The Dwarves mined for mithril «too greedily and too deep», ultimately releasing a Balrog, Durin’s Bane. Once it destroyed the kingdom of the Dwarves at Khazad-dûm, Middle-earth’s only source of new Mithril ore was cut off. Even if each link perfectly holds its shape, when a cave troll puts his bulk behind a spear, you have a spearhead-shaped piece of Mithril piercing your chest cavity nearly as deeply as the spearhead would have. Effectively, you have reduced the sharpness of the edge, but the pounds per square inch have not been reduced sufficiently to withstand the mass of a pissed-off cave troll and convert a potential puncture into a mere bruise.
It’s also known as the White Ring, the Ring of Water, or the Ring of Adamant. It’s set with a white stone made of adamant (hence the nickname). The name of the ring is derived from the word for «water» in the Quenya Elvish dialect. In the books, it’s described as barely visible to anyone other than a ring-bearer, like Frodo. Sam describes it as looking like a star on Galadrial’s fingers. She took the ring with her after its power faded upon Sauron’s defeat, and she left Middle-earth.
What real-world substance most closely corresponds to mithril? closed
These are contradictory material properties, so no, there is no existing substance that can match. Plate armor has the problem of penetration between the plates, but a hybrid of chain-mail or woven kevlar protecting the inter-plate areas could be effective, though not exactly as light or thin as Egyptian cotton. It was in the Third Age that the dwarves awakened the aforementioned Balrog and failed in their attempts to fight it.
The mithril coat
- «The wealth of the Dwarves was not in gold or jewels, the silver of the Dwarves; nor in iron for it’s worth was more than that of gold, and now it is beyond price; for little is left above ground, and even the Orcs dare not delve here for it.»‘…
- Frodo’s mithril shirt, also known as a mithril «coat» or «vest,» that saves him from an orc’s spear (a cave troll in the movies) in the Mines of Moria has a history all of its own.
- This places the discovery of mithril in the Second Age of Middle-earth.
- For the literal-minded reader, it is unclear whether or not mithril is a real metal; many have thought it to be platinum or iridium, however, both are far too heavy to qualify as candidates.
- The stone was lost in the defeat of Sauron in the Disaster of Gladden Fields.
But any skilled smith might have been able to have enhanced its properties still further, by controlling the crystalline structure of the material — an important determinant of its hardness. Swordsmiths can control the properties of blades by forging them in just the right way to ensure that the edge is extremely hard and brittle, but the main body of the blade is flexible. A key step in the forging of a samurai sword involves wrapping the sword in clay, with only the edge exposed. The sword is then heated to above what is known as the ‘martensitic’ transition, when the steel adopts a different kind of crystalline configuration.
Or we would be, were it not for the extremely recent discovery of a family of simple intermetallics that are shiny, strong, light — and ductile. They all consist of a regular metal, such as copper or silver, allied with one of a member of the intriguing and exotic ‘rare earth’ metals, hardly known to the general public outside Tom Lehrer’s song The Elements. The researchers’ favourite is yttrium silver, an intermetallic in which atoms of silver and atoms of the rare-earth element yttrium occur in precisely equal amounts.
What is Mithril in The Lord of the Rings?
It’s during The Hobbit that Thorin presents the mail shirt to Bilbo. After returning to the Shire following the events of The Hobbit, Bilbo lends the shirt to Mathom-house. Michel-Delving, Located in the Shire capital of Michel-Delving Mathom-house is a museum where hobbits store some of their many mathoms (a hobbit term for anything they couldn’t part with). As a linguist, Tolkien placed meaning on mithril even when naming it.
The only way to obtain a mithril object at the end of the Third Age was to either use heirloom mithril weapons and armour that were produced, or to melt down objects to forge new ones. However, most of the mithril produced by the Dwarves was gathered by Orcs and paid as tribute to Sauron, who was said to covet it. The coat eventually comes into the possession of the dwarves of The Lonely Mountain and becomes part of their massive store of treasures.
Mithril Was an Important Asset for Frodo and All of Middle-Earth in Lord of the Rings
There’s possible contextual evidence that Legolas was one of few elf princes in Middle-earth in the Third Age. Although a mail-shirt of mithril rings isn’t quite the same thing as a sword, one might imagine how a smith might put it through a quench-hardening process. This would leave the core of each ring strong but flexible, and the outer surface brittle but very, very hard — and with a network of microscopically fine cracks that might give the material a sparkly appearance if turned in the light. Mithril is the prized ore of Durin’s Folk in Khazad-dûm, “lighter than silk, harder than iron, it would best our proudest blades. Add a little vanadium, chromium and carbon, though, and is mithril real it becomes an alloy called stainless steel — rustproof and very much harder than pure iron.