Like many pets, Daenerys’ dragons looked really cute when they were young, sitting on Khaleesi’s shoulder and immolating slavemasters. But the dragons have grown up; in fact this season Drogon is rumoured to be 80 feet in length. Which got us thinking, how much would it cost to feed that thing?

As in, assuming you don’t want to just feed it shepherds’ kids.

Nerdist and XKCD tell us that Drogon’s energy requirement per day would be about 400,000 Calories (as in, kcal). If Drogon was to survive on sheep, then this would mean eating 2.8 of the fluffy snacks per day.

But what good is a dragon if you can’t use it to toast marshmallows? Drogon has to eat more sheep in order to get the energy for those flames. If we think of Drogon’s fire breath as being like a WW2 flamethrower, then Drogon gets through a sheep’s – worth of energy every 9.9 seconds. So if Drogon decides to breath fire for 5 seconds a day, then he needs in total 3.3 sheep per day to fully function, or 1,215 sheep per year.

Which is nice, but as any unburnt Queen of the Andals, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons needs to know, how much will all of these sheep cost?

We think that the Game of Thrones universe is comparable to 14th Century England (think the Hundred Years War, the Black Death and the whole Braveheart/freedom-not-going-well thing…It seems about right.) In these times a sheep cost 17 pence, so Drogon would cost a medieval kingdom 20,663 pence per year. Which doesn’t sound like much to us now, but a Fourteenth Century labourer only earned about 2 pence per day.

The royalty of England however raised 12 million pence in taxes per year (specifically 1294-7), so Drogon would have ended up costing the kingdom a mere 0.17% of the budget. Which is a bargain for a creature that, for starters, got Khaleesi an army of unsullied.

Given her three dragons, Daenerys probably doesn’t have to worry about spending too much on defence. Which allows her to spend the rest of the budget on things like unemployment benefits for her freed slaves, alternative entertainment to fighting pits and maybe some nice jewelry.  Though, jewelry didn’t work out too well for her brother.

Enjoyed this? Check out our thoughts on the the Wall That Protects The Seven Kingdoms, How Much Bruce Wayne Is Worth and How to Make Mordor’s Economy Work. You can find those and other interesting things in our Editorials although if you want a selection of our most popular check out the Greatest Hits. And be sure to stay in touch: