The Riddle of Iron Part 4: The Historic Riddle of Steel

Part 1. (What is Sword & Sorcery?)

Part 2. (The Tower of the Elephant)

Part 3. (Jirel of Joiry)

Join me as I try to answer “The Riddle of Iron” in a continued journey to help move the great genre of Sword and Sorcery forward, for the glory of the #IronAge. 

Exhibit C: The Riddle of Steel

The featured image is the legendary Sword of Goujian, a sword forged in China during the Iron Age. Goujian was the King of Yue (now called Zhejiang) in 496 B.C., the last of the Five Hegemons, and once wielded that very sword.

To answer “The Riddle of Iron“, perhaps we should turn our attention to the philosophy behind “The Riddle of Steel” and see what answers it may bring.

Historically, once civilization achieved proper technology to heat and smelt iron (through use of a bloomery), blacksmiths found iron was stronger in some parts of the metal and weaker in others.

They started setting this harder, rarer metal aside to make more valuable objects like jewelry for the rich, or premium bladed weapons that held their edges far longer than normal iron. But they couldn’t figure out exactly how to purposefully make these stronger bits. They just knew it was somehow coming out of the kiln as a biproduct. Almost as if by magic.

This challenge was the real-world riddle of steel. And during that time period, many legendary swords were crafted in the quest to discover the answer, such as the Sword of Goujian. That sword, crafted from a mixture of different alloys including iron, is ~2,500 years old and somehow survived sharp, untarnished, and un-rusted despite being submerged in an ancient tomb aqueduct for about 1,000 years before finally being rescued by archeologists in 1965.

Of course, humanity eventually figured out that carbonizing iron was key to answering the riddle. Then they discovered that repeatedly quenching and tempering the blade would improve the final product even more.

But if we’re in the #IronAge of writing fiction, then we’re something like those blacksmiths trying to solve the mystery, the riddle of steel, creating rare legendary swords along the way.

Not everything’s been solved yet. We don’t have the perfect formula, which means the world we write in can remain magical and mysterious.

The magic is often in the seeking, not the finding.

If we do one day crack this secret, we can keep quenching and tempering our best stories (through revision) until they are so strong, they can no longer be easily ignored.

(In the next post, I’ll talk about the meaning of the Riddle of Steel within the context of the 1982 Conan movie.)