Roll the phrase round your tongue with me: Starmetal sword. Starmetal sword. The misplaced secret to Damascus metal might completely have been meteorites! Attila the Hun had a sword like this, proper? Or Excalibur was one, yeah? Tutankhamun was definitely buried with one. Blue Eye Samurai’s heroine has a starmetal sword, and so does Sokka in Avatar: The Final Airbender, and the Redwall sequence virtually revolves round whoever’s obtained the meteorite-forged sword of Martin the Warrior of their paws.
Man, starmetal swords are cool. Till you truly look them up in actual life.
Wouldn’t it shock you to know that there’s no materials benefit you’ll be able to forge right into a sword utilizing steel from a meteorite? Eh, most likely not, you’re sensible and skeptical, so you recognize that whereas the iron-nickel alloys in meteorites have distinctively completely different traces of different components than these present in Earth’s personal iron ore, none of these meteorite components are recurrently present in any portions that might have an effect on the properties of a solid object.
Tutankhamun’s meteorite dagger was distinctive in supplies, not in capabilities. Excalibur isn’t actual. Attila’s “sword of Mars” was folklore. Additionally, we’ve developed some actually stable concepts of how Damascus metal was made, and none of them contain steel from house.
Starmetal swords are simply regular swords.
However are they actually?
Of course not. They’re made with steel from house! And each record of starmetal swords that had been no sharper, tougher, or hardier than their earthly counterparts can also be a listing of human craving — craving to attach an earthly device, and subsequently its wielder, to the celestial realm.
And also you don’t even need to go as far afield as heaven. The earliest recognized prehistoric iron objects are made out of meteoric iron. Earlier than we developed the strategies that would refine iron ore into usable steel, we made issues out of iron from house. A starmetal sword doesn’t have to attach you to the sky when it could join you to the origins of ironworking on this planet.
The starmetal sword is the center of fantasy fiction
And no one knew that higher than satirist Terry Pratchett. Upon being knighted in 2009, Sir Terry told the Guardian, “You possibly can’t ask a fantasy author to not need a knighthood. You realize, for 2 pins I’d get myself a horse and a sword.”
A 12 months later, he did just that (OK, not the horse half). He gathered iron ore from floor deposits close to his England house, smelted and hammered it into bars with a hand-crafted clay forge, and delivered the bars to a blacksmith to have them labored into his personal sword, completed with silver. And he tossed items of meteorite into the fires of that forge as effectively, telling News.com.au, “Thunderbolt iron, you see — extremely magical, you’ve obtained to chuck that stuff in whether or not you imagine in it or not.”
In probably the most well-known passages Pratchett ever wrote, he opined on the worth of informal perception. In his attribute foolish and profound, satirist method, a scene within the novel Hogfather options the determine of the Grim Reaper telling his adopted granddaughter that human beings need to imagine in little issues with out exhausting proof, like Santa Claus — and swords made from stars.
They needed to, in order that they may imagine within the massive issues with out exhausting proof, like justice, and hope.
So if it’s all the identical to you, I’m going to maintain believing that starmetal swords are cool. Terry Pratchett thought they had been.