Middle Earth Ranger Forum

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.

I always thought that the closest thing that we have to Mithril is Titanium (or an alloy of it). Not a 100% consistent with the description, but close.

I'm not sure that the difficulty of using it for coins eliminates it from consideration.

Of course, Mithril might be an idealized version of Titanium--or just an out right fantasy metal.

Brilliant write up Will Whitfoot, right up my street : I have certainly given much thought to which metal would be most like mithril, and came to the same conclusion as Harper. Mithril is discribed as hard, corotion resistant and light and titanium is all three of those. I have a small amount of exsperiance machining titanium at work and its far from easy. I have a small scrap of it in my box of bits and always wanted to make it into some small item to call mithril but never rose to the challenge, I remember all to clearly how quickly it blunted cutters and how easily it overheated

`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.

I have never noticed that refferance in the text that suggests mithril could be an alloy, I interpreted that as meaning mithril was the name of ether rock or ore, and that from that a number metals with different property's could be made (example: mild steel and high carbon steel both from iron ore).
Interesting, thankyou

Harper wrote:I always thought that the closest thing that we have to Mithril is Titanium (or an alloy of it). Not a 100% consistent with the description, but close.

I'm not sure that the difficulty of using it for coins eliminates it from cosideration.

Of course, Mithril might be an idealized version of Titanium--or just an out right fantasy metal.

I often wondered about the scarcity of mithril. When Gandalf says that the coat of rings Bilbo was given by Thorin was greater than the value of the Shire, well, that seems awfully rare and expensive. If one coat is as much as that much territory, there can't be more than a few dozen times what the coat contains. Unless, of course, Gandalf was joking/exaggerating, which is something that he was known to do.

I knew there was a thread somewhere here that discussed something about finding a methril-ish metal, I finally found it:
http://middleearthrangers.org/forum/vie ... it=Mithril

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Not quite the worth of the Shire, but expensive enough (free shipping):



https://www.ebay.com/itm/Titanium-XL-Si ... SwVNxaJOKW

Not very shiny though.

...put that in a big tumbler with some Sunsheen liquid and a couple gallons of stainless steel balls for two or three days and it would brighten right up.

Since it seems apparent that there is no actual analogue of Mithril, I think the more pertinent question is "What is the best analogue of Mithril for my application?"

Coins of Mithril would be...interesting.

Let's take Gandalf's assertion that Bilbo's shirt is worth more than the Shire--as Straelbora said, this seems like probably an exaggeration, but we'll under-guess to compensate.

What's the population of the Shire? Most sources I've seen say ~100,000--based on a population density similar to that of Saxon England. Of course, Middle Earth seems far less populous than Medieval Europe, so let's decimate that. 10,000 hobbits. If we guess that hobbits average 5 to a household, this means 2,000 households in the Shire.

According to my notebook based on research I did a while back, a medieval cottage would likely cost about 480 pence to buy outright--that is, 2 Pounds Sterling, or 2 Livre on the continent. So a very conservative value for all the houses in the Shire alone is 960,000 pence--£4000, just for the houses.

Now, these are medieval Pounds--slightly more valuable than our current ones. In fact, by rough, loaf-of-bread conversion rates, that's about £37 million in today's money, or $50 million US.

So, if a shirt of mail is worth $50 million...what does that mean for the coins?

The weight of a shirt of mail is variable, but let's say 10 kilos. That means you've got about 1¼ liters of steel. A medieval silver penny was about 0.14cc of silver, so volumetrically you could make about 8,000 coins from the same amount of metal it took to make a mail shirt.

This means that each mithril coin--the size of a medieval penny (like a US dime, but thinner) would be worth about $6,360 in today's money. And that's being extremely conservative in most of our calculations.

Good luck finding a merchant who can make change...

Anyway, if we wanted to make coins of Mithril that would fit most of the properties of Mithril one would expect of a coin, the problem I see with niobium is its density. Mithril is light--niobium is not. In fact, if we're looking primarily for bright lustre and low density, aluminum seems like it'd be the best candidate, as well as being easier on Will's dies.

And in fact, Aluminum would've been quite valuable in the 3rd age, as it was for us until we figured out how to electrolyze it.

Of course...conditioned as we are these days, the lightness of such coins would likely make them feel cheap, however wondrous our ancestors might have found them.

Will Whitfoot wrote:...put that in a big tumbler with some Sunsheen liquid and a couple gallons of stainless steel balls for two or three days and it would brighten right up.

I don't think it'd stay bright, though. If one were to anodize it at, say, 40v, however...



Or, one could ignore its stated properties in favor of its etymology--Mithril means "Gray glitter"--and raw titanium fits the bill quite nicely, I think.

SierraStrider- that's exactly the kind of calculation I was wondering about. Thanks!

SierraStrider wrote:This means that each mithril coin--the size of a medieval penny (like a US dime, but thinner) would be worth about $6,360 in today's money. And that's being extremely conservative in most of our calculations.

Good luck finding a merchant who can make change...

Anyway, if we wanted to make coins of Mithril that would fit most of the properties of Mithril one would expect of a coin, the problem I see with niobium is its density. Mithril is light--niobium is not. In fact, if we're looking primarily for bright lustre and low density, aluminum seems like it'd be the best candidate, as well as being easier on Will's dies.

And in fact, Aluminum would've been quite valuable in the 3rd age, as it was for us until we figured out how to electrolyze it.

Wow, mithril really is worth a lot of money, I had never thought to actually calculate it, maybe I should keep my scrap (titanium) in my kit as trading goods for emergency's.
I did wonder about the weight of neobium, it having just a bit less density than copper (no light metal) although aluminum would seem a bit to soft to mimic mithril and might get scratched quickly, spoiling the effect. Even so, it was defiantly valubel before electrolysis came along:

and the minor emperor Napoleon III reserved a prized set of aluminum cutlery for special guests at banquets. (Less favored guests used gold knives and forks.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... _gold.html

Sadly I don't think mithril has a perfect alternative

I will admit to a metallurgical bias against aluminum (and zinc for that matter). I've seen so much cheap aluminum and cast zinc junk that I have developed a sort of "ethical" bias away from the low-melting-point base metals towards the (as I think if it) upper tier base metals... copper, silver, brass, bronze, iron, steel. I agree that for maile shirts, titanium is a pretty nice analogue for mithril. For coins, titanium is unsatisfying... too light to feel right. Niobium just feels more like a coin in the hand.

When Greg Franck-Weiby and I designed the Elvish "Hollin" coinage of the second age, we concluded that the Elves would base their denomination system on the metals. So there is one coin design, with four metals... the lowest denomination is copper, patinated brown.. the "fall leaf". Then the pure silver "winter leaf", the gold (or brass) "summer leaf", and finally the green anodized niobium "spring leaf". I never did try to figure out what ratios each had to the other. Silver would typically be 10x to 20x silver. Silver would be 20x to 80x gold, but the gold to mithril ratio I never attempted to determine.

Interesting - I'd not heard of niobium before you mentioned it Will.

A year or two ago I had an idea for a "character piece" crafted from titanium rings - the story behind it was that it had been a family heirloom made from the last remaining rings of an ancestor's mithril shirt, torn to shreds in the Fall of Fornost.
It would have made a good story I think, but I ultimately abandoned the idea in part because it broke the "rule of the commonplace" and in part because it just came out too big and chunky to look good. I ended up looking more Goth groupie than Dunedain.


Interesting stuff to work with though. The light weight eventually came to feel natural, but it was weird at first.