The legend goes that a sword appears embedded in a stone, or in an anvil standing atop a stone, and there is a label: whoever pulls this sword from the stone is the true king of England. And Arthur finds it, and does so, and becomes such.
I wonder if this is a description of Arthur forging his own sword?
Like: if you were to explain ore, and the process of smelting the rock to produce iron, and forging the iron to make a sword, and you wanted to really drum home the miracle of this technology, today rendered invisible by a supply chain too diffuse to see, wouldn’t you say that he had drawn the sword from the stone?
I guess I’m thinking of ways for the story to be non-fantastical.
You could also say that raising a popular army is like pulling a sword from a stone, if your metaphors were such that stone = land. So there’s that too.
You might want to bring attention to ore being the source. Because it turns out that in northern Europe, in Arthurian times (400AD-ish), smelting iron from stone was unusual.
Iron came from bogs:
In northern Europe in the Iron Age all the way through to the early Medieval period, most iron came from bog iron. It was hard to smelt, because it was a rather low grade ore, but you didn’t have to mine it and it was a renewable resource (in about twenty years you could just come back and get more, because it formed constantly).
(That link quoting a thread by author Jennifer R. Povey.)
So maybe the other origin story of King Arthur, in which the Lady of the Lake rises out of the water and hands him Excalibur, is also about iron and sword making?
…and, perhaps, was this the original legend? And later, when bog iron was replaced by iron ore, was the myth rewritten so that the sword is produced from a stone not a lake, so that although the story differs, the underlying meaning in metaphor-space is the same?
I’m speculating.
Excalibur is returned to the lake after Arthur’s death, which was traditional. But this practice pre-dates iron which, to my mind, is a point against the idea of a reciprocal relationship between blacksmithing and bogs.
SEE: The History of Magic (Chris Golden). After death, weapons were placed in water. In the Bronze Age:
streams, marshes and bogs received spearheads, axes and sickles; major rivers were given swords, sickles, spears, axes and personal ornaments from outside the region.
And this continued with iron in the Iron Age (800BCE–43BCE):
in southern Britain swords were regularly thrown into rivers.
It’s not a misinterpretation of accidental loss: Broadly speaking, when more things are placed in graves, fewer items are thrown into rivers and bogs.
It’s wonderfully alchemical, the idea of transmuting water into weapons.
Maybe Merlin came from the future and equipped the once and future king (that’s why Arthur is the future king too, because he returned with Merlin).
I’m imagining a nanotech smithery that you drop into a bog, like a long strip of something that feels like rough leather, and as water flows over engineered cilia fixers, it slowly reefs an iron-coral sword.
Or a glowing hoop that you place on a hunk of iron ore, and it atomically teases out the metal and weaves it and extrudes a hilt, which you grasp and heave and the blade prints as you draw it from the red hot aperture of the Drexler assembler.
I guess current technology is that magical, really, except that the process of transformation from raw material to end artefact takes thousands of miles and so much time that it’s not really your agency that makes it happen. So maybe, to invent something magical, one algorithm is to look for lengthy industrial processes and imagine them as on-demand, pocket-sized.
It’s like bubble wrap isn’t it. I squash down the fantasy in one place, and it finds a way to pop up somewhere else.
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‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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The legend goes that a sword appears embedded in a stone, or in an anvil standing atop a stone, and there is a label: whoever pulls this sword from the stone is the true king of England. And Arthur finds it, and does so, and becomes such.
I wonder if this is a description of Arthur forging his own sword?
Like: if you were to explain ore, and the process of smelting the rock to produce iron, and forging the iron to make a sword, and you wanted to really drum home the miracle of this technology, today rendered invisible by a supply chain too diffuse to see, wouldn’t you say that he had drawn the sword from the stone?
I guess I’m thinking of ways for the story to be non-fantastical.
BTW #1:
Iron may have been transgressive and egalitarian, once upon a time:
BTW #2:
You could also say that raising a popular army is like pulling a sword from a stone, if your metaphors were such that stone = land. So there’s that too.
You might want to bring attention to ore being the source. Because it turns out that in northern Europe, in Arthurian times (400AD-ish), smelting iron from stone was unusual.
Iron came from bogs:
(That link quoting a thread by author Jennifer R. Povey.)
So maybe the other origin story of King Arthur, in which the Lady of the Lake rises out of the water and hands him Excalibur, is also about iron and sword making?
…and, perhaps, was this the original legend? And later, when bog iron was replaced by iron ore, was the myth rewritten so that the sword is produced from a stone not a lake, so that although the story differs, the underlying meaning in metaphor-space is the same?
I’m speculating.
Excalibur is returned to the lake after Arthur’s death, which was traditional. But this practice pre-dates iron which, to my mind, is a point against the idea of a reciprocal relationship between blacksmithing and bogs.
SEE: The History of Magic (Chris Golden). After death, weapons were placed in water. In the Bronze Age:
And this continued with iron in the Iron Age (800BCE–43BCE):
It’s not a misinterpretation of accidental loss:
It’s wonderfully alchemical, the idea of transmuting water into weapons.
Maybe Merlin came from the future and equipped the once and future king (that’s why Arthur is the future king too, because he returned with Merlin).
I’m imagining a nanotech smithery that you drop into a bog, like a long strip of something that feels like rough leather, and as water flows over engineered cilia fixers, it slowly reefs an iron-coral sword.
Or a glowing hoop that you place on a hunk of iron ore, and it atomically teases out the metal and weaves it and extrudes a hilt, which you grasp and heave and the blade prints as you draw it from the red hot aperture of the Drexler assembler.
I guess current technology is that magical, really, except that the process of transformation from raw material to end artefact takes thousands of miles and so much time that it’s not really your agency that makes it happen. So maybe, to invent something magical, one algorithm is to look for lengthy industrial processes and imagine them as on-demand, pocket-sized.
It’s like bubble wrap isn’t it. I squash down the fantasy in one place, and it finds a way to pop up somewhere else.