Forge And Anvil: The Spirit Of Smithing

The next fire-and-earth craft is blacksmithing, which is a complex and somewhat dangerous art, but incredibly important to our ancestors’ culture. The smith was the first craftsman to be so specialized that he was generally supported by a village or tribe in order to do smithing full-time; the first non-layman’s craft. The position was often passed along through families, and it was so necessary that Smith, in almost any language, is a very common name; in fact, my own last name, Kaldera, is a Romany adaptation of the Spanish Caldera, meaning cauldron, and refers to someone who makes cauldrons; i.e. a smith. In medieval Germany, the only ones allowed to carry the surname of Schmidt were members of the smith’s guild, which was known to be riddled with alchemists; the Church disbanded and attempted to cleanse it several times, without success. As the earliest of engineers, smiths were often on the ancient cutting edge of technology and science, and thus lumped in with magicians more often than not.

Many cultures have smith-gods; in fact, it’s almost a given in any culture more advanced than Stone Age. Greece had Hephaestus, the lame smith-god whose workshop was under a volcano - thus his Roman name Vulcan - and who won the hand of Aphrodite, if not her fidelity. The Germanic peoples had the legend of the smith Volund or Wayland, who was crippled by his kinsman in order that they might not lose a valuable smith. Supposedly this smith-crippling happened regularly, although there seems to be no other record of it; another possibility for all the lame smiths is that men who were not able-bodied were more likely to take up full-time trade rather than depend on heavy-labor farming or warmaking.

In the Celtic culture, Brigid the fire goddess is the patron of smiths, as well as many other things. (See Oimelc chapter.) Among the Norse, the dwarves became the faery race of smiths who could make anything out of metal, including Brisingamen, the most beautiful necklace in the world. In Afro-Carribbean Yoruba tradition, the jungle-hunter god Ogoun is also the divine smith. He is a saturnine, uncompromising deity who, after it was discovered that he had raped his mother, laid a sentence on himself of eternal work that never stops in atonement for his deed.

The rune Ken or Kano or Kaunaz is the official rune of smithcraft, an onomatopoeic word that mimics the repeated ringing of the hammer on metal. It is said that it takes seven years of hard work to become a proper blacksmith. Certainly smithing is one of the most impressive crafts, with its sparks and flame and hissing steam; it is easy to see how early people would see it as a kind of magic. Indeed, it has its own magical traditions,

If there is a pinnacle to the blacksmith’s art, it could be said to be the farrier’s craft. It’s hard enough to measure a hoof size and beat out a horseshoe that fits exactly and will never make the horse sore; it’s another still to be able to handle a huge skittish animal while banging nails into its feet.