Some say (not without a trace of mockery) that the old masters would supposedly forever invest a fraction of their souls in each batch of mithril, and since today there are no souls, but only the ‘objective reality perceived by our senses,’ by definition we have no chance to obtain true mithril.
Mithril is described as an alloy with near-miraculous properties, produced in ancient times, which cannot be reproduced nowadays, despite the best efforts of modern metallurgy. The book is a work of fiction.
Alternatively, mithril is aluminum, almost unobtainable in ancient times and thus seen as miraculous. Think about that the next time you crush a soda can.
Incidentally, in many cases modern armor is made of aluminum, because aluminum (being less rigid) can dissipate more energy without failing. A suit of chain mail made of aircraft-grade aluminum would seem downright magical a few centuries ago.
Aluminum was entirely unobtainable in ancient times, I believe. It fuses with carbon as well as oxygen, so there was no way to refine it. And it would have made terrible armor, being quite a lot softer than steel. It also suffers from fatigue failures much more easily than steel. These are some of the reasons it makes a bad, though cheap, material for bikes.
Pure aluminum can be found without reducing it yourself, but it’s very rare. You’d have to pluck it out of the interior of a volcano or the bottom of the sea- and so it seems possible that some could end up in the hands of a medieval smith, but very unlikely.
-Kirill Yeskov, The Last Ringbearer, trans. Yisroel Markov
Context, please?
Mithril is described as an alloy with near-miraculous properties, produced in ancient times, which cannot be reproduced nowadays, despite the best efforts of modern metallurgy. The book is a work of fiction.
Alternatively, mithril is aluminum, almost unobtainable in ancient times and thus seen as miraculous. Think about that the next time you crush a soda can.
(belated...)
Incidentally, in many cases modern armor is made of aluminum, because aluminum (being less rigid) can dissipate more energy without failing. A suit of chain mail made of aircraft-grade aluminum would seem downright magical a few centuries ago.
Aluminum was entirely unobtainable in ancient times, I believe. It fuses with carbon as well as oxygen, so there was no way to refine it. And it would have made terrible armor, being quite a lot softer than steel. It also suffers from fatigue failures much more easily than steel. These are some of the reasons it makes a bad, though cheap, material for bikes.
Pure aluminum can be found without reducing it yourself, but it’s very rare. You’d have to pluck it out of the interior of a volcano or the bottom of the sea- and so it seems possible that some could end up in the hands of a medieval smith, but very unlikely.
Oh, I don’t know, one would say the same thing about meteoritic iron, and yet there are well documented uses of it.
(Although apparently the Sword of Attila wasn’t really meteoritic and I got that from fiction.)
I dunno. I read The Last Ringbearer (pretty good, although I have mixed feelings about it in general), but it doesn’t seem interesting to me either.