In the cold open to Sunday's season premiere of Game of Thrones, patriarch and cold-hearted tactical mastermind Tywin Lannister personally oversees the work of one of the best blacksmiths in the kingdom. The task at hand: melting down the broadsword Ice, property of the now-dispatched Eddard Stark, to forge two new blades for the Lannisters.

Besides the obvious metaphorical value of melting down your foe's weapon to make it your own, there's another driver behind Lord Tywin's action: Ice is one of the few remaining swords in the Game of Thrones universe known to be made of Valyrian steel, a mystical material that makes the best weapons around. But the secret of making this alloy has been lost to the ages. Only a handful of smiths in Westeros know how to reshape the material.

This brings up an important question: In the real world, can you just melt and reforge a steel alloy without losing the properties that make it great?

Sort of. I put the question to Burt Foster, a Virginia bladesmith whom PopMech profiled in 2009. Foster says the closest real-life analogue to Valyrian steel is Damascus steel, a material that allowed smiths of the Middle East to produce weapons of unrivaled strength and cutting ability. The method of making that material was lost over the centuries, and modern scientists have been trying to sort it out. Recent studies have highlighted the importance of impurities in the material and even suggested that the method of the Middle Eastern smiths actually produced carbon nanotubes that endow the steel with some of its strength. But there's something more, Foster says:

"The thing that makes Damascus steel unique is that it's not a homogenous steel," he says. "It is composed of layers of two or more different steels that are fused together, but where each layer retains its individual properties. Japanese swords are made from a similar process. If that steel were actually melted it would lose that layered quality and so would lose something that couldn't be gotten back."

According to Foster, this wouldn't have been an issue if Tywin Lannister had simply reshaped Ice into a new sword rather than reforging it into a pair of blades.

"Generally there's no reason to melt anything down," he says. "The beauty of forging is that when the steel is hot, it is able to be shaped into something else. So technically the smith could reforge the old blades into new blades and the steel would retain all of its original potential (assuming it was heat-treated again)."

Of course, author George R. R. Martin's land is a fantasy world, and so whatever component makes Valyrian steel such a marvelous alloy doesn't rely on plaid old materials science. Carry on, black magic blacksmith.

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