How does the "dragonglass+steel=dragonsteel" theory work?

[falcotron]

6 hours ago, White Ravens said:

Or maybe some exotic source for the carbon which needs to bond with the iron to create steel?

The one thing Europeans ever found out about Damascus steel was that they couldn't be taught to make it because it required an exotic source of carbon. So that idea has been used in other fantasy stories before. Which is probably why people are looking for something like that here.

The problem is that dragonglass doesn't work, because it's not a carbon source.

Weirwood faces would be a great carbon source if GRRM wanted one. Certainly more interesting than avaram fibers, restharrow extract, and the other "magical" stuff used in our world, which were only ever considered magical because of their steel connection. And they're even more connected to the Children than dragonglass is.

[BRANDON GREYSTARK]

It's magic .

[falcotron]

4 minutes ago, BRANDON GREYSTARK said:

It's magic .

Yes, thank you. We don't need explanations for anything. Why do we even have a forum?

[Mikkel]

1 hour ago, falcotron said:

Why do we even have a forum?

Forum was created by magic too, duh!

[falcotron]

6 minutes ago, Mikkel said:

Forum was created by magic too, duh!

Wait, I have a theory.

You know how the forum sometimes works perfectly, while sometimes it keeps going down and coming back up and returning errors? Most people assume this is because of the flood of people coming by every time an episode of a certain TV show airs, but how do we know it isn't because the magic is weakening?

Sure, there is still a correlation to explain, but that's easy—everyone knows the TV show kills some of the magic. But other are other causes for magic waxing and waning, which explains why the forum sometimes has problems in, say, the middle of December.

Can someone yell at me for derailing my own thread now? Thanks.

[Kytheros]

Whatever the solution is, we know magic is significantly involved in the process. Plus, I don't expect GRRM to have heavily invested into researching metallurgy when he came up with dragonsteel/valyrian steel. They're 'magical' metals, like mithral or adamantium. They do not, strictly speaking, have to conform to real-world metallurgy and materials sciences.

 

Carbon source for dragonsteel could be dragon feces.

 

/dives for cover

[Damon_Tor]

5 minutes ago, Kytheros said:

They're 'magical' metals, like mithral or adamantium. They do not, strictly speaking, have to conform to real-world metallurgy and materials sciences.

Of course this is the same author who went on a rant about how dragons can have only four limbs. I think it's pretty likely that he generally uses scientific principles whenever possible.

[Ser Petyr Parker]

2 hours ago, Damon_Tor said:

Of course this is the same author who went on a rant about how dragons can have only four limbs. I think it's pretty likely that he generally uses scientific principles whenever possible.

It's science as long as it's not magic!

[White Ravens]

10 hours ago, falcotron said:

Yes, definitely.

In fact, we already know that dragonglass, just like real-world obsidian, sometimes comes with metallic impurities that give it vibrant colors instead of being black, and it's not hard to imagine that this could change the magical properties of dragonglass, or of its glass-candle flame.

But it's still not going to make something that can be used as a good sword.

4

Good point about the colours of the dragonglass.  There are three black candles and one green one at the Citadel.  Perhaps the green one has a different function?

Quote

Yes, it's certainly possible that the only connection is that dragonfire is used—or is just believed by ignorant commoners to be used—in some stage of the process, so it ended up as part of the name.

And I may be wasting my time trying to come up with better theories to explain the non-problem than the bad theory that I found, when the right thing to do is leave the non-problem as a non-problem… But I do really like my idea of a forge burning with glass candle flame, even if it's ultimately an unmotivated crackpot.

2

Yeah, that does feel like crackpot.  How big of a glass candle would you need? 

When Sam meets Marwyn in Feast it is stated that the flame of the glass candle is intensely bright and casts a queer light on the room which renders colours more intense and it is unwavering and unaffected by air movement in the room.  I can't find a reference to support it but my impression was that it doesn't give off any heat.  Maybe the flame is somewhere else and Sam sees a representation of it much like a hologram.    

[Hedera of the Helix]

On 9/2/2017 at 5:45 PM, falcotron said:

The one question is: How do you make steel with dragonglass? 

Every version I've seen here or elsewhere that answers that question just says "You could use obsidian as the source of carbon for making steel". But that makes no sense. First, obsidian is not made of carbon, it's glass—silicon dioxide. Sure, it has small amounts of trace impurities, some of which are molecules with carbon in them, but that's true for almost anything; there's more carbon in seawater. And from a storytelling point of view, making dragonsteel use a mineral instead of living matter like real-world steel seems to make it less fantastic rather than more—why not the face of a weirwood, or the genitals of a eunuch?***

The only alternative I've heard is that it's about strengthening dragonglass with iron rather than vice versa. But that makes even less sense. You can't forge obsidian and work it like an iron alloy.

So, does anyone have an explanation somewhere for how you'd use dragonglass as a carbon source, or some different explanation for how dragonglass could be part of the process of dragonsteel? The rest of the theory is so interesting that I'd hate to just dismiss is because nobody's answered this gap (or, worse, because someone did, but I'm too stupid to find it in a search).

---

*  When else has GRRM ever given us a mystery and then had someone guess the answer in the next line and be right?

** I can see why a weapon with all the advantages of a steel sword (which was ahead of its time in the late bronze age) but also all the magical properties of obsidian weapons and other obsidian tools like glass candles would be useful in the Battle for the Dawn. And how it fits the Lightbringer story. And why it makes sense that the Last Hero's quest for the Children could lead to them giving him the secret of this magic/technology. And how you could give someone steel forging knowledge without the whole iron age technology complex (as long as they had meteoric iron to work with—and Dawn implies that isn't implausible). And so on.

*** Or, if you like "Lightbringer is the first dragonsteel sword", Nissa Nissa's heart—using it at the start of the process as the source of carbon, instead of at the end, to quench the sword, which the legend then changes for poetic reasons.

Silicon is used to make steel.

Since obsidian is comprised largely of silicon dioxide, perhaps the dragonfire/magic refines the silicon dioxide back to it's pure silicon state.  Silicon is a metalloid that can dissolve into the iron during the steel-making process. 

Then their Valyrian magic polymerizes the silicon, iron ore, carbon and whatever else is added, giving birth to a super-refined steel that can hold the finest edge.

Surgical tools made from obsidian have a superfine flawless cutting edge that is incomparable. Even the finest stainless steel surgical edge is thicker and looks irregular under a microscope.  

The source of the silicon for the Valyrian steel mattered - it had to be derived from dragonglass. It not only dissolved into the iron, it helped refine the steel per the first link. So if the Valyrians were able to fuse the two together with their magical metalsmithing, it's no wonder the blades were so coveted. 

 

[Lady Blizzardborn]

20 hours ago, Damon_Tor said:

you're assuming it was meant to be a mystery. I don't think it was. A record that predates valyria wouldn't call it valyrian steel, so it had to call it something different.

there's still a mystery; what lost secret allows for the creation of the alloy? The existence of a second mystery metal seems pointless. Yes there's Dawn, which seems to be its own kind of thing, but I'm not convinced.

The problem with dragonsteel being the same as VS is that there is no way someone invented it 4,000 years before Valyria became a power and then just lost the recipe. Everybody would have wanted one of those swords, in case the Others came back, if not for the massive cool factor. 

The only way that works is if the sacrifice required to make it was so incomprehensibly huge (more than just some water, a lion, and one woman) that no one was willing to do it again, or the man who invented it wasn't willing to share the recipe...or maybe he died. I guess if he was the only one who knew, and he died, it could have taken people 4,000 years of experimenting to figure it out.

But the question remains, why would people writing about it hundreds of years after the fact, when there are no dragons in Westeros, refer to it as dragonsteel? The character of Azor Ahai is Asshai'i. The Westerosi version is the Last Hero. Unless the CotF were hiding a dragon somewhere, LH did not make anything via dragonfire. That only leaves us other things with dragon in the name, like dragonglass, and dragonbone.

[falcotron]

55 minutes ago, Lady Blizzardborn said:

The problem with dragonsteel being the same as VS is that there is no way someone invented it 4,000 years before Valyria became a power and then just lost the recipe.

I think you're right here, but to play devil's advocate:

It could well be some kind of unique one-time event. Nobody's going to forget Dany's recipe for birthing dragons, but that doesn't mean anyone can repeat it.

In fact, even without the recipe being unreproducible because magic:

If the Children taught the Last Hero how to make dragonsteel, and gave him a limited stash of refined iron, but didn't teach him how to smelt more iron, once he used up that stash making weapons for the war, the recipe would be useless for millennia. And you can see why the Children might have wanted it that way. (Or, of course, if dragonsteel is what Dawn is, the stash would be inherently limited to the meteoric iron in the falling star, and the Children didn't teach him to smelt iron because they didn't know how in the first place.)

55 minutes ago, Lady Blizzardborn said:

But the question remains, why would people writing about it hundreds of years after the fact, when there are no dragons in Westeros, refer to it as dragonsteel? The character of Azor Ahai is Asshai'i. The Westerosi version is the Last Hero. Unless the CotF were hiding a dragon somewhere, LH did not make anything via dragonfire. That only leaves us other things with dragon in the name, like dragonglass, and dragonbone.

To continue playing devil's advocate, why does dragonglass have "dragon" in the name if it was named thousands of years before there were dragons in Westeros?

While we're at it, these clearly aren't the Old Tongue names for these things, but Common translations of them, and the Common tongue didn't come to Westeros until well after the rise of Valyria and their dragons.

I don't want to get too deep into fantasy linguistics here (especially since we know GRRM didn't want to get deep into them…), but imagine this scenario:

The First Men have legends of a special kind of metal called "fragglerock" in their language. It just means what dragonsteel means, but it's obviously built from two ancient roots that mean magic fire, and iron.

An Andal who's somewhat bilingual in the Old Tongue hears the legend, and doesn't know the word "fragglerock", but he knows the First Men call dragonglass "fragglegorg", dragonfire "fragglemuppet", and dragons "fragglesprocket", and that they call steel "indierock", steel swords "rockanroll", etc. The pattern isn't perfect—for some reason, they call the Andals' steel forges "ebm" instead of something with "rock" in—but it's good enough for even a poorly-educated guy to figure out that the obvious way to translate "fragglerock" to Common is "dragonsteel". And that sticks. (Actually, it doesn't even have to stick that well, given that it only appears in one old record we know of that's survived to this day, and isn't familiar to educated modern Common speakers like Sam…)

Again, despite all this, I think you're right that LH did not have a dragon available, and if AA!=LH neither did AA, and LH's story probably isn't about learning the secrets of Valyrian steel from the Children and then losing them right after the war.

[falcotron]

2 hours ago, Hedera of the Helix said:

Silicon is used to make steel.

Silica is used to make some modern steels, especially steels made for electrical work or building skyscrapers. But those are very different from traditional sword steels. In particular, Wootz steel/Damascus steel swords did not use a source of silica—Faraday first positing that and then debunking it is famous as one of the starting points of modern metallurgy.

In the past couple of decades, people have actually come up with recipes for "super spring steels" that can make swords at least as good as traditional spring steels in every way while being far more resilient and easier to work, which is pretty cool, and they do use a relatively high silica content. But, unless GRRM heard about them a few years ahead of the rest of the internet, that can't be what inspired him.

[Kytheros]

2 hours ago, Lady Blizzardborn said:

The problem with dragonsteel being the same as VS is that there is no way someone invented it 4,000 years before Valyria became a power and then just lost the recipe. Everybody would have wanted one of those swords, in case the Others came back, if not for the massive cool factor. 

The only way that works is if the sacrifice required to make it was so incomprehensibly huge (more than just some water, a lion, and one woman) that no one was willing to do it again, or the man who invented it wasn't willing to share the recipe...or maybe he died. I guess if he was the only one who knew, and he died, it could have taken people 4,000 years of experimenting to figure it out.

But the question remains, why would people writing about it hundreds of years after the fact, when there are no dragons in Westeros, refer to it as dragonsteel? The character of Azor Ahai is Asshai'i. The Westerosi version is the Last Hero. Unless the CotF were hiding a dragon somewhere, LH did not make anything via dragonfire. That only leaves us other things with dragon in the name, like dragonglass, and dragonbone.

Dragonbone is actually dragon bone - meaning, the endoskeletal material of dragons.

[Lady Blizzardborn]

14 minutes ago, Kytheros said:

Dragonbone is actually dragon bone - meaning, the endoskeletal material of dragons.

I'm aware of that, as everyone who has read AGOT should be.

[Kytheros]

8 minutes ago, Lady Blizzardborn said:

I'm aware of that, as everyone who has read AGOT should be.

Apologies, it seemed like you were associating dragonbone with dragonglass - in a category of things with "dragon" in their names, but not actually of/from dragons.

[Lady Blizzardborn]

10 minutes ago, Kytheros said:

Apologies, it seemed like you were associating dragonbone with dragonglass - in a category of things with "dragon" in their names, but not actually of/from dragons.

No biggie. 

[Romaine3]

Dragonglass aka obsidian can hold an extremely sharp edge. When Cortez conquered the Aztecs, written accounts state that with their obsidian weapons, Aztecs could decapitate a horse with a single blow. That's pretty damn sharp!

Although it can be napped into a blade that is sharper than a razor, dragonglass is brittle. How would you combine it with the steel anyway? Get some uniformly sized steel bars and make a sandwich of steel, dragonglass, steel, dragonglass, steel, etc. then weld it all together into a billet of amalgamated steel/dragonglass?

That method doesn't seem to make a believer out of me. Unless there were magical incantations of some sort that you chanted to bind the steel and dragonglass together during the welding part.

Maybe you can crush the dragonglass into a fine powder and coat each bar of steel in the powder, then weld your billet and chant your incantations. 

I dunno, what do y'all think?

[falcotron]

1 hour ago, Romaine3 said:

Dragonglass aka obsidian can hold an extremely sharp edge. When Cortez conquered the Aztecs, written accounts state that with their obsidian weapons, Aztecs could decapitate a horse with a single blow. That's pretty damn sharp!I dunno, what do y'all think?

Well, there is one obvious way to make an obsidian sword: make a crappy sword with lots of notches in it, and fit sharpened shards of obsidian into the notches (replacing them between battles as they shatter).

If probably wouldn't be any more effective offensively than the Aztec macuahuitl (which is the same idea but with a wooden club instead of a metal sword), but it would presumably be a lot better for parrying enemy swords.

But anyway, although it might be a useful weapon, I don't think you'd call it "dragonsteel". (Especially since I don't think you'd want the base to be steel—medium-soft bronze would be good enough for parrying, and a lot easier to embed the blades in.)

[Romaine3]

26 minutes ago, falcotron said:

But anyway, although it might be a useful weapon, I don't think you'd call it "dragonsteel". (Especially since I don't think you'd want the base to be steel—medium-soft bronze would be good enough for parrying, and a lot easier to embed the blades in.)

Nope, that wouldn't be dragonsteel. You know how some bladesmiths fuse metals like gold into their blades for decorative purposes? How is that done any idea? And what did you think about the dipping the steel into dragonglass powder part of my last post? Wouldn't it be absorbed into the steel that way after heating the billet in the forge?