Westeros, you can begin to see the advantages of using Dragonglass against those pesky White Walkers, maybe the sharpness of that edge, mixed with a dose of magic of some kind is what makes the difference. Either way, with a bit of Valyrian steel (the only other thing known to kill White Walkers) by your side as well, you stand a better chance of fighting off those blue eyed bad guys, with their every expanding army of the dead!

We may not be dealing with Dragonglass scalpels on a commercial basis anytime soon, but if you do have a need for some regular steel scalpel blade implements, look no further! It always nice to know, however, that should the need arise, at the very least we have a head start in dealing with those nasty looking White Walkers should they ever turn up on a day trip from the Artic.