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theoutcastrogue · 3 months

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Cold Iron in folklore, fiction, and RPGs

'Gold is for the mistress—silver for the maid! Copper for the craftsman cunning at his trade.' 'Good!' said the Baron, sitting in his hall, 'But Iron—Cold Iron—is master of them all!' — Rudyard Kipling, “Cold Iron”

Folklore

Drudenmesser, or "witch-knife", an apotropaic folding knife from Germany

The notion that iron (or steel) can ward against evil spirits, witches, fairies, etc is very widespread in folklore. You hang a horseshoe over your threshold to deny entry to evil spirits, you carry an iron tool with you to make sure devils won't assault you, you place a small knife under the baby's crib to ward it from witches, and so on. Iron is apotropaic in many many cultures.

In English, we often come across passages that refer to apotropaic cold iron (or cold steel). "All uncouth, unknown Wights are terrifyed by nothing earthly so much as by cold Iron", says Robert Kirk in 1691, which I believe is the earliest example. "Evil spirits cannot bear the touch of cold steel. Iron, or preferably steel, in any form is a protection", says John Gregorson Campbell in 1901.

Words

So what is cold iron? In this context, it’s just iron. The “cold” part is poetic, especially – but not only – if we’re talking about either blades (or swords, weapons, the force of arms) or manacles and the like. It just sounds more ominous. There are “cold yron chaines” in The Fairie Queene (1596), and a 1638 book of travels tells us that a Georgian general (in the Caucasus) vowed “to make the Turk to eat cold iron”.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines “cold iron” as a sword, and dates the term to 1698. From 1725 it appears in Cant dictionaries (could this sense be thieves’ cant, originally? why not, plenty of words and expressions started as underworld slang and then entered the mainstream), and from ~1750 its use becomes much more common.

NGram Viewer diagram for 1600-2019.

In other contexts, cold iron is (surprise!) iron that’s not hot. So let’s talk a bit about metallurgy.

Metals

In nature, we can find only one kind of iron that’s pure enough to work with: meteoritic iron. It has to literally fall from the sky. Barring that very rare occurrence, people have to mine the earth for iron ore, which is not workable as is. To separate the iron from the ore we have to smelt it, and for that we need heat, in the form of hot charcoals. Throwing the ore on the coals won’t do much of anything, it’s not hot enough. But if we enclose the coals in a little tower built of clay, leaving holes for air flow, the temperature rises enough to smelt the ore. That’s called a bloomery.

clay bloomery / medieval bloomery / beating the bloom to get rid of the slag

What comes out of the bloomery is a bloom: a porous, malleable mass of iron (that we need) and slag (byproducts that we don’t need). But now we can get rid of the slag and turn the porous mass to something solid, by hammering the hot bloom over and over. And once the slag is off, by the same process we can give it a desired shape in the forge, reheating it as needed. This is called “working” the iron, hence “wrought iron” objects, i.e. forged.

a blacksmith in his forge, with bellows, fire, and anvil (English woodcut, 1603)

This is the lowest-tech version, possibly going back to ~2000 BCE in Nigeria. If we add bellows, the improved air flow will raise the temperature. So smelting happens faster and more efficiently in the bloomery, and so does heating the iron in the forge, making it easier to work with. And that’s the standard process from the Iron Age all through the middle ages and beyond (although in China they may have skipped this stage and gone straight to the next one).

If we make the bloomery bigger and bigger, with stronger and stronger bellows, we end up with a blast furnace, a construction so efficient that the temperature outright melts the iron, and it’s liquified enough to be poured into a mould and acquire the desired shape when it cools off. This is “cast iron”.

a blast furnace

So in all of this, what’s cold iron? Well, it’s iron that went though the heat and cooled off. (No heat = no iron, all you got is ore.) If it came out of a bloomery, or if it wasn’t cast, it’s by definition worked, hammered, beaten, wrought, and that happened while it was still hot.

Is there such a thing as “cold-wrought” iron? No. In fact, “working cold iron” was a simile for something foolish or pointless. A smith who beats cold iron instead of putting it in the fire shows folly, says a 1694 book on religion, so you too should choose your best tools, piety and good decorum, to educate your children and servants, instead of beating them. When Don Quixote (1605) declares he’ll go knight-erranting again, Sancho Panza tries to dissuade him, but it’s like “preaching in the desert and hammering on cold iron” (a direct translation of martillar en hierro frío).

Minor work can be done on cold iron. A 1710 dictionary of technical terms tells us that a rivetting-hammer is “chiefly used for rivetting or setting straight cold iron, or for crooking of small work; but ’tis seldom used at the forge”. Fully fashioning an object out of cold iron is not a real process – though a 1659 History of the World would claim that in Arabia it’s so hot that “smiths work nails and horseshoes out of cold iron, softened only by the vigorous heat of the sun, and the hard hammering of hands on the anvil”. [I declare myself unqualified to judge the veracity of this statement, let's just say I have doubts.] And there is of course such a thing as “cold wrought-iron”, as in wrought iron after it’s cooled off.

Either way, in the context of pre-20th century English texts which refer to apotropaic “cold iron”, it’s definitely not “cold-wrought”, or meteoritic, or a special alloy of any kind. It’s just iron.

Fiction

The old superstition kept coming up in fantasy fiction. In 1910 Rudyard Kipling wrote the very influential short story “Cold Iron” (in the collection Rewards and Fairies), where he explains invents the details of the fairies’ aversion to iron. They can’t bewitch a child wearing boots, because the boots have nails in the soles. They can’t pass under a doorway guarded by a horseshoe, but they can slip through the backdoor that people neglected to guard. Mortals live “on the near side of Cold Iron”, because there’s iron in every house, while fairies live “on the far side of Cold Iron”, and want nothing to do with it. And changelings brought up by fairies will go back to the world of mortals as soon they touch cold iron for the first time.

In Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword (1954), we read:

“Let me tell you, boy, that you humans, weak and short-lived and unwitting, are nonetheless more strong than elves and trolls, aye, than giants and gods. And that you can touch cold iron is only one reason.”

In Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn (1968) the unicorn is imprisoned in an iron cage:

“She turned and turned in her prison, her body shrinking from the touch of the iron bars all around her. No creature of man’s night loves cold iron, and while the unicorn could endure its presence, the murderous smell of it seemed to turn her bones to sand and her blood to rain.”

Poul Anderson would come back to that idea in Operation Chaos (1971), where the worldbuilding’s premise is that magic and magical creatures have been reintroduced into the modern world, because a scientist “discovered he could degauss the effects of cold iron and release the goetic forces”. And that until then, they had been steadily declining, ever since the Iron Age came along.

There are a million examples, I’m just focusing on those that would have had a more direct influence on roleplaying games. However, I should note that all these say “cold iron” but mean “iron”. Yes, the fey call it cold, but they are a poetic bunch. You can’t expect Robin Goodfellow’s words to be pedestrian, now can you?

RPGs

And from there, fantasy roleplaying systems got the idea that Cold Iron is a special material that fey are vulnerable to. The term had been floating around since the early D&D days, but inconsistently, scattered in random sourcebooks, and not necessarily meaning anything else than iron. In 1st Edition’s Monster Manual (1977) it’s ghasts and quasits who are vulnerable to it, not any fey creature. Devils and/or fiends might dislike iron, powdered cold iron is a component in Magic Circle Against Evil, and “cold-wrought iron” makes a couple of appearances. For example, in AD&D it can strike Fool’s Gold and turn it back to its natural state, revealing the illusion.

Then Changeling: The Dreaming came along and made it a big deal, a fundamental rule, and an anathema to all fae:

Cold iron is the ultimate sign of Banality to changelings. ... Its presence makes changelings ill at ease, and cold iron weapons cause horrible, smoking wounds that rob changelings of Glamour and threaten their very existence.... The best way to think about cold iron is not as a thing, but as a process, a very low-tech process. It must be produced from iron ore over a charcoal fire. The resulting lump of black-gray material can then be forged (hammered) into useful shapes. — Changeling: The Dreaming (2nd Edition, 1997)

So now that we know how iron works, does that description make sense? Well, if we assume that the iron ore is unceremoniously dumped on coals, it does not. You can’t smelt iron like that. If we assume that a bloomery is involved even though it’s not mentioned, then yes, this is broadly speaking how iron’s been made since the Iron Age, and until blast furnaces came into the picture. But the World of Darkness isn’t a pseudo-medieval setting, it’s modern urban fantasy. So the implication here is that “cold iron” is iron made the old way: you can’t buy it in the store, someone has to replicate ye olde process and do the whole thing by hand. Now, this is NOT how the term “cold iron” has been used in real life or fiction thus far, but hey, fantasy games are allowed to invent things.

Regardless, 3.5 borrowed the idea, and for the first time D&D made this a core rule. Now most fey creatures had damage reduction and took less damage from weapons and natural attacks, unless the weapon was made of Cold Iron:

“This iron, mined deep underground, known for its effectiveness against fey creatures, is forged at a lower temperature to preserve its delicate properties.” — Player’s Handbook (3.5 Edition, 2003)

Pathfinder kept the rule, though 5e did not. And unlike Changeling, this definition left it somewhat ambiguous if we’re talking about a material with special composition (i.e. not iron) or made with a special process (i.e. iron but). The community was divided, threads were locked over this!

So until someone points me to new evidence, I’ll assume that the invention of cold iron as a special material, distinct from plain iron, should be attributed to TTRPGs.

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hundredwrittingskills · 1 year

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I missed you

summary: JJ is feeling very fucking clingy.

warnings: soft JJ (not that there should be a warning for that) extremely touchy JJ. JJ getting a little handsy

A/n: this is more of a Drabble than anything but box 3 is coming very soon and this is all I've been thing about

"JJ? What time is it?" I ask while looking over my shoulder to JJ who is currently crawling under the sheets on my bed, groaning as his body lays flat. I may be half asleep but I know its way after midnight. I knew he was going to be coming back to the chateau late because of his night shift at work but I honestly expected him to go sleep on the pull out couch in the living room, not come sleep with me in John B extra bedroom. At least he normally doesn't because he hates waking me up in the middle of the night.

Im a little alarmed when he doesn't say anything but just plasters his bare body to the back of me. "J? Everything okay?"

"Yeah baby, Im sorry I woke you but I had no desire in going to sleep on that damn couch. I missed you." He whispers in my ear, sending tingles down my back.

He already has me locked in his firm arms so I try my best to turn over and face him. He has dark purple bags under his eyes and his blonde hair is in even more of a messy shape than normal, if that's even possible.

Pushing his hair out of his forehead, I look into his ocean blue eyes. "Your sure you're okay?"

He smiles showing the laugh lines around his eyes. "Fuck yeah I am. I've got the hottest pouge in my arms and I'm about to go to sleep after a long ass shift of working with spoiled ass rich folks."

Rolling my eyes, I give him a sweet but quick peck on the lips. It feels like its been forever since I've seen him and I would love nothing more than to give him the biggest and sloppiest kiss I could fathom but I know my boyfriend and it doesn't matter if the man was dying from a gunshot wound, he would turn the innocent good bye kiss into sex. Normally I would be all for it too but its way to late and I'm readying to go back to sleep.

"Go back to sleep princess. I love you."

I turn back around and press my body as close to him as I can get it.

"I love you sweet boy."

****

The next morning I wake up and try and move but to no anvil. JJ's arms are wrapped around me like a vise. I'm about to wiggly my way out of his grasp until I hear a groan from behind me and a hand squeeze my right breast hard. My head falls back on the pillow with a sigh. This man is insufferable.

I grab one of his finger and try and lift it off my boob but it does nothing but make him squeeze harder. This bitch.

"J. Please stop groping me, I need to get up." I say, trying to hide the humor in my voice.

He groans again but still doesn't move his hand. "Im comfortable. Let me be."

#outer banks #jj maybank #jj maybank x pogue!reader #jj maybank one shot #jj maybank fanfiction #jj maybank imagine #hundredwrittingskills

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thewertsearch · 4 days

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You make the JUNIOR COMPU-SOOTH SPECTAGOGGLES!

2.2 million grist? That's more than Fear No Anvil!

This thing must be crazy powerful. Judging by the name and ingredients, it may confer some sort of clairvoyance on its user. That feels like it would be more Rose's department - but then again, John's not the only Player with a rocket pack, so it's clearly possible to create gear that evokes an Aspect other than your own.

It worked! The result is a huge kickass PROTON CANNON.

Or you would, if you were able to afford the thing. Dave turbo-torrented you a lot of grist, but you don't have THAT much.

That's a little steep, yeah.

Mind you, Dave is on his way to mastering the LOHACse, so you might be able to afford it sooner than you think.

While wearing this outfit, you almost feel as if you were ripped straight from the animes!

Sick. It reminds me a little of Death from Soul Eater, actually.

Jade definitely watches anime. I know we haven't seen her discuss it in the comic, but we're all in agreement on this, right?

You make the GREEN SUN STREETSWEEPER! Aw yeah.

A million grist is a lot less than I'd expect to replicate a First Guardian's power level - but it still might replicate some of their abilities, just at a smaller scale.

You make… YOU MAKE………..

JOHNNY 5.

Hey, they can’t all be winners!

Way back in Act 2, I predicted that, based on how codes are combined in the Alchemiter, each item fusion should actually have multiple recipes. This is far from the only combination that will yield Johnny 5, and some combinations are going to make more sense than others.

#homestuck liveblog #full liveblog #act 5.2 #s106 #3158 #are all cannons not technically proton cannons

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m1ssunderstanding · 4 months

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Get Back Rewatch 55 Years On: Day Four

"Lennon's late again" says Paul, as he walks in late. And sweet Ringo just gently, "between ten and eleven is the time" Which means: "Chill babe. He'll be here."

One thing that always gob smacks me is how bored George and Ringo are watching Paul pull Get Back out of the ether. They literally see him do this shit all the time which is insane to me.

His voice is so so so pretty!!! And he's just so completely in his own world. The hunched shoulders. The twitching. The gibberish. The tapping. The twisting.

Obviously this is a song with the original central feeling being let's go back to before everything went wrong but he wants to make it into a meaningless song with both story bits and almost walrus-esque bits. But why is the first lyric he comes up with about gender? Thinking of @scurators posts on Paul and gender.

Ringo's customary quiet really does add significance to his voice, so him singing along with this so quickly says something I think about his support for the song and for Paul in general.

When John walks in he's greeted with a little cocky nod and smile like "look what I've just done while you were late." And then Paul sings "get back to where you once belonged" directly at him before breaking the eye contact. It's one of those heartbreaking Lennon/McCartney miscommunications because Paul is doing this to get John back, but actually it's scaring him away, you know? Paul thinks he has to prove to John how good he is, but John's exhausted with how good Paul is.

STFU Michael Lindsay Hogg

Paul really does love the idea of being forced out of parliament by cops and honestly so do I. Would've been iconic and might've kept them together.

John's so quiet today and also Yoko is not here. Correlation or causation I wonder.

"They say don't they say charity begins at home?" I love you forever, George. His humor is always so well-placed and so dry (even though he's clearly cracking himself up here). And it steers the conversation away from a direction he was not happy with without poking any bears. In fact, everyone's laughing. Clever boy.

"I've decided that the whole point of it is communication. And to be on TV is communication and we've got a chance to smile at people like all you need is love or something so that's me incentive for doing it." Wise, egalitarian John making a lovely appearance.

And then there's Paul. "I'm here cause I wanna do a show." Lol I love them.

Why do they say "Mr Epstein?" Is it because they're on camera and they want people to know who they're talking about? Does it have something to do with the maharishi telling them certain ways to talk about Brian? Does anyone have any thoughts about that?

Okay so you know how I just said last time how emotionally mature George was? I still think it's generally more true of him than the others, but this right here? This is not it. "I don't want to do any of my songs in the show because they'll all just turn out shitty." Man has issues.

I think it's important to recognize that George and Paul have both said the literal word "divorce" and it's NBD. But when John does it, Paul takes it as "the groups really over and I have to go into hiding and not get out of bed and maybe od who knows." Why? There's another puzzle piece here that we're missing.

"Should we leave you for a while?" "YES!"

On the one hand I'm like "working on Maxwell is the last thing you guys should be doing with this time alone." But on the other thing maybe it's the only thing they can do at this point.

"Mal? You should get a hammer. And an anvil." As he's walking away. Main character in a contrived mad genius biopic. Except it's real.

"Joan" sounding suspiciously like "John" ... And then he goes "fool, Maxwell fool." Aka one of their ~special words~ New theory. John hates Maxwell because he dies in it. And Paul's the killer.

"Take it away Johnny." Even though it was George and John whistling before wasn't it? Did George get cut from the whistle chorus? Another straw on the camel's back.

I LOVE that John just does not know any of his own songs. Across the Universe my beloved!

On the glyn/Paul moment featured below, I have three thoughts. 1. Whore. 2. John Lennon villain origin story. 3. The fact that glyn didn't just tell John is striking.

"I wish it fucking would". "Cause I'm down." This lyric going from a self-soothing reassurance that his people aren't going to leave him that he'll always have this beautiful dream he's created with them. To this? I hate it here.

So there is a big emotional and energy difference between their Beatlemania selves singing "Rock and Roll Music" and their current selves. And part of it is due to the fact that they're just not as happy as they were then. But I think most of it is really just that they thrive when they're performing for an audience.

#Sorry for the scarcity of shitty pics to break up the block of text in this one.#Hopefully the next one will be better #paul mccartney #the beatles #john lennon #mclennon #ringo starr #george harrison #Get back

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kayhi808 · 4 months

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Company Party

You were never one for big parties. Always preferring intimate get-togethers. You're attending your boyfriend's company Christmas party. The ballroom of the hotel is elegant and beautiful. Decorated in red, gold & silver, its truly a festive wonderland. The twinkling lights and the soft Christmas music in the background lightens your mood.

Your relationship with John has been deteriorating but you tell yourself it's work stress. The stress of the holidays. You tell yourself once the holidays are over you'll talk things over and work it out.

Even though you're seated at John's side, he's pretty much ignored you all evening. His coworkers' dates seem to all know each other. They've met before. John's never invited you along to go out with his team. Their inside jokes fly over your head. You sit with a forced smile trying to keep up. Follow along. The feeling of being an outsider becoming very apparent to you.

"You want something to drink?" John finally acknowledges you.

"Sure, a Coke please," you smile up at him but he's already turned to the rest of the table, taking his friends drink orders.

He returns passing out bottles of beer and made a point of delivering a cocktail to his coworker, Robyn. You watch him with unease as he leans in a little too close to her. A knot starts forming in your belly. He smiles at her with the smile he used to give to you. He returns to his seat next to you and drinks his beer. You stare at him, "What??" He gives you an exasperated look.

"I'm kind of parched. Where's my Coke??" You hiss out sassily.

"Oh, you want me to go back to the bar?"

"You can remember HER drink but you can't remember mine?" HER in question gives you a surprised wide-eyed look. Keeping your voice low, "Who is she, to you?"

Knowing he messed up, "She's just a co-worker. Stop being crazy."

You've never felt so humiliated. You fold your napkin and replace in on the table, pushing your chair back. You grab your bag, leaving the ballroom. Expecting John to follow you out but he never comes. He stays in the party.

Part of you is so angry you want to go in there and cause a scene, but what good will it do? You'll end up feeling even more humiliated. He obviously doesn't give a shit. You sit in one of the lounge chairs trying to decide what to do. You repeat to yourself that it's over. You're done. You take out your phone and break up with John through a text. He's not even worth your time. If he wanted to make things right, he would have followed you out here. Tears start to fall and you brush them away.

"What's got you so upset, Darlin'?" Bill Russo, John's boss, crouches down in front of you, dropping a hand on your knee. You didn't even hear him approach. John's never introduced you to him, but Anvil is a prominent company and Mr Russo is frequently in the society pages. You know who he is.

Embarrassed, "Oh, it's nothing. It's been a long rough day," you sigh. "I was going to head home early."

"Have you eaten? I don't believe they've served dinner yet," nodding back at the ballroom.

"No, I'm going to head home, thank you though."

Lifting his hand from your knee, he holds it out to you, "Bill Russo, by the way." You place your hand in his and he smiles while you tell him your name. His warm hand surrounding your chilled one gives you shivers.

"Come, join me for dinner. There's an excellent Italian restaurant upstairs. Everything will seem better after a good meal." Not releasing your hand, he pulls you to your feet as he stands.

"But...your party is here."

He shrugs, "Nobody wants the boss at these parties." Again, with a coaxing smile he gently tugs you towards the bay of elevators. "Please join me for dinner."

You silently follow.

#billy russo #billy russo x reader #billy russo fanfic #billy russo imagine

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