13
The King’s Justice
The Biology of a Gruesome Death
If you have seen the show, heard about the show, caught the show for 30 seconds while changing channels, or even thought of maybe possibly watching the show, you know that Game of Thrones is violent. There’s no point in dancing around it. Many viewers worry that the violence has shifted from being an integral part of the plot to being straight-up torture porn. Regardless of your feelings on this point, if you are reading this chapter, you are fully aware of how many unique and painful ways Game of Thrones can come up with to kill a person. If you are reading this chapter, please understand that I’m assuming you are interested in learning more about the reality of this fictional brutality and that there will be no holding back. It’s gonna get rough. After researching and writing this chapter, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the reality of these deaths has caused me more nightmares than all the shows and books combined—and that is saying something. There is something about contemplating the biological and physical reality of death that puts one in the condemned’s shoes (or noose) in a way a work of fiction never could. So, if you are ready for that, read on. Know that however bad this chapter makes you feel as a reader, it was way worse to write. Writing this chapter during long-haul flights has also gotten me more than a few questionable looks. If you want to make sure your seatmate won’t talk to you on a long flight, I highly recommend having a Google doc with a subsection titled “Beheading” open on your laptop.
Now, if you are looking for instructions on how to be resurrected after being stabbed, I’m sorry to say that this chapter will be of no help. Personally, I’m Team Lord Commander all the way, but as a scientist there’s not much I can do. (I suggest you ask the Red Woman.) You have been warned.
Beheading
There has been a lot of research into what exactly happens at the moment of death. Does the brain shut off the moment the heart does? Does it take some time for the brain to get the message that the heart has stopped? What can near-death experiences and the movie Flatliners really tell us about this? Researching the biology of a beheading is an excellent place to start exploring these questions that you probably didn’t know you had until now. In a beheading, the head is severed from the body by a blade of some sort. The questions I’m hoping to answer in this section are: How does the method of beheading change what is experienced by the person executed, and would you be aware of your own beheading after your head has been separated from your body? Anne Boleyn famously asked Henry VIII for a French executioner, who would use a sword instead of the traditional English axe. Was this worth it as a dying request? During the French Revolution, many people were said to have made facial movements after their head had left their body. Scientists even asked condemned prisoners if they would try and communicate after their decapitation. Were the movements just imagined by observers or were these people really able to comprehend the crowd cheering their death? How painful would this type of death be? The most traditional methods of beheading are the sword and the axe. Indeed, these are the two seen in Game of Thrones. It was believed that the sword was less painful and more effective than the axe. Considering their relative sharpness this would make some sense. It’s a very interesting physics problem and one better solved by looking at a method of beheading not shown in Game of Thrones: the guillotine.
Probably the most (in)famous method of beheading was the guillotine, developed by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin and harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt. Ironically, Guillotin first proposed the contraption that bears his name in a bid to end the death penalty altogether. He felt that the first step in doing away with it outright was to figure out how to administer it quickly and painlessly. It didn’t work. The guillotine was in use in France from 1792 until 1977. To give you some historical context, the last judicial execution by guillotine occurred a few months after the first Star Wars movie was released, the year that Atari hit the shelves, and the year you could buy your first Apple II computer. Jimmy Carter was president. It was not that long ago. When thinking about how painful it might be to be beheaded, I was curious about the likelihood of a headsman doing it in one blow. Would it be like Ned’s execution of the Night’s Watch deserter, or more like Theon’s botched beheading of Ser Rodrik Cassel? It is complicated to figure out the force needed to cut through a person’s neck since there isn’t a lot of useful data on the subject. This is why the guillotine might be a good place to start. Considering it was used about 30,000 times and was deemed to be very effective, it’s safe to assume that the force it provided was enough to comfortably, reliably, and repeatedly sever a head in one blow. As I’ll explain more fully in the section on hanging, tackling this problem head-on (get it? Head-on?) is easiest by looking at energy. Once we find the energy per unit area provided by the guillotine, we can make a pretty good estimate of how much force a headsman needs to apply.
When the guillotine blade is at the top of the structure, it’s about 2.2 m high. The blade itself weighs about 7 kg, which is not very heavy—it’s about the weight of the average Thanksgiving turkey. To add more heft to the blade and increase the energy, it would have when slicing a neck, a mouton, or weight, was added to the top. The whole contraption ended up weighing about 37 kg, or a little less than me without my head (OK, more like 50% of me). At the top of the guillotine, the blade has about 820 kJ of potential energy. Some of that is lost to friction on the way down and some is lost to the friction of cutting through the neck. The blade was angled to reduce the amount of friction experienced at one time so as not to slow the blade down too quickly; and if you’ve ever watched French chefs, you know they like slicing with their blade at an angle. When it comes to headsmen, however, it’s less about the amount of force applied by the executioner than their skill with an axe. The axe used by the English could be sharpened to the same thickness as a sword, so, assuming the executioner is strong enough, the axe should be more humane since it is heavier. An axe provides more energy per unit area than a sword. Unluckily for many Brits, the axe is much harder to wield and the headsman much less practiced. The average neck is narrow, but the back and the head are not. The executioner must land a blow on the narrowest part of the neck to have enough force to make it through the whole thing. As a blade moves through the neck, energy is lost to friction and mechanically breaking bonds. Once the potential energy is used up, the axe stops. If it hasn’t made it through the neck, the prisoner is in for a much worse day. Just as hanging was a practiced craft, so was beheading. The execution method of choice in England was hanging; beheading was reserved for the highborn. Hangmen would often moonlight as headsmen. The goal of hanging, however, was to keep the head firmly attached to the body, so a hangman did not always make a good headsman. It often took them three or more strokes to fully decapitate someone. In France, however, beheading was the preferred method of execution. Their swordsmen were able to aim correctly and sever heads in one blow.
What happens once the executioner finally severs a head? What is going on up there in the gray matter? For a brain to be conscious, it has to have enough oxygen for the neurons to send electrical impulses. I’ll go more into how neurons work and how to mess with them in the section on poisoning, but the key point is that when neurons are able to fire, a person may very well be aware of what’s going on. Some “experiments” were done during the French Revolution in which the condemned were asked to communicate with a scientist in the crowd after the fall of the blade. Many onlookers swore they saw signs of recognition on the disembodied faces. This was—and continues to be—a hotly debated topic. Ischemia is the technical term for loss of blood flow to the brain. Without constant blood flow, the potassium, sodium, and calcium channels cause excessive amounts of potassium to linger in the intercellular space between neurons and cause the neurons to retain too much potassium and chloride. In a human, the magic number for ischemia has long been thought to be 10 seconds; after that point, unconsciousness sets in.1 To know what that would be like, set a stopwatch for 10 seconds. Hit go and see how much you take in and think about in those 10 seconds. Kinda scary to think you might be conscious for that long after your head had been removed from your body. The time from loss of blood flow to the brain to unconsciousness was long theorized but not tested with modern equipment. (Imagine trying to get that past the institutional review board.) A group from the Netherlands decided to use their equipment and some lab rats to settle the debate about consciousness after beheading.2 Beheading via cervical spine dissection was long used as a way to euthanize rats no longer needed in experimentation, and was preferred over pharmacological euthanasia for experiments in which the brain needed to be studied. There was much debate as to whether or not this was a humane form of euthanasia, however. To test this, Clementina van Rijn hooked electrodes up to rats’ heads and measured the duration of significant electrical activity after the rats’ heads were severed. This was a surprisingly difficult paper for me to read; I had to take a break after contemplating the idea that the university machine shop had to build a rat-sized guillotine. They used the tiny terror to systematically cut off the rats’ heads and then measured the electrical signals in the brain. They found that it took about 2.7 seconds for brain activity to slow to a point that would indicate unconsciousness. During this time, the disembodied head seemed to be making a chewing motion. Scaling up to a human head, they estimate that someone would have about 7–10 seconds before they would lose consciousness. In discussing this section with others, I regularly heard people say, “If it was me, I’d probably be screaming,” or ask, “Did the heads in the French Revolution ever scream?” The answer is no, they did not. To make a noise, air from the lungs must pass through the vocal cords and out of the mouth. Once a head is removed, the lungs and the mouth are no longer connected, so it’s not possible to scream. I’ll leave it up to you to read the rest of this chapter and decide how scary death by beheading may be. After you read about burning at the stake, I think you would choose the sword.
A Golden Crown
Viserys’s death was certainly one of the most fitting in the series: in his dying moments, he finally got his golden crown. The idea of killing someone with molten metal has historical precedent; the Spanish Inquisition’s prosecutors were particularly fond of pouring molten metal down people’s throats. Before I get too far into this discussion, however, I need to address one glaring physics error in Viserys’s death scene. The melting point of gold is about 1064°C. The hottest a wood fire can get is about 585°C. Those who have read the section on dragon fire might have already figured this out. In reality, Viserys would more likely have died from being knocked out by the blow of the heavy gold being dumped on his head. I know this is a huge error, and in keeping with the theme of this book, I should stop here; however, I’m too interested in what would happen if gold were poured over someone’s head to stop now. I don’t think anyone would argue that molten gold dumped on your head will kill you, but the question is how exactly it would do that. What, exactly, would it say on Viserys’s death certificate? The options are suffocation due to his mouth and nose being blocked by gold, shock from having molten gold poured on his head, or the cooking of his brains. Since I think the most likely cause of death is brain cooking, I’m going to start by looking at how long it might take to boil a brain and see how that compares to other two possible causes of death.
I’m not the first to be interested in this topic (obviously). In 2003, a group of pathologists in Amsterdam approached this question experimentally by taking a cow larynx (not one attached to a cow; rather, one that a dead cow was no longer using), covering one end with tissue, and pouring molten lead at a temperature of 450°C down the other end. The steam produced immediately blew out the tissue paper at the other end.3 Seeing as steam seems to be the most pressing issue, I’m going to look at how long it might take for a brain to boil if it is heated by molten gold poured over the skull. To answer this there are two things to look at: the energy required to boil the water in the brain and how fast that energy can be transferred through the skull. The brain weighs roughly 1.4 kg and comprises 73% water, which means the average brain holds about 1 kg of water. This makes the math very easy. There are two factors involved in boiling: First, the temperature needed to raise the substance to its boiling point. In the case of water that is 100°C. Then, energy is needed for the actual boiling. It takes a lot of energy for a substance to change physical state; in this case, from liquid to gas. (Chapter 2 goes into more detail about the physics of this as it relates to the Wall.) The unit of energy is the joule, but for this example it’s a bit more practical to use kilojoules (kJ). It takes 2260 kJ to change a kilogram (kg) of water to steam. To find out how much energy is needed to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 63°C (body temperature is 37°C) the equation to use is the specific heat formula,
,
where Q is energy in kilojoules, m is the mass in kilograms, ΔT is the change in temperature, and c is a constant that’s different for each material and indicates how easy it is to heat something up. Plugging everything in, we get that it takes roughly 268 kJ to warm the brain up to the boiling point. Adding the two numbers, we get that it takes about 2528 kJ to boil all the water in the human brain.
To figure out how long it would take to boil the brain, we need to determine how quickly heat can be transferred from the molten gold through the skull to the brain. This is a very rudimentary look at this calculation. Heat transfer from the outside of the brain to the inside of the brain will be different from the transfer of heat from the gold through the skull, and there will some additional time associated with heat moving from the outside of the brain to the inside, so this number will only be a really rough estimate. However, it will give us enough of a handle on the time frame to see if boiling the brain will take less time than, say, suffocation. The equation that determines how quickly heat transfers through something like bone is pretty similar to the equation that tells us how quickly something heats up:
,
where 
is the energy delivered per second; k is a constant that indicates how quickly energy moves through a given material (in this case, bone); A is the surface area in square meters (in this case, the surface area of the skull); ΔT is the difference in temperature between the two materials (in this case, 1027°C, the difference between the temperature of molten gold and body temperature); and d is the thickness through which the heat is traveling in meters. The thickness of the average male skull is 7.1 mm, or 0.007 m.4 The surface area of the skull is 0.98 m2, according to a group that measured many different skulls.5 The constant, k, was frighteningly easy to find and ranges between 0.410 and 0.630, so I’ll assume 0.5. Taken together, we find that bone transfers about 718 kJ/s to the brain. Looking back at how much energy is needed to make a brain boil, we can estimate that it takes roughly 3.5 seconds to fully boil a human male brain.
Again, this is really just an order of magnitude estimation of the problem and not a precise number, but it’s clear we’re talking seconds and not minutes. It would take about 3 minutes for Viserys to suffocate with a nose and mouth full of gold and much longer to die from shock. He would be dead before his whole brain boiled for sure, so 3.5 seconds is really the upper bound on death by brain cooking. Although this isn’t an exact figure, I think it’s safe to say that Viserys died pretty quickly, he probably didn’t have time to jerk around the way he did in the book, and he most likely did not suffer the way most fans wish he had.
Hanging
It may not be one of the flashier execution methods used on Game of Thrones, but hanging seems to be the most ubiquitous. The first recorded execution by hanging was in Homer’s Odyssey and was carried out via suspension hanging. The Greeks may have invented hanging, but the British perfected it. It is one of the oldest ways of executing someone, second only to beheading as the longest-used judicial method of execution. Unlike beheading, it is efficient in that many people can be killed at once with a single executioner. Hangings were a joyous town event and a reminder to citizens of what would await them if they broke the law. Public executions were not just a method of offing criminals but a way to deter others from committing crimes. Hanging people, however, can be a tad more difficult than lopping off their heads. So how does hanging really kill someone? Is their neck broken? Do they suffocate? Is the blood supply to their brain cut off? Turns out the answer to all these questions is “It depends.” There are several different methods of hanging—long drop, short drop, and suspension—and they all lead to death in different ways. As far as I can tell, only two of the three are used in the book or show, but I’d like to talk about all of them, so I will.
Suspension hanging is possibly the oldest method of hanging. In this method, the person to be hanged is suspended by their neck until the heart stops. Generally, the noose is placed around the person’s neck and they pulled up till their feet are off the ground. If you are a book reader, you know that Brienne of Tarth can explain this method all too well. After her encounter with Lady Stoneheart, she said that nothing had ever hurt so much. This method is no longer used (as far as I’ve been able to find) as a method of execution now that the long-drop method is standard. It would seem that the cause of death in this kind of hanging is pretty clear—you can’t breathe if there’s a noose around your neck. It’s more complicated than that, however. You have about a 40% chance of dying by suffocation and a 60% chance of dying from the constriction of either your carotid artery or jugular vein. So how you die depends on the placement of the noose’s knot. If the knot is on the left or right side of your head, the pressure will be on your arteries, veins, or both rather than on your windpipe. The carotid arteries and the jugular veins are squished, which stops blood flow to and from your brain. It is much, much quicker to die this way. It only takes about 4.4 pounds of force to compress the jugular vein and 11 pounds of force to compress the carotid arteries, but 33 pounds of force to compress the trachea. If the arteries or veins are cut off, blood flow to your head stops and you would pass out within 15 seconds or so. If you are into forensics, it’s possible to determine whether the jugular vein was compressed more than the carotid artery. If the jugular is more compressed, the blood can get into the head but can’t leave. Little capillaries burst from the pressure, leaving telltale red spots called petechial hemorrhaging. You might know this term from such shows as CSI, NCIS, and Law and Order. Facial petechial hemorrhaging is indeed a marker of strangulation for just this reason, but contrary to Hollywood’s presentation it can occur on any part of the head and face, not just the eyes. The absence of petechial hemorrhaging doesn’t rule out strangulation; it just means that if the person were strangled, the perpetrator pushed more on the arteries than the veins. After passing out, the condemned would eventually die from either suffocation that they wouldn’t feel, or from blood not circulating through the brain.
If they are one of the unlucky 40%, as I believe Brienne was, the pressure is mainly on the trachea and death is caused by asphyxiation alone. This usually happens when the knot is at the back of the head. Death by suffocation takes much, much longer and for the majority of it, the one being hanged is conscious. In these cases, there is often damage to the hyoid bone or larynx. It is presumed to be quite painful both because pushing that hard on the trachea would not be comfortable and because struggling to breathe is a terrible experience. Just try holding your breath for too long.6 This type of hanging might seem unlucky, but back in 17th and 18th centuries (and, one assumes, in Westeros), having the knot in the back might be your get-out-of-death-free card. The tradition with suspension hanging was to hang people for about 30 minutes. In more than a few cases, the pressure on the trachea was just enough to cut off air and cause unconsciousness, but not enough to kill. The hangman was even known in many cases to pull on the feet or sit on the shoulders of the unlucky soul on the end of the rope to make sure his work was done. In spite of all this, in many cases those thought to be dead would wake up in transit or on the autopsy table. It became so common that friends and family of the “dead” would try and revive them. Luckily, in many cases, if you were revived it was considered a miracle and you were set free. The case of “Half-Hangit Maggie” is particularly interesting.7
Short-drop hanging is a bridge between suspension and the Brit-perfected long-drop method. It was the first attempt to make hanging more humane and also less prone to failure. The manner of death in a short-drop hanging is very similar to that of suspension hanging, in most cases—the person dies from vein and artery compression, suffocation, or both. However, if everything is positioned correctly and the short drop is a little longer than usual, it’s possible for enough force to be applied to break the neck and cause almost instantaneous death. Death from short-drop hanging is sort of a crapshoot, but it’s much more likely to ensure death. This method uses a 1–1.5-foot-long rope. The condemned is put on some sort of platform that is quickly removed, usually a chair or a cart or, if you are in the Old West, a horse. Jon Snow used this method to hang the Brothers who stabbed him. Short-drop hanging is only slightly better than the suspension method in that there is a small chance death is instantaneous. From a scientific perspective, there’s not much to be said about it other than that it inspired the hangmen of Britain to find a way to ensure the quick and painless death that sometimes occurred in a short-drop hanging.
The long-drop hanging method is not explicitly seen in Game of Thrones because it didn’t become the standard method until fairly recently, around 1872. It was seen as a more humane method of execution yet was still showy enough to deter would-be criminals. Although this isn’t the type of hanging seen in the show, it is usually what comes to mind when one thinks of judicial hanging, and, from a physics point of view, it is by far the most interesting. The goal of this method is to snap the neck as quickly as possible to induce death quickly and painlessly. When the neck is snapped the spinal cord is severed and the person being hanged dies quickly. This is not always easy to do, so hangmen, and British ones in particular, were seen as artists whose goal was to cause the least amount of pain to their victims. William Marwood was the first to begin thinking about how a longer drop could cause a less painful death. He recommended a drop of 7–10 feet, much longer than the short-drop method. There were a lot of disagreements about the right way to make the long drop work, from the drop distance to the placement of the knot. Whether or not (knot?) they knew it, hangmen were really experimental physicists.
Traditionally, each hangman had his own method; regardless, the key thing to know in long-drop hanging is the energy required to break a human neck. By knowing how much energy needs to be applied, you can figure out how far the person needs to drop to end up with energy to break the neck. (I’m required to say here that energy is neither created nor destroyed; it just changes forms. Sorry, too much physics training.) In your physics class, energy is usually measured in joules, but British hangmen preferred the unit of ft · lbs. When the prisoner is standing on top of the trap door with a noose around their neck, they have energy of position, or potential energy (much like the potential energy of the suspended guillotine blade). How much potential energy the prisoner has depends on the height of the platform, or rather how far the fall will be. Potential energy can be difficult to wrap one’s head around because “energy” usually implies action, and someone standing on the gallows isn’t doing much else besides sweating. The condemned had to walk up to the gallows, however, and thus had to provide the energy sufficient to cause their own death. In addition, the prisoner’s high position contributes potential energy that could turn into energy of motion, or kinetic energy. On the ground, it’s not really possible to move by falling, but getting down from a high platform requires movement. As the condemned falls through the trap door, that potential energy changes into kinetic energy. When the prisoner’s neck hits the end of the rope, all that kinetic energy goes into the torque created by the angled knot to snap the neck. The key point is that all the energy the prisoner started with—the potential energy—is eventually transferred to the prisoner’s neck. To make sure there is enough energy to break the neck, we need to know two things: how much energy will break a neck, and the height required to transfer that energy into the neck after the fall. Potential energy is U = weight · height, where U is the universal symbol for potential energy for reasons I’ve never understood. There have been varying estimates over the years of how much energy it takes to break a neck. In the 19th century, executioners estimated it to be about 2,240 ft · lbs, but this figure has been revised over time. A 1947 US Army manual outlining military execution procedures states that it would take approximately 1200–1400 ft · lbs to break a neck. They also specified that a military band should be present to play a lively tune after the execution.8 I don’t know how accurate their numbers are, but you can’t fault their style. From here, determining the length of the rope is pretty straightforward. Divide the neck-breaking energy by the weight of the prisoner and you get the height of the drop needed and thus the length of rope that should be used.
At the dawn of long-drop hanging in the 19th century, people understood the physics of all this, but they were just making educated guesses based on past hangings about the amount of force required to break a neck. The two premier British noosers (which is a fabulous Scrabble word, FYI) were William Marwood and Albert Pierrepoint, and each had his own table of drops.9 The 1947 Army manual has yet another. You might be thinking, “Hey, whatever, err on the side of longer, really break the neck, and we’re all good.” Unfortunately, there is an upper bound on the force you can apply. Apply too much force at the end of the rope, and the condemned’s head will pop right off. It is a truly gruesome event and one that hangmen hoped to avoid. It is still unclear how much is too much and how little is too little. Luckily, this is not as much of a pressing matter these days. If you are interested in a more detailed history of hanging, Mahmoud Rayes, Monika Mittal, Setti S. Rengachary, and Sandeep Mittal published a paper in 2011 that offers a fascinating romp through the lives of hangmen throughout the ages. I can’t say I recommend it, but it is very informative.10
There is one type of death that hasn’t happened yet but is worth talking about: manual strangulation. To date, no one in the show or books has actually been manually strangled by someone else, but book readers know that eventually Cersei Lannister will get what she deserves, according to the prophecy of Maggy the Frog: “And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.” From a science perspective she’ll pretty much die the same way as someone in a suspension hanging, only most certainly from cutting off blood supply to the brain. It takes about 33 pounds of force to crush the trachea, and quite frankly I don’t think either of her younger brothers would have that strength in their hand(s). I do think, however, that one of them could muster the 4.4 pounds of force to compress her veins, or the 11 pounds of force to compress her arteries. In manual strangulation cases, petechial hemorrhaging is almost always present because of the difference in force. Because it only takes half the force to completely compress a vein, it is much more likely the veins are damaged more than the arteries, which leads to bursting capillaries. In all likelihood, Cersei’s pale white throat would end up a bit spotted.
Poison
Poison has long been seen as a weapon of the cold and calculating. Ned Stark called it the “woman’s weapon,” and although Oberyn Martell may disagree, the majority of successful poisonings in Game of Thrones have been carried out by women. (To be fair, Arya Stark used poison out of convenience—it was much easier to off all the Freys at once with poison than with repeated throat-slitting.) Westerosi poisons seem to come in a variety of types, many similar to real-life poisons, but in several cases, the method of death may have been played up a bit for the cameras. The poison used at “The Purple Wedding” has effects far beyond what a real poison could accomplish, but “The Pale and Sleepy Wedding” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Poison also has the advantage of being hard to detect and its effects often mirror those of a sudden illness. I’ll talk specifically about poisons that mirror those in Game of Thrones, so I’m skipping over some of the common ones such as cyanide (and, in particular, its place in history), although if I had infinite space they would be fun to talk about. In figuring out what types of poisons might have played a part in deaths on Game of Thrones, availability also needs to be taken into account. The science of poisoning could easily be extended into its own chapter, so please forgive me if I leave out your favorites.
The proverbial kickoff to the great Game of Thrones occurred with the poisoning of Jon Arryn. Things went downhill fast for the Starks after they received a letter from his wife, Lysa, about the unusual circumstances surrounding his death. Lord Varys offered his suspicions that the cause of Arryn’s death may have been the Tears of Lys, an untraceable poison that mimics death by intestinal ailments and is, according to Oberyn Martell, a “favorite tool for impatient heirs.” True to the assumptions of a poisoner’s gender, it was Jon’s wife Lysa who ultimately did him in. From a scientific point of view, what might the deadly Tears of Lys be? Is there such a poison? Arsenic, nicknamed “the inheritance powder,” is a commonly used poison, and the symptoms of arsenic poisoning mimic those of other diseases such as the stomach flu. The only seeming difference between the two poisons is that Tears of Lys is supposedly very rare and expensive, while arsenic is pretty easy to find. Arsenic is not a compound but rather an element—number 33 on the periodic table, to be exact. It’s classified as a metalloid, which means it has some properties of metals and some properties of nonmetals, and it is the 53rd most abundant element in Earth’s crust. It is a naturally occurring mineral and is found in both soil and rocks as well as mixed in with other minerals. Because it’s found in soil, it can also find its way into unfortunate places such as groundwater and plant roots, poisoning wells and ending up in crops. Arsenic in its elemental form is not very good for you, but it’s not nearly as toxic as it is in its compound form, arsenic trioxide. Known as white arsenic, this is the stuff that is used to off one’s friends and family. Unlike the fictional Tears of Lys, it’s quite easy to come by. Arsenic trioxide is created when anything that contains arsenic, such as coal and gold- or copper-containing ores, is heated. During the combustion process, two arsenic atoms bond with three oxygen atoms to form a white powder. Historically, this was used in everything from rat poison to teething medicine. In the 19th century, you could walk into any drugstore and buy a bottle. Arsenic wreaks havoc on a cell’s ability to make and use energy and stops the work of a crucial enzyme in cellular respiration. If that wasn’t enough, it inhibits thiamine (vitamin B1), raises the production of hydrogen peroxide, and messes with a cell’s potassium channels. In short, it interrupts the chemical pathways that make usable energy for cells. Without energy, the cells die off, eventually killing the unfortunate victim.11
One of the most surprising aspects of the case of Jon Arryn was the certainty with which Varys told Ned that Arryn had been poisoned. How could he have known? We can assume that the spectroscopy technology used to detect arsenic in a blood sample is not available in Westeros, but that doesn’t mean the poison would be untraceable. The Westerosi may not have access to modern, high-tech CSI devices, but they can get by without it because arsenic is one poison that can be detected without the aid of sophisticated lab equipment. In fact, it was one of the first poisons to be easily detected in a corpse. Arsenic causes telltale stomach lesions and oftentimes leaves a crystalline coating of poison in the digestive tract, both of which are easily seen in an autopsy. We’ve seen that maesters are adept at autopsies, so if Arryn’s death was at all suspicious, the maesters could have easily verified their assumptions. So, the obvious question might be, “How did Varys know?” but the better question is, “Why did the maester tell him and only him?”
In the (sort-of?) death of the Mountain at the hand of Oberyn Martell, he fell victim to a poison-tipped spear. Technically, the poisoner wasn’t a woman, but I think this might not count since weapons and fights to the death were also involved. We’ll get to the physics of Oberyn’s death in the next section, but the Mountain’s death (I am not going to get into the biology of resurrection) was painful and slow. His skin festered, he was paralyzed, and worst of all, he was conscious for the entire process. Unlike the ingestible or absorbable poisons, Oberyn’s “manticore venom” seems to require injection right into the bloodstream.
Poison-tipped spears and arrows have a long history, dating back to Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, and they are still used as weapons in South America, Africa, and Asia. The term toxin comes directly from the Greek word for “bow,” toxon. A poisoned arrow, dart, or spear may seem like an excellent weapon; however, the likelihood of accidentally puncturing your own skin with your poisoned weapon was high enough to deter some from using them. The traditional poisons used were all found in nature and were either plant- or animal-based. The components of the poison depended on what was available. Everything from monkshood to poison dart frogs has been used to make poison for use on weapons. The fictitious manticore is described as having the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail (or stinger) of a scorpion. So, in trying to figure out what type of poison was used by Oberyn and what kind of death the Mountain suffered, scorpions would be one place to start. A scorpion sting is often compared to a bee sting. I’ve never been stung by a scorpion, but I have friends who have been, and they say this is a gross understatement. It hurts! There are many scorpion species, but the deadliest is the deathstalker scorpion; luckily, these are not native to the United States. Although the sting of one is not usually enough to kill an adult, a concentrated amount on the end of a spear certainly could. Its venom is a powerful mix of neurotoxins. The most active, chlorotoxin, works by blocking a certain type of chloride channel, CLCN1, in muscle cells. The proteins in the toxin are the perfect shape to plug up the channel and stop chloride from getting in. Chloride is essential to making a muscle cell reactive to the electrical impulses from nerve cells. When chloride can’t move through the channels, paralysis occurs. This is one of the Mountain’s main problems. This is the only effect of deathstalker scorpion venom, however; it doesn’t cause the necrosis seen in the Mountain’s wound. For that, we need to look elsewhere.
Manticore venom also seems to have an effect similar to that of brown recluse spider venom. The brown recluse (Loxosceles reclusa) is one of the deadliest spiders on Earth, and its venom causes skin necrosis much like that seen in the Mountain’s wound. The spider’s venom interacts with the membranes of the cells it comes in contact with and destroys them, killing the cell. A cell membrane is made up of two layers of molecules called phospholipids. They are little heads with two tails. In the bilayer, the tails are in the middle with the heads on the outside. Brown recluse venom contains a protein that rips the heads off the phospholipids, destroying the cell membrane and killing the cell. This causes the necrosis that radiates out from the wound. The spider’s venom, however, works over a number of hours, not the short time scale we saw on screen.12 If I had to make a guess at what GRRM’s version of a manticore might be, based on its venom alone I’d say it was the love child of a deathstalker scorpion and a brown recluse with a fast-acting venom mutation.
The Purple Wedding was one of the most wonderful yet horrible scenes in season 4. Joffrey finally got what he deserved, and it was pretty graphic—the “Strangler” quite literally chokes its victims to death, leaving a purple-faced corpse in its wake (hence the nuptials’ colorful moniker). So, what exactly did Olenna Tyrell slip into his wine goblet? What kind of poison is the Strangler? It has to be available in crystal form since it came from Sansa’s necklace, which means it’s probably tasteless and easily dissolved in liquid. The most likely candidate is strychnine. It is available in crystal form and kills by causing muscle contractions and eventually asphyxiation. The poison is derived from the fruit or seeds of plants belonging to the genus Strychnos, so it would certainly be something the maesters could find in nature. It doesn’t take much to kill; a fatal dose is only about 16 mg/kg of body weight, and strychnine can kill in as little as 15 minutes at high doses. If you assume that Joffrey was about 45 kg, which is the average weight of a 13-year-old kid, it would only take about 720 mg to kill him. (For comparison, the average dose of ibuprofen is 400 mg.) Signals in the central nervous system are carried by molecules called neurotransmitters. Strychnine binds to the same receptors as glycine, an inhibitory neurotransmitter, slowing down the electrical signals that control the brain. When strychnine fills in for glycine, the electrical signals go into overdrive causing muscle contractions and eventually death by suffocation. This seems like the most likely poison responsible for Joffrey’s death; however, it works on all muscles of the body, not just the throat. Ingested poisons act on the entire body, rather than on a specific spot, as an injected poison might. So, although the Strangler’s effect on Joffrey certainly made for a dramatic death scene, there’s no poison that could have caused just the throat to close up.
In one of the rare cases of a man using poison in Game of Thrones, Jaime Lannister gave Lady Olenna the gift of a supposedly quick and painless death. It wasn’t fast enough, however, to stop her from twisting the knife one last time. There are two classes of drugs that could be responsible for such a quick(ish) and painless death: barbiturates and opioids. In modern times, these classes of drugs are used extensively for medical purposes: barbiturates as anesthetics and opioids as pain relievers. As most people have guessed, Westeros’s milk of the poppy is most likely an opioid derived from poppies. To control pain response, our bodies secrete natural opioids that bind to special opioid receptors in the central nervous system. When the natural opioids bind to the opioid receptors, it sends a signal to the brain to block pain and slow breathing. We don’t walk around in a constant state of opioid stupor because our bodies synthesize very small amounts of these opioids. Most of the receptors don’t have an opioid buddy at any given time, so we aren’t too numb to pain. Add in an opioid of some sort, and those opioid receptors fill up and tell our bodies to calm down and block pain signals. Unfortunately, opioids that come from an external source never bind quite right to the receptors, so in addition to calming and controlling pain, they send dopamine synthesis into overdrive. This is why opioids are so addictive: they trigger the brain’s reward system. In an overdose, the calming effect is too strong and the respiratory system relaxes so much that it stops. The tricky thing with trying to kill someone with opioids is that it is quite difficult to find a dosage that will reliably kill. Since Jaime very much wanted to leave the castle knowing Lady Olenna would be dead, I doubt he would have chosen milk of the poppy. In addition, it would take a fair amount to kill her, and Jaime had only a very small vial.
It’s more likely the poison came from the barbiturate family. The sleep aid sweetsleep seems to be the most likely candidate for a fictional barbiturate, because a very small amount is said to induce sleep and a small amount can cause a sleep from which you won’t wake up. The first barbiturate was synthesized in 1864 by Adolf von Baeyer. He combined concentrated urea with a compound derived from the acid of apples. Even though the first barbiturate was derived long after the supposed time period of Game of Thrones, there’s no reason the maesters couldn’t have found something similar; they had access to both urea and apples. Barbiturates depress the central nervous system, making you groggy, disoriented, and sleepy. Eventually, you will fall asleep, and if you have consumed enough, your nervous system will be depressed enough that your brain shuts off and you will never wake up. The main neurotransmitter system, called the γ-aminobutyric (GABA) system, regulates how active nerve transmission is. GABA’s main job is to keep things calm and in control. It does this through the GABA channel, which opens selectively. Barbiturates kick this inhibitor system into overdrive and force the GABA channels to stay open for too long. When the channels are open for an extended period of time, the voltage in the brain cells is changed in a way that makes them resistant to nerve impulses. This is great if only a little bit is used, but a bit too much and your brain is no longer able to send signals. Barbiturates can act anywhere from several hours to seconds. The time frame fits—short enough to ensure a quick death with enough time to deliver some killer final lines. Olenna most likely died peacefully in a dreamless sleep after making sure Jaime would never sleep again.
Crushing the Skull
One of the most soul-crushing (and skull-crushing) deaths of season 4 was the death of Oberyn Martell. For several brief moments we all thought that he would win, and that Tyrion would escape the trial by combat with his life. That joy was all too short-lived when hubris got the better of him and he gave the Mountain the chance to crush his skull. The Mountain is undoubtedly huge—8 feet tall and about 420 pounds, according to GRRM—but would he be large and strong enough to crush a human skull? It appears after several viewings of the scene that the Mountain first jams his thumbs in Oberyn’s eyes. That alone is not enough to force a brain to pop out of the skull. It appears, to me at least, that he then squeezes Oberyn’s skull between his hands until it crushes and that causes his death. Even if he’s not squeezing but just pushing on the bone of the eye socket the physics will be roughly the same. The physics of this isn’t all that complicated, we just need to know the force needed to crush a skull and the force that the Mountain’s hands could apply. This is so easy that many a science journalist has tackled it. There are actually several articles on the subject—some are good; some not so much. For this section, I went back to the original research to draw my own conclusions.
Many studies have been conducted to determine the force needed to crush a human skull, most of them by car safety groups and helmet manufacturers. There is one particular paper that is quoted in most science publications’ articles about this scene. I would not recommend reading the article ScienceAlert published on the topic, because the units used are more than a bit of a mess. The units used in the original paper also gave me some pause, and for about the millionth time in my life I wanted to yell at a doctor, “Wrong units, minus 10 points!” (I used to teach premeds.) Once I figured out what the units actually were, I learned that it takes about 520 pounds of force to cause catastrophic failure in a human skull. The study only tested the skulls of 10-year-olds, but the bones of the skull have fully formed by that age, generally speaking, and although a 10-year-old’s head is smaller than an adult’s, they would take similar amounts of force to crush.13 The force needed specifically to crush a skull is different from the force needed to crush other types of bones, such as the femur or the ulna. That’s because the dome shape of the head adds extra strength. If you don’t believe me, here’s a fun experiment: Go get an egg and hold it over the sink. Try and crush it from the flat sides and see how much force it takes. Now try and crush it by pushing on the top and bottom. It takes quite a bit more force. This is due to the dome shape on the ends. A skull is no different—it takes much more force to crush it than it would to crush a flat bone like, say, a shoulder blade. Knowing that the magic crushing number is 520 pounds of force, the next step is to figure out how much force the Mountain could apply.
The Mountain only weighs 420 pounds. Even if the Mountain leaned his entire body on Oberyn’s head it wouldn’t crush. He’d have a hell of a headache, but no fractures. You might be saying, but wait, boxers fracture skulls all the time, why couldn’t a huge man do the same? Boxers have the advantage of being in motion when their fists hit a head. That motion adds to the force applied and they can end up delivering over 1,000 pounds of force with a moving punch. The Mountain did not have this advantage. If, instead of pushing on Oberyn’s skull, he had just landed one good punch, you wouldn’t even be reading this section. But is anyone strong enough to crush a skull with their bare hands? According to NASA, the average man can exert up to 300 pounds of force.14 That is still well below what would be needed to crush a skull. The Mountain would have to be about 73% stronger than the average man to be able to crush his skull. I like being able to wrap these sections up in a neat little bow saying “yes” or “no” to the question asked; unfortunately, this one is a solid “maybe.” I don’t know how much stronger the Mountain is than the average person. Twice as strong? One-and-a-half times as strong? He is a unique human and I assume NASA averages don’t apply. I’ll leave it at this: he very well might have been able to crush Oberyn’s skull, but he should have just given him a solid roundhouse punch to really do the job.
Burning at the Stake
Burning at the stake is one of the oldest methods of execution, and it has also been used as a method of human sacrifice. Mance Rayder and Shireen Baratheon can collectively tell you about both. It has quite the history, and I would encourage you to look up the social and religious implications of this execution method; however, I’ll be sticking to the biology of death by burning at the stake. Before you continue, I should say that I have found this to be the least enjoyable section to write, and given the chapter title and the other topics covered here, that is really saying something. In fact, I found this method of dying to be so horrible that I almost didn’t write this section. But, seeing as there were two notable deaths by burning at the hands of the Red Woman, it needed to be included. When being burned you are being killed in two different ways: First, your body is becoming the fuel of the fire and is slowly consumed. Second, the fumes produced by the fire and the heat are entering your lungs and suffocating you. If you are lucky, the fumes will get you quickly. Oftentimes, the victims were not so lucky.
Whether you burn or suffocate will depend on the position of both the fire and the stake. As I mentioned in chapters 9 and 10, fire needs oxygen to burn and produces carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and water. When people are trapped in a burning building, they usually die from suffocation. There is little oxygen as the fire consumes it and the gas produced isn’t exactly what our lungs need. When being burned at the stake, your best hope of dying by asphyxiation is for the stake and the fuel to be set up in such a way that the gases produced are trapped. This is much more likely to happen if the fuel is piled around the stake instead of under it because the wood used as fuel will trap the gases produced and keep out oxygen. Surrounded by fire, the condemned will breathe in hot carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The heat will burn the throat and lungs and irritate the throat, probably causing swelling. As carbon monoxide enters the bloodstream through the lungs, it pushes what oxygen there is out of the way. Hemoglobin is the protein in blood that shuttles oxygen around to the cells that need it. Unfortunately, hemoglobin likes carbon monoxide about 200 times more than oxygen. Your cells don’t like CO as much as hemoglobin does, however, and without oxygen they begin to die. This quickly leads to dizziness and unconsciousness . . . if you’re lucky. Even if you were able to inhale some oxygen, the CO would push it out of the way and you’d still asphyxiate. In an enclosed space, the exhaust from older cars can pump out a lethal amount of CO in about 10 minutes.15 Shireen and Mance were just not that lucky. Besides, this wouldn’t make for a good and dramatic TV shot.
When the prisoner is placed above rather than inside of the fuel and flame, death is caused by the fire, not the smoke. The smoke isn’t trapped near the victim, who also has ready access to oxygen. The key to a quick death is falling unconscious as quickly as possible. When flames start at your feet that isn’t easy. If you have ever burned yourself, you know it can be very painful. First, the flames break down the proteins in your skin cells, causing them to burst. Nerves are also damaged by the flames, which causes the characteristic burning sensation. Eventually, the burns will progress from first-degree skin burns to second-degree burns that kill the nerves to the point they can no longer send pain signals to the brain. From there, the burns increase in severity to third-degree burns, consuming muscles and then bones. Depending on the rate at which the fire is burning, by the time your feet are finally deadened to pain, your thighs will be experiencing first and second-degree burns. Hopefully, you will enter shock at this point. As your body is burning, your heart and breathing rates will decrease. Body structures that contain necessary fluids will break down in the flames, and you will begin to lose blood and other fluids, eventually dying of blood loss or multiple organ failure. At this point, the flames probably still haven’t reached your head and granted you unconsciousness. Humans can burn for a very long time. We have a fair amount of fat, which, as discussed in chapter 9, is a pretty good fuel. Clothing can act just like a wick, turning the condemned into a human candle—and candles don’t burn quickly. “It will all be over soon, Princess” couldn’t be further from the truth. There are records of people burning for 45 minutes before succumbing to death. Don’t die in a fire.16
Drowning
“What Is Dead May Never Die” are the words of House Greyjoy, but they also appear to signify a religious ritual of this house. And people thought confirmation was a lot of work! In both the show and the book, followers of the Drowned God are purposely drowned and resuscitated to become part of the brotherhood of drowned men. It is said this is usually done soon after birth but has morphed over the years to a more normal baptism of simply dunking the child in water. But in A Feast for Crows, Aeron Greyjoy, aka Damphair, brings back the drowning and resuscitation. This is one of those things we’ve all seen happen many times on TV: someone drowns and is brought back, with the requisite coughing and throwing up water. But does that happen enough that it’s reasonable to expect a priest to be able to bring back your newborn son or yourself after an intentional drowning? Turns out that, yes, it is pretty common to be able to resuscitate someone after they’ve drowned.
The definition of “drowning” is a bit tricky. I went into this thinking drowning meant to die by inhaling water. That’s not totally accurate. Drowning is defined by the World Health Organization as experiencing respiratory impairment from submersion or immersion in liquid. When someone can no longer keep their head above water, whether that is from exhaustion or because a priest is holding their head underwater, the first response is to hold their breath as long as possible, usually about a minute. Once that’s no longer possible, the person will breathe in water, try to cough it out, and breathe in more. Sometimes there’s a muscle spasm in the throat that stops the inhalation of more water, but that stops as soon as the person passes out. Water in the lungs doesn’t just mean that oxygen can’t get in, it messes with the membranes of the alveoli, the tiny sacs in the lungs that allow oxygen to be transferred to the blood. The water gets in the way of this transfer and causes the membranes to be more permeable, which in turn allows not just oxygen but fluid to transfer into the lungs. If the person is in fresh water, osmosis causes water to be pulled into the blood. If they are in salt water, then water is pulled out of the blood and into the lungs. This is why even a little bit of water in the lungs can have a huge effect. Heart attack due to lack of oxygen to the brain quickly follows. If the person is rescued before their heart stops, it is called a nonfatal drowning; if they are not so lucky, it is a fatal drowning. If you want to survive drowning, your best bet is to drown in very cold water. Death from drowning occurs when there isn’t enough oxygen to power the brain and heart. Although humans are warm-blooded, cold still has a large effect on the metabolism. If a person is drowning in cold water, their metabolism slows down and less oxygen is needed by the brain. This means that it takes much longer to die. There is a recorded case of a child being submerged in icy water for 66 minutes and recovering with no ill effects. Obviously, this is an outlier, but it’s a good example of what cold can do. In the case of the Iron Islands, the water is described as being very cold. This is probably good news for those followers of the Drowned God.17
If a person is pulled out of the water soon enough, it’s possible for the water to be cleared from their lungs, at which point the alveoli membranes to go back to doing their job and the brain gets its much-needed oxygen. If a person is rescued after being submerged for 5 minutes or less, there’s a 90% chance they will be just fine. Submersion for 6 minutes still has a 44% chance of survival with minimal brain impairment. The two goals in reviving a drowning victim are to get the heart going (or keep it going) and get the lungs to the point of transferring oxygen to the blood again. CPR does both. Those trained in drowning rescue are taught to try rescue breathing while the victim is still in the water instead of waiting to get them to land. In the water, it’s pretty tough to do chest compressions, and really, they aren’t recommended anyway unless it’s clear the heart has stopped. Chest compressions make the victim vomit 86% of the time, and the Heimlich maneuver does pretty much the same. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation pushes oxygen into the lungs and makes sure that the alveoli not compromised by water are getting enough oxygen. Once things are back up and running, any water remaining in the lungs is coughed up and the victim eventually goes back to normal.
In the case of the Iron Islanders, this is all really good news. The water is described as very cold, which certainly helps the survival rate. In addition, they probably didn’t have a way to make sure they actually killed their drowning victims. Hopefully, this means that the one being “baptized” is removed from the water before their heart stops. In this case, with a little mouth-to-mouth, the initiate will revive and return to normal to serve the Drowned God. I can’t say this would be the religion or initiation method I would choose, but the science seems to indicate there’s about a 90% chance of survival, which is better than I thought it would be the first time I read about Damphair trying this out.
So, What Type of Justice Would You Pick?
As I said at the beginning of this chapter, it is difficult to research and write something like this without imagining myself as an unfortunate character in Game of Thrones. To be clear, the odds of surviving the series are vanishingly slim for those who want to play the game and survive. Jon seems to run toward death as if its name is Ygritte, and yet he keeps coming back. It’s uncanny. Personally, I had to take a break in the middle of each of the books, as I was having nightmares about being killed in the increasingly brutal ways devised by GRRM. As he has made clear time and again, no one is safe. The natural question, then, is: If I got drafted into Westeros, which way would I pick to go? This was up for much debate both in the office and at various social gatherings. For months I was a lot of fun at parties. The conclusion I’ve come to personally is that I’d pick pretty much anything but burning. Poisoning by anything but barbiturates is second on my “would not recommend” list. Most others lead to quick unconsciousness and death. I hope, however, that I could go out with a great gut punch like Lady Olenna, or, as Tyrion once hoped for himself, simply die in my own bed with a belly full of wine, and, well . . . you know the rest.