This really didn’t seem like enough people to me, so I did the math. It would take 124 minimum people harvested to make roughly one pound of iron. You take the iron and turn it into steel, which depending on the heating processes and alloying metals (if any) were added there could be a margin of change; for the sake of argument let’s say the metallurgy stays a 1:1. My sword of choice would be an Ulfbert, which is about 4 pounds of metal. Without going down the rabbit hole of smithing and sword type vairiables it would take around 500 people to forge a sword from the blood of your enemies. Which for some reason still doesn’t seem like enough.
Okay serious question right here: how many swords will we get if we used every person in the world? Like really, i’m curious can someone do the maths for me?
If you wanted to use every single person in the world, ~7.6 billion, to make as many swords as you can you’d end up with approximately fifteen million two thousand Swords.
This frustrates me as a blacksmith because these numbers are so rough -I badly want to get into the technical variables and calculate out exactly how much of everything a human body contains, how much loss there would be per individual extracting process, and then how much iron loss there would be upon refinement processing. Also the body contains things like chromium (which is used to alloy stainless steel; not my first choice for sword metal because the molecules tend to be a bit big but I mean. The body has trace amounts of a shitload other metals. Like zinc, which is used for galvanizing. Not only could you have a sword forged from the blood of your enemies you could galvenize it in some of your other enemies. Sure, it would come off when you sharpened it, which is not functional or practical at all -but the possibilities. The possibilities are endless. I digress.)
Also I’m talking about making an Ulfberht, which is around a meter long:
My second choices would either be a Spatha or Claymore.
If you were to make all Spathas, it would come out to 38 million. A smaller sword, a but light and dexterous infantry sword.
If you made all Claymores, also Infantry and coming in at over 5 pounds of metal alone, reaching whopping a meter and a half in length (4.5 feet) it would be roughly 12 million swords.
I did some more calculations… ok so the average human is about 3.5 grams of iron, which is not a lot to work with. But in terms of usefulness and to put it into perspective: the average human is less that 1/600 the weight of your phone in iron.
I’d name it Literally, short for “Literally Forged From the Blood of My Enemies”
Modern Life is Rubbish 