Time for that #worldbuilding thread I teased yesterday!

My worldbuilding threads are focused on secondary world fantasy, i.e. stories set in a place or on a world that despite having lots of things in common with our world, most notably humans, is definitely not our world.

For example, GoT/ASoIaF, or N. K. Jemisin's novels prior to The City We Became, or Benjanun Sriduangkaew's Winterglass and Mirrorstrike.

My past worldbuilding threads can be found by this search: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Asapphixy%20%23worldbuilding&s=09

Today, I'm going to be talking about one of the most central objects of fantasy: weapons and armor.

Legendary and iconic weapons, with names and histories, are of course well established in many, many cultures the world over.

Westerners grow up hearing about swords like Excalibur and Durandal; readers of English language fantasy fiction are aware of such iconic weapons as Narsíl or Stormbringer. There's also the Green Destiny from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for movie buffs.

And many, many bladesmiths working today first wanted to learn how to make swords after watching the opening credits of Conan the Barbarian (1982):

Note that making a sword by casting a preform blank from a mold is *not* done with steel because (a) the temperatures required for molten steel are simply absurd for even a charcoal or coke furnace and (b) it's not remotely necessary and arguably undesirable.

And under no circumstances would you quench a sword or a knife in *snow*, for fuck's sake. It'd crack like glass just from the thermal shock.

The engraving on the hilt is pretty accurate, though.

Anyway. I'm going to try to keep digressions like that to a relative (for me) minimum because getting into the minutiae of metallurgy and bladesmithing would be distracting, and I want to keep this high level.

The thing about all weapons and armor — from the simplest hunter-gatherer spear to the most high-tech modern military arms — is that they exist in a context of technology, resources, and cultural biases that affect everything from basic shapes and use cases to the transmission…

of knowledge of metallurgy and bladesmithing itself. Picking and choosing things from disparate cultures and times because they look cool … well, I'm not going to say you're bad and wrong for doing it, but I'm going to have questions if you have Japanese-style swords matched …

up with 16th century English full plate. People used war hammers, war picks, and combination polearm weapons like the glaive-guisarme against armored cavalry for good reasons.

If you take nothing else away from this, remember this: they need to make sense together.

And they should make sense in context of other steel and iron tools, such as utility knives, agricultural equipment, woodworking tools, and more.

With that said, let's move on to some basic information and terminology.

Steel is an alloy of iron and cementite, or iron carbide. You may have heard references to carbon being in steel; some of it is free carbon, and some is in the form of iron carbide crystals.

In general, the higher the carbon content, the harder and more brittle the steel or iron. Wrought iron, which has minimal carbon, cannot be hardened via heat-treating, and remains ductile and malleable at room temperature, although it doesn't move easily.

Historically, the most resilient blades combined wrought iron or low-carbon steels, which reduced brittleness and the consequences thereof, and high-carbon steels for cutting edges and points, which were hardened by heating and then quenching.

This could be accomplished by making steel in layers, like Japanese blades are famous for; this was also done, to varying degrees of success and utility, by Northern European smiths during the Viking Age. One technique that's attested for the latter from archeological finds …

was to make pattern-welded blades by folding and twisting low-carbon iron and steels to be the core of the blade and forge-welding a relatively small amount of high-carbon steel around the edge.

It was common throughout the pre-modern world to make axes by forge-welding a high-carbon blade to a wrought iron head, both for war axes and tool axes.

I've already dropped the next couple of terms above.

Pattern-welding is a type of forge-welding. Forge-welding involves taking two materials, heating them up to an appropriate temperature, and using pressure (i.e. banging on them with a hammer) to turn them into a single piece of material.

It's used not just for steels but for other metals as well; this exquisite tsuba (guard) I posted yesterday is an example of a Japanese technique, and the product thereof, called mokume gane ("wood-grain metal").

I don't know for sure what the materials are in the above example, but I'd guess copper, silver, and … I'm not sure what the dark metal is. (If you want to fall down a rabbit hole of fun with metallurgy and patination google "irogane.")

[knives] Here are some pictures of what's called mosaic Damascus in modern bladesmithing jargon, and they're also examples of pattern welding:

I've seen some utterly mind-blowing things done by modern bladesmiths, up to and including legible writing, by very carefully combining different kinds of steels (all high-carbon alloys, just with other materials to affect color) in very specific ways.

This sort of artistic forging effectively requires modern industrial steelmaking to create, but I see no reason one couldn't use magic to achieve similar precision, with perhaps an even broader range of materials and colors.

In modern bladesmithing parlance, "Damascus" is any sort of layered forge-welding, which is a reality that I discovered must really irritate some pedantic Wikipedia editor since any article related to pattern welding goes out of its way to say such usage is incorrect.

(cont'd)

(I thought I'd go a lot longer before hitting the cap on tweets that can be simultaneously posted.)

I'll get back to Damascus steel in a bit. First, I'm going to finish off outlining the basic approaches to resolving that dilemma of hard and brittle vs resilient and ductile.

In addition to various approaches to layering and such, the other common solution, and really the simplest, is case hardening: sticking hot iron in some charcoal or other organic material to carburize the outside.

This would be followed by the quench: putting the steel in some medium to quickly cool it after bringing it up to critical temperature. Modern bladesmithing usually quenches in oil, because it's much less of a thermal shock than quenching in water.

(It's also really fucking badass to watch, because it's hot enough to set the oil on fire. Not explosively, but there's often a bit of flame when you put the hot metal into the oil, and if you pull it out too soon you might lose your eyebrows.)

Historically, blades might be quenched in water; depending on the quality of the steel, it might simply not harden enough to crack, because a lot of historical steel was still pretty ductile and often not very homogenous.

There was also differential hardening; in traditional Japanese swordsmithing, clay is used to coat the part of the blade not being hardened so that it doesn't reach critical temperature and remains soft.

More terms worth knowing:

Annealing: in the case of steel, specifically, it's a process of heating and slowly cooling steel that makes it softer and more malleable.

Billet: a block of steel ready to be forged into a blade.

The first iron and steel smelting was done via what's called a bloomery: a furnace into which iron ore and charcoal is fed from the top, and as the ore heats it breaks apart and the slag melts out of it, and the stuff collects towards the bottom of the bloomery into sponge iron.

This is a porous iron alloy which still has a number of impurities that can readily compromise the structural integrity of the steel, most notably phosphorus and sulfur. From that it can be worked to reduce the impurities and form it into billets.

Most bloomery steels want to be heated for forging in a charcoal forge, in order to maintain the necessary carbon content, since the process of forging tends to burn up the carbon in the metal.

However, the earliest metallic iron to be worked didn't come from iron ore, but from meteoric iron. This is the only naturally available metallic iron on the surface of the Earth. It's got some distinctive crystalline structures and it can be worked cold.

Indigenous people of Greenland found several massive pieces of a meteor and removed chunks to work into small tools and knives, which they often used as trade goods. It'ss now on display in a couple of Western institutions, most notably the American Museum of Natural History.

Whether the Indigenous Greenlanders were compensated for this is unclear, but probably not.

Prior to iron, the materials tools were made out of throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia were first stone, then copper and bronze in turn. (Indigenous Americans and Australians had very different approaches to tool and weapon creation that are outside the scope here.)

(And, to be clear, I'm saying "outside the scope" because this is already a long thread and it's only going to get longer and my knowledge of Indigenous weapons and armor is not sufficient to even do a high-level overview with any reliability.)

Stone is, obviously, brittle, but in this case, knapping of stone tools capitalized on this by taking advantage of natural shear lines to create extremely sharp cutting edges.

Copper can be found in naturally occurring metallic form, as well as in ores, and can be worked cold.

Over time, annealing, smelting, and casting were discovered, in all likelihood independently several different times. There is archaeological evidence of copper smelting in North America as early as roughly 8,000 years ago, and in China at least 5,000 years ago.

Naturally occurring metallic bronze was typically arsenic bronze (copper-arsenic alloy); sometime before 4500 BCE tin alloy bronze was developed through the refinement of bronze smelting and casting.

Moving to iron was not necessarily an obvious step, mind.

Wrought iron is more ductile than tin alloy bronze, for example.

But iron ore is ridiculously common, and it didn't require finding relatively rare deposits of tin and trading for it. (Seriously. Tin from ancient Cornwall made it as far as Phoenicia.)

Of course, in a fantasy world, you're not constrained to real world forces of solar system formation and resulting planetary body geology, so, y'know, if you like bronze, fill your boots.

Oh, one more note on bronze: for the most part, Bronze Age people didn't distinguish between brass and bronze in their nomenclature. Even the English word "bronze" is derived from a word for brass.

Now, let's talk about iron and steel.

First, I'm going to circle back to that Damascus steel thing.

The historical Damascus steel was legendary for its ability to simultaneously hold an edge but also be flexible enough to not break and springy enough to return to true.

It was named for the city in Syria because that was the center of production of Damascus steel blades. It was forged from what's called wootz steel in English, which was manufactured in parts of southern India and in particular on Sri Lanka.

Wootz steel had a couple of other names (e.g. Hindustani steel) that reflected (more or less) its region of origin. Either way, I want to stress: for roughly two thousand years the finest steel in the world was being produced in a region of South Asia.

The reason I'm telling this story is that the knowledge of making wootz steel, and therefore Damascus blades in the historical sense, has been lost. While travelers from elsewhere in Asia and, in the late 17th century, Europe visited the steelmakers of Sri Lanka and did their…

best to document what they learned, they were unable to duplicate the material. Metallurgists from the 19th century through to the present day have been studying existing samples to understand what gave it its remarkable properties, and while modern metallurgy can produce…

steels that match or surpass its qualities, there is still much that remains unknown.

One of the traits of Damascus blades was that they had contrasting light and dark layers, generally of a very fine grain, and early attempts to duplicate it focused on that property.

It's this trait that modern Damascus steel is named for (and I once saw copper-nickel mokume gane referred to as "Damascus," which I would love to show to whichever Wikipedia editor loses sleep over that sort of thing).

And, it turns out, that in most of the world the overriding theme of metallurgy is that knowledge of it is lost regularly because it simply wasn't valued in and of itself, as a general rule. People would learn and pass on stuff what was needed but there was no formal tradition.

Except in Japan, most notably.

But I'll get to that.

Anyway, China figured out blast furnaces centuries before Europeans did, probably a thousand years or more. Which is an important development in the production of steel, because it allows for greater production of better quality steel.

Why? Short version: they can get hot enough to fully melt iron ore, and the heating process introduces a LOT of carbon, enough that you're generally not worrying about decarburization in the forging process — in fact, you *have* to decarburize it.

Because what comes out of a blast furnace, pig iron, is even harder and more brittle than cast iron.

Incidentally, this is about as far forward as I'm going to follow the technology curve, because getting much past this involves heavy industry and gets kind of out of scope.

And now I need to eat something, after which I shall return and continue.

Okay! So, I was talking about how the history of Damascus blades reflects an overall trend of metallurgy knowledge in pre-industrial times not being valued except in the immediately pragmatic sense.

In the case of Viking Age northern Europe, for example, we only know as much as we do because of archaeology, history, and in particular art history. Archaeology, obviously, is because of the artifacts found in various digs, which is how we know about their pattern welding.

History because of various texts from contemporary writers and from people writing while the Viking Age was still recent history. And art history from both the Sagas and roughly contemporaneous art depicting Norsemen going a-Viking.

Museum pieces of European arms we see are often (by no means always, but often enough) blades intended as a display of wealth and power. Consequently, their owners didn't give a shit about the blade quality; all the value was in the jewel-encrusted hilt.

There are museum pieces with hilts that are stunning (or sometimes merely garish) examples of the jeweler's artistry of the time, and blades with visible file marks because they're just not hardened at all.

Another factor in this is in how the guild system that came to dominate Western Europe, including Great Britain, partitioned and hoarded knowledge even when crafts overlapped. Silversmiths, goldsmiths, and jewelers were all separate guilds, for example, despite similar domains.

And that's before you get into blacksmiths, whitesmiths, tinsmiths, bladesmiths, and more.

Obviously, the case of wootz steel is different, since it's basically white colonialism and the advent of firearms to blame for that.

While Chinese metallurgy was better at preserving knowledge over time, there's still a lot that went unrecorded and a lot of history (such as how long Chinese people had blast furnaces) is known through archaeology rather than bureaucracy.

(And if you know anything about the long history of bureaucracy in China you might be grasping just what I'm saying here.)

In Japan, however?

A very, very different story.

And while I'm not historian enough to fully untangle the driving forces, I know enough to say that the samurai class is probably a key factor.

In Japan, swordsmithing and related disciplines have a long history of being high art.

The samurai originated as a warrior nobility class — they were the hereditary officers and leaders of military forces in the Warring States period.

Even after that, they worked hard to maintain their value as a warrior class, which is why they had the right to go around routinely heavily armed.

My guess is that this motivated a culture that valued a good blade more than ornate fittings.

(Eventually, the fittings did get more ornate, but a little more on that later.)

In Japan, there are historical swordsmiths whose names are known centuries later, the way we might know the names of people like Michelangelo or Leonardo.

There are blades — and I mean the *blades* — that are centuries old whose provenance is fully documented all the way back to the original forging.

And there are manuals detailing swordsmithing that are just as old.

The fittings have a comparable history. That tsuba I showed above? There are families whose centuries-long trade is *just making tsuba*.

Mokume gane? It originated as a technique for creating fittings for weapons.

That's why I emphasize the word "blades" above. The *blade* is the tachi, or katana, or odachi, or naginata. They have stamps identifying the maker on the nakago (tang). When not being daily carried for active use, they are stored in plain fittings to preserve them.

That's as compared to how we view knives and swords in the West, where it's inclusive of the fittings save for the scabbard — the blade, crossguard, grip, and pommel.

The point of this digression is that the strictly pragmatic view of weapons and tools is hardly universal.

The seemingly mundane can indeed be high art, and when it happens it comes with a whole ecosystem of associated artisans.

Now, let's move on to the next part.

You know how, way back at the beginning of the thread, I talked about how these things need to make sense together?

Let's talk about what that means.

Very tired right now. Going to finish this tomorrow instead.

Okay, I'm full of thoughts and off my ADHD meds (and the pharmacy is closed today so I have to wait until tomorrow) so let's get back into this!