2002-10-08 - 9:36 a.m.
The following excerpt is taken from the introduction of Manfred Sachse�s Damascus Steel:
*The sword is the first true weapon in the history of man whose origin lies not in tools for daily usage such as the axe and knife, nor in the vital hunting implement developed to assist man in his fight for survival such as the spear or bow and arrow; rather, it was designed and developed from its very conception for the killing of other humans.
It is probably for this very-albeit macabre reason-that the sword is universally regarded as the most noble of all weapons, and thus among practically all nations and cultures to whom this weapon is known there has developed a mythology not around the sword itself but also around its creator, the smith.
The smith created his artifacts by taming the divine element of fire; and it is significant that the only human craft that was found sufficiently worthy to be practiced by one of the Olympian gods-Hephaistos/Vulcan-was a smith. A parallel to this can be found in the medieval Germanic saga Wieland der Schmied (Wayland the Smith) who was not only placed on equal footing with other warriors and heroes but who also had dedicated to him his own epic cycle. The other smiths of Germanic mythology, including the master that who taught the craft to Wieland, are not human figures but, rather, dark elves and dwarves, a fact which underlines the mystery and, for the peoples of earlier times, even eeriness and wondrousness of the smith�s skill and profession.
The sword�s ability to destroy life was seen as something bordering on magical, and it was regarded as quite natural that the smith, as producer of such a potentially destructive object, would have powerful, even supernatural forces at his disposal.
It is probable that the smiths themselves contributed to the superstitious awe in which they were held by most tribal societies. Their apparent preference to work away from light in gloomy workshops or in the pitch-darkness of the night must have in itself appeared unwholesome to impressionable minds. Most likely the smith�s fellow tribesmen would have been skeptical towards any explanation that this work in the dark was simply done because of the varying hues of the heated metal-indicating changes in temperature-could be observed better this way than in bright daylight. Similarly it would have been difficult to believe that the words they mutter to themselves during the quenching operation were not a magic spell but merely verses devised to enable them to measure the right length of immersion time.
Processes such as the following attributed the Wieland will no doubt likewise have been regarded as sorcery. In Nordic sagas we find detailed accounts of how Wieland reduced to iron dust a sword that fell short of his expectations, and how he kneaded these iron grains into dough. This he baked into buns and fed to chickens. By smelting the iron out of the carefully collected chicken droppings, he obtained the raw material from which he forged his masterpiece, the celebrated Mimmung blade. Experiments performed in the Museum of English Rural life, Reading/Berkshire, in the 1950s succeeded in proving that this seemingly extravagant procedure is in fact a very efficient way not only of getting rid of slags and impurities in the iron-through the action of stomach acids of the chickens-but of enriching it with nitrogen, because bird droppings are extremely rich in nitrides. On the other hand, when the Norse Thidrekssaga the dwarf smith Alberich is searching through the nine kingdoms to find the right water for quenching the sword Ekkisax, it is clear from the use of the magic number nine that here indeed the use of magic was intended. Quite frankly magical, in real life, were blades produced by the swordsmiths of Passau, at the border between Bavaria and Austria, and the incised insignia of their guild, the celebrated Wolf mark, was considered proof of the magical properties of such a blade which would keep its owner from harm. The superstitions surrounding the Wolf mark resulted in being eagerly adopted by other blademaking centers, such as Solingen and even Toledo; this was probably done to comply with the demands of customers understandably concerned for their health.*
There is of course a lot more in this book than what I included here, and if you are interested in obtaining a copy of it for yourself, the isbn# is 3-514-00522-2
I hope you found this as interesting as I have. Well ok, perhaps you didn�t�but I hope you at least learned something from it.
There will be a few more excerpts over the next week as I try to gather my thoughts and try to make sense of this�whatever you want to call it�magic, mystique, mystery that surrounds the smith. I experienced it this last weekend, and now I want to try to understand it a bit more. Please, if you have any input on this topic please let me know�Feel free to e-mail, or drop me a note in the guestbook.
Well anyhow�
So today I learned that your average top fuel dragster generates over 7000 hp! They can run a � mile in a little over 4 seconds, accelerating to over 300mph! After every run these engines must be completely tore down and inspected. In addition to this the clutch must be replaced after every run. Oh and get this, the fuel used by these cars is a whopping $25 a gallon! And this is all done with a supercharged v8! Man o man�and I thought the SHO was fast�
So normally I would ask �what have you learned today��but hopefully if you read my entry today, I already know the answer.
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