Mithril... what is it and how to find it?
Posted: Thu Feb 08, 2018 5:58 pm
Having long been interested in crafting artifacts of Middle-earth, and being a "metal" kind of guy, I've long pondered the mythical metals of Tolkien's world. I have only found three of them: Galvorn, the black metal of the dark elf, Ithildin that mirrors only moonlight, and of course Mithril. Gandalf says in "The Fellowship..."
`Mithril! All folk desired it. It could be beaten like copper, and
polished like glass; and the Dwarves could make of it a metal, light and yet
harder than tempered steel. Its beauty was like to that of common silver,
but the beauty of mithril did not tarnish or grow dim. The Elves dearly
loved it, and among many uses they made of it ithildin, starmoon, which you
saw upon the doors. Bilbo had a corslet of mithril-rings that Thorin gave
him. I wonder what has become of it? Gathering dust still in Michel Delving
Mathom-house, I suppose.'
So ithildin is actually an alloy of mithril, not a separate metal.
So what are the clues here? The Dwarves "could make of it" a metal. The phrase "could make of it" implies that the corselet of mithril rings Frodo bore was not pure mithril, but rather an alloy of some kind, and that the dwarves were particularly skilled in manipulating those alloys.
Of course... search the periodic table as we might, there is no one element in the real world that stands out as the perfect analogue of mithril. The fact that it can be "beaten like copper"... meaning that it probably has a face-centered cubic crystal structure, making it malleable. Titanium is the first thought... it is light and with the addition of aluminum and vanadium can be made into a very strong alloy. But for the purpose of making coins of it... titanium is terribly hard on dies, and it has the property of burning with a very hot flame if you overheat it. The search broadens to include the other members of the "transition metals" group... on the periodic table they are just left of center, on the fourth, fifth, and sixth rows. Other members of the group-of-six include vanadium, niobium, tantalum, hafnium, and zirconium. Vanadium and zirconium are body centered cubic and rather brittle. That leaves niobium, tantalum, and hafnium. All three have extremely high melting points, making them good choices against dragon-fire. Tantalum is dark and very heavy, with a density of 16g/cc... nearly as heavy as gold. It can be anodized an amazing deep-purple color. It is a great stand-in for galvorn. Hafnium is also quite dense at 13g/cc... but it's also quite stiff and hard to work with... almost as difficult as titanium. So we come at last to niobium. Of the group, it is the easiest to come by... a bit expensive at $160/lb (about half or a third the cost of silver per ounce) but it's about the density and workability of copper, but work hardens more slowly (you can keep pounding on it longer before it breaks) and can be anodized to an astonishing rainbow array of colors. It is primarily used in aerospace as a rocket-nozzle lining, and in steelmaking as an alloying agent in high-strength specialty steels.
Niobium is what we've settled on as the analogue for Mithril.
The downside is that, unlike silver, it's not easy or simple to recycle niobium scrap. It takes very high temperatures in a hard vacuum to remelt or reprocess. So the upshot is that I have a lot of strangely shaped little clippings of niobium, too narrow to get any more coin blanks out if... that might be useful to others to make small mithril objects... like earrings. I could easily supply some material to anybody on this list who would like to try working with it.
`Mithril! All folk desired it. It could be beaten like copper, and
polished like glass; and the Dwarves could make of it a metal, light and yet
harder than tempered steel. Its beauty was like to that of common silver,
but the beauty of mithril did not tarnish or grow dim. The Elves dearly
loved it, and among many uses they made of it ithildin, starmoon, which you
saw upon the doors. Bilbo had a corslet of mithril-rings that Thorin gave
him. I wonder what has become of it? Gathering dust still in Michel Delving
Mathom-house, I suppose.'
So ithildin is actually an alloy of mithril, not a separate metal.
So what are the clues here? The Dwarves "could make of it" a metal. The phrase "could make of it" implies that the corselet of mithril rings Frodo bore was not pure mithril, but rather an alloy of some kind, and that the dwarves were particularly skilled in manipulating those alloys.
Of course... search the periodic table as we might, there is no one element in the real world that stands out as the perfect analogue of mithril. The fact that it can be "beaten like copper"... meaning that it probably has a face-centered cubic crystal structure, making it malleable. Titanium is the first thought... it is light and with the addition of aluminum and vanadium can be made into a very strong alloy. But for the purpose of making coins of it... titanium is terribly hard on dies, and it has the property of burning with a very hot flame if you overheat it. The search broadens to include the other members of the "transition metals" group... on the periodic table they are just left of center, on the fourth, fifth, and sixth rows. Other members of the group-of-six include vanadium, niobium, tantalum, hafnium, and zirconium. Vanadium and zirconium are body centered cubic and rather brittle. That leaves niobium, tantalum, and hafnium. All three have extremely high melting points, making them good choices against dragon-fire. Tantalum is dark and very heavy, with a density of 16g/cc... nearly as heavy as gold. It can be anodized an amazing deep-purple color. It is a great stand-in for galvorn. Hafnium is also quite dense at 13g/cc... but it's also quite stiff and hard to work with... almost as difficult as titanium. So we come at last to niobium. Of the group, it is the easiest to come by... a bit expensive at $160/lb (about half or a third the cost of silver per ounce) but it's about the density and workability of copper, but work hardens more slowly (you can keep pounding on it longer before it breaks) and can be anodized to an astonishing rainbow array of colors. It is primarily used in aerospace as a rocket-nozzle lining, and in steelmaking as an alloying agent in high-strength specialty steels.
Niobium is what we've settled on as the analogue for Mithril.
The downside is that, unlike silver, it's not easy or simple to recycle niobium scrap. It takes very high temperatures in a hard vacuum to remelt or reprocess. So the upshot is that I have a lot of strangely shaped little clippings of niobium, too narrow to get any more coin blanks out if... that might be useful to others to make small mithril objects... like earrings. I could easily supply some material to anybody on this list who would like to try working with it.