How heavy is the Iron Throne?

There is no official weight, so this is our estimate from the legend. Aegon the Conqueror had the throne made from the swords of the enemies he beat while taking Westeros, softened in the fire of his dragon Balerion and hammered together over 59 days. The songs say it took a thousand blades. 1,000 swords × 1.4 kg = 1,400 kg.

Why 1.4 kg? Medieval one-handed swords usually weighed about 1 to 1.5 kg, and a German hand-and-a-half sword from around 1400 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art weighs 1.56 kg. So a thousand real swords would come to somewhere between 1,000 and 1,560 kg. That counts only the blades: the knives, steps and any iron holding it together would add more, while steel lost in the melting would take a little away.

The thousand is itself a story. George R.R. Martin wrote in 2013 that his throne has “thousands of swords in it, not just a few”, which would push it to 2.8 tonnes or more. In the show, Littlefinger calls the thousand blades one of “the stories we agree to tell each other”.

Martin has said more than once that the HBO throne, which he calls “terrific”, is not the one he pictures. His Iron Throne is massive, ugly and asymmetric, a heap of half-melted swords hammered together by blacksmiths, with iron steps up to a seat where the king sits about 10 feet above everyone else. He named Marc Simonetti’s painting for The World of Ice & Fire as the closest anyone has come.

He also said HBO could never build it: its thrones are already large, cumbersome and expensive, and his version would not fit even in the Paint Hall in Belfast, one of Europe’s largest sound stages. For House of the Dragon (2022), HBO built a new, bigger throne closer to the books, with about 2,500 swords. Miguel Sapochnik said some of them are real, and the crew borrowed blades from The Witcher and Warcraft. Most of the melted look comes from plaster wrapped around steel rods, so it weighs far less than 2,500 real swords would.

In 2012 HBO sold full-size replicas for $30,000: 7 ft 2 in tall, 5 ft 11 in deep and 5 ft 5 in wide, in hand-painted fiberglass and fire-proof resin, weighing 350 lb (159 kg). A replica AT&T gave away in a 2019 sweepstakes was listed at 310 lb (141 kg), more than seven feet tall and worth $18,000.

The heaviest was a promotional throne at Rockefeller Center for the final season in 2019: a 30 ft throne on a 5 ft base, built as a truss with a scenic shell and ballasted with concrete blocks to 20,000 lb (about 9 tonnes). That same year HBO hid six thrones around the world for its #ForTheThrone hunt, but never published their weights.

In October 2024 a throne made of plastic, molded from the screen-used one, sold for $1.49 million at Heritage Auctions in Dallas. Its weight was not given.