#tolkien #middleearth
Q: What Can Be Inferred from Bladorthin’s Spears?
ANSWER: I’ve only ever been asked a few questions about King Bladorthin, and I’ve answered the most obvious questions as best I can. He occasionally crops up in online discussions among Tolkien fans, and as I don’t really have anything to add to what everyone already knows, I refrain from responding to those conversations (even here on the blog).
That said, I was glancing through some online Bladorthin talk recently (some of the posts were years old) and it occurred to me that no one (in my experience) has ever asked or said much about the spears themselves. In decades-old discussions long ago I remember that I and a few other people talked about what “thrice-forged” means. Let me quote the relevant passage in The Hobbit for reference:
From that the talk turned to the great hoard itself and to the things that Thorin and Balin remembered. They wondered if they were still lying there, unharmed in the hall below: the spears that were made for the armies of the great King Bladorthin (long since dead), each had a thrice-forged head and their shafts were inlaid with cunning gold, but they were never delivered or paid for; shields made for warriors long dead; the great golden cup of Thrór, two-handed, hammered and carven with birds and flowers whose eyes and petals were of jewels; coats of mail gilded and silvered and impenetrable; the necklace of Girion, Lord of Dale, made of five hundred emeralds green as grass, which he gave for the arming of his eldest son in a coat of dwarf-linked rings the like of which had never been made before, for it was wrought of pure silver to the power and strength of triple steel. But fairest of all was the great white gem, which the dwarves had found beneath the roots of the Mountain, the Heart of the Mountain, the Arkenstone of Thráin.
So What IS “Triple Forging”?
I don’t know much about forging and the making of weapons, but a quick search of 19th century texts shows that Henry Marion Stowe’s The Metallurgy of Steel (1892) discusses in some detail the advantages of and reasons for reheating iron and steel and re-forging it to strengthen it. In a table titled “Influence of Direction of Forging, from Maitland’s Data” on page 195 there is an entry for “heated four times, thrice forged”. This table is also found in the 1889 Engineering and Mining Journal, Volume 49.
On the other hand, the 18th century text Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature, which explains how to make and harden steel, doesn’t describe triple-forging. Popular opinion (at least on the Internet) says that the concept of “thrice-forged steel” or iron goes back to Sigurd and Siegfried, but I can’t find any references to these phrases in either English or German prior to the 19th century. My ability to read 18th century German texts is limited to crude online translations, so I’ve hardly found anything definitive.
But phrases like “thrice-wrought” and “thrice-forged” occur in several poetic texts of the 19th century. In my blog post What Does “Thrice-Forged” Mean? I wrote: “Thrice-forging is a historically attested process developed by ancient peoples in Europe and elsewhere.” Unfortunately, I didn’t provide a reference for that statement. It’s possible I found one or more academic descriptions of such a process (perhaps describing re-hammering the iron in different directions), but a quick search of online literature for the current article returns nothing. And according to one paper, it appears that the quality of the steel had more to do with the quality of the weapon than the forging process itself.
I think – unless someone with expertise in ancient weapons drops by to correct me – that triple-forging is a more modern process that was perhaps named for or which inspired the 19th century poetic uses in literature. There are some occult-related texts from the 17th and 18th centuries that may use the phrase, but I didn’t want to spend the time browsing them.
My thinking on the “thrice-forged” nature of the spears for now is that it’s just a poetic description inspired by 19th century literature and perhaps late 19th century metallurgy.
Gold Inlay Really Was Used in Ancient Weapons
I had better luck researching the use of gold inlay. It was quite common and popular around the world and is probably a technique that goes back thousands of years. I can’t find a definitive history or timeline of the use of gold inlay.
It would not have made a weapon particularly expensive. Nor would it have impacted the usefulness of the weapon. Gold inlay, and other decorative uses of metal on wooden hafts and metal blades, was used either for decoration or to emblazon the weapon with lettering.
Norse and Germanic smiths often used gold inlay to put names or curses on swords. Other cultures used gold inlay for decorative purposes on spear and axe shafts.
So when I began pondering the mysteries of Bladorthin’s spears, my first thought was that perhaps they were intended for cermomnial purposes. Maybe, I thought, each of his armies received a spear with gold inlay – sort of like the eagles mounted on staves that Roman legions carried with them. But it seems that gold inlay isn’t that special.
How Many Spears Were There?
Another reason why I first thought the spears might be ceremonial is that I couldn’t imagine thousands upon thousands of spears being piled up in Erebor (by Smaug). The gold might have made the spears appealing to him (a dragon), but where would the spears all be placed? They are only mentioned once. It’s not like Tolkien says there was an entire armoury (or more than one) devoted to them.
You would think that weapons for 2 or more armies would run into the hundreds or thousands. So would Smaug really have piled them along with the rest of the gold and trinkets? They’d be broken by his great weight eventually, or rot away. That’s why I thought there might only be a few ceremonial spears.
But I think the whole phrase “the spears that were made for the armies of …” is simply a figurative way of describing an ambiguous number of old weapons that were of little value or interest to Thorin and his companions. There could have been 2 spears (the start of a much larger order that was never finished) or 20 spears or 200 spears. Maybe most were destroyed by Smaug and some survived, either by chance or the dragon’s whimsy. Maybe there were scattered bundles around the mountain awaiting shipping or in various states of completion.
As this story was originally composed for children I doubt Tolkien gave much thought to how many spears there were, what state they were in, or if they were all collected in the same place.
So we can only assume that Bilbo saw at least 2 spears, probably more, but maybe didn’t see all of them. The reader is free to imagine that some or most of the spears were buried, stored away elsewhere, or had been destroyed. We’ll never know.
Who Made the Spear Shafts?
I can’t think of a single passage where Tolkien described any Dwarves working or shaping wood. About the closest they come to using wood in any capacity is making campfires.
There must have been Woodmasters who sought out the proper trees for making spears and knife/axe-hafts, right? Were they Dwarves or Men or someone else? It’s hard for me to imagine a group of Dwarves walking through the woods picking out saplings for making spears. That just doesn’t fit with the fannish stereotype of Dwarves, masters of stone.
But perhaps I’m overthinking the deal. It could be they simply ordered loads of spear shafts from merchants and then added the spear heads and gold inlay.
The fact that Thrór’s people were manufacturing spears tells us something about Erebor’s culture: they either included woodcrafts in their specialties or they traded with people who provided them with wooden objects to use in their work.
Can We Infer When Bladorthin Lived?
The text doesn’t say that production of the spears ended when Erebor was attacked. They could have been ordered and not delivered/paid for 100 years before Smaug attacked.
All we know for sure is that Bladorthin ordered the spears from Erebor. The Dwarves lived there (under Thrór II) from Third Age year 2590 to 2770 (a period of about 180/1 years). It seems unlikely to me that Thrór would have hauled a load of unfinished spears from his people’s ancient home in the north. I mean, maybe he would have done that – if they were being made when the dragons drove the Dwarves out of the northern mountains.
In that case, Bladorthin could have lived and died in the 26th century (Circa. 2500-2590). And maybe he was a far northern king. For all we know he was a Dwarf (but not of Durin’s Line – and yet even that doesn’t seem to make sense).
It’s also possible that Bladorthin outlived Erebor. If he was awaiting delivery of the spears when Smaug attacked, that means he wasn’t king of Dale (because Girion was “Lord of Dale” – and some people object to any suggestion that Dale had kings before Bard, even though King Theoden was Lord of the Riddermark – but I digress).
Assuming Bladorthin and Girion were contemporaries in any capacity (even if Bladorthin died before Girion), then it follows that Bladorthin was not king of Dale or Lake-town (which had never had a king, at least by the time Bilbo visited in 2941).
If we assume for the sake of discussion that Bladorthin was an Elf (a popular fan theory, although his name doesn’t fit with any known Elvish style), then the existence of the spears tells us nothing.
Actually, we haven’t learned anything from the existence of the spears at all. We don’t even know if the gold inlay was on the spear heads or the shafts (or both).
Conclusion
To answer my question more directly, “what can be inferred from Bladorthin’s spears?”, technically: nothing.
However, the “thrice-forged” nature of the weapons though probably a literary device could be used as an argument to say there was something magical about the spears. That would at least justify Smaug’s keeping them around rather than using them for kindling when he wanted to enjoy a slow-roast Dwarf or pony. The use of gold inlay would complement a magical spear-head, though I doubt it would be necessary for it (in Tolkien’s imagination).
Tolkien’s Dwarves did use magic, by the way. Many people believe they didn’t, but Tolkien mentions Dwarven magic in several passages.
People writing fan fiction or developing role-playing adventures might find something useful in the above ponderance. As for the rest of us, well, maybe we’ll continue pondering about Bladorthin, his armies, and his spears for centuries to come.
See also
Why Weren’t Bladorthin’s Thrice-forged Spears Delivered?
Who Was King Bladorthin in The Hobbit?
What Does “Thrice-forged” Mean?
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Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
I don’t have any direct expertise, but I do follow the blog of someone who does. https://acoup.blog/2020/10/09/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-iva-steel-yourself/
Multiple forging is a myth that was largely promulgated by post Bessemer process academics (so, 19th century and early 20th century). To make good steel, you need a pretty precise amount of carbon in the iron. Too much carbon and it’s too hard and brittle to use. Too little and you’ve got something that will bend on impact and isn’t good either. For medieval and renaissance era weapons, you’re looking for a carbon content of about 0.6%-1.2%. If these are wholly ceremonial weapons, it might not matter much if they weren’t in that bracket, but assuming they were ever intended to be used on anyone, this is really important to get right.
The problem is that the smelting processes are not going to leave you with that proper carbon amount. Bessemer and subsequent industrial processes smelt your metal in a blast furnace and leave it with lots of extra carbon that needs to be removed prior to forging it into whatever you’re making. But ancient ironworking didn’t use the Bessemer process, and bloomery production produces iron with virtually no carbon in it. So these kinds of blacksmiths, and the dwarves assuming that basic physics and the ironworking production match our own reality, need to come up with a way to introduce carbon into their iron to turn it into high quality steel.
Fortunately, there are ways to do this. And hot iron will naturally absorb carbon from the surrounding area. And the prevailing academic understanding of Tolkien’s day (which remember, is post-Bessemer and thus nobody is actually using these techniques anymore) was that repeated forging was used to reheat the metal and give more time to introduce carbon to get it to the proper ratios. However, experimental efforts to actually do this inevitably fail; and we’ve since developed a pretty robust theoretical model as to why it can never work. Carbon absorption for hot but solid iron (say, the iron you’re forging) is slow; it takes hours to penetrate the bar but the item will only be heated on the forge fire for a fraction of that time. Even if carbonization takes place, it only would penetrate to the outermost layers. You can’t just leave your iron in the forge for hours either; it will actively burn (bad) and it’s also extremely expensive to do so. You also run the risk of the carbon being “beaten out” by the oxygen in the forge works (Dwarves need to breathe, right?) to not properly carbonize your iron into steel but instead make 4Fe(OH)3, more commonly known as rust.
Prevailing academic consensus of today thinks that cementation was the primary method of introducing carbon to iron to produce steel in pre-modern Europe. Bloomery processes would also have been possible, but from what I understand, the evidence for doing that in Europe is very weak. But both processes would have been done prior to forging, with bloomery done when you’re smelting the iron out of the ore it was mined in, and cementation done as you’re shaping that smelted iron into bars. (Both processes work somewhat similar in that you heat the iron up in a carbon rich but oxygen poor environment, but not enough to truly forge it)
TL:DR. Multiple forging was not really a thing that happened. It’s intended effects of improving carbon content in low-carbon iron to produce steel do not actually work. However, it was a (mistaken) academic consensus of Tolkien’s time, and possibly something JRRT might have consulted a colleague and gotten about and gotten the then-current understanding of ancient blacksmithing. That’s almost certainly how he heard about it and put it in the Hobbit.
If you’re really interested in the ins and outs of ancient iron production and metalworking, this book comes very highly recommended, although I’ve not read it myself https://www.amazon.com/EARLY-METAL-MINING-PRODUCTION-Craddock/dp/1560985356
How many Maia can dance on the point of a spear?
“Armies,” not regiments, not the king’s personal guard. That’s a whole lot of sharp, pointy objects, no matter how a child might imagine things. I don’t buy the notion they’d have been doled out sparingly
like the standards of Roman legions – the quantity or financial loss would hardly have been memorable. (The local historical society treasures a well-burnished wood staff carried by our Civil War troop, its flag or banner long gone or bestowed separately to a commander, dignitary, or mathom-house. The tarnish on its small, silver commemorative plaque explains why grand King Bladorthin might have specified gold).
Triple-forged is a term understood by fans of smithery. Steel of that quality (not unlike Damascus steel) seems likely to be specified for practical, armor-piercing purpose.
“But Papa, wouldn’t the cunning Dwarves have wanted pre-payment or at least a substantial deposit for such a large custom order?”
“An excellent question, my bright little daughter! Maybe we’ll learn more if King Thorin regains his throne and finds the ancient account books have survived the dragon-fire.”
I’m most intrigued by this bit of (potential) foreshadowing, “…the necklace of Girion, Lord of Dale, made of five hundred emeralds green as grass, which he gave for the arming of his eldest son in a coat of dwarf-linked rings the like of which had never been made before, for it was wrought of pure silver to the power and strength of triple steel…” Sounds like mithril to me.
Not much later in the narrative Thorin dresses Bilbo in a coat of mail. Although described as having been “…wrought for some elf-prince long ago. It was of silver-steel, which the elves call mithril,” I can’t help but wonder whether if those two mail shirts were one and the same. We know JRRT intended a revision of The Hobbit; perhaps this is one of those discrepancies he intended to address?
Now, as Girion’s necklace was found in the hoard and bestowed upon the Elvenking, both payment and merchandise ought not to have been in the Dwarves possession. There’s the possibility that Smaug had captured the mail coat and added it to his hoard. But then again, perhaps there were multiple marvelous coats of mail.
But I digressed… and here’s another… ‘King Bladorthin’ rolls off a storyteller’s tongue just about as nicely as ‘the cats of Queen Berúthiel.’ Sometimes an embellishment is just an embellishment.
Regarding Dwarves use of wood. They obviously had use of wooden furniture, in The Hobbit we even see the remnants of it in the Chamber of Thrór:
“They passed through the ruined chamber. Tables were rotting there; chairs and benches were lying there overturned, charred and decaying.”
Whether they made it themselves is other matter, but I wouldn’t put it past them. Dwarven mansions usually had access to the forests nearby, there were forests around the Mountain and on it’s slopes, there were woods in the valley of Nanduhirion/Azanulbizar (and this forest was only cut down when the Dwarves needed pyres to burn their dead after battle). The forests would be useful as source of fuel wood obviously could be used for fireplaces, hearths, furnaces whether in form of charcoal or just the wood logs (though we also hear in The Hobbit of the Dwarves mining coal so… :)). Also seeing that Thorin had some skill with bow and would know a bit of hunting, as seen by his hunt for the deer in Mirkwood…maybe the Dwarves were using the resources of the forests from time to time, and obviously the wooden shafts of spears, arrows and other such weapons would be naturally needed, Dwarves could also potentially trade for wood especially of the kinds that they required with other folk, wood would be also needed for the shields, even if they were later plated with metal.
Besides while the Dwarves are most often associated with working in metal and stone, at times they may have used other materials like leather and horn, Thorin took a bow from the armories of Lonely Mountain a bow of horn:
“Then Thorin seized a bow of horn and shot an arrow at the speaker. It smote into his shield and stuck there quivering.”
” A light helm of figured leather, strengthened beneath with hoops of steel, and studded about the bring with white gems, was set upon the hobbit’s head.”
They did make arrows, including the Black Arrow if to believe Bard so they needed the wooden elements :). The horn bow, the animal horn could also imply the use of other exotic materials, maybe they also did stuff with ivory and bone? Obviously Dwarves could obtan much in traffic, one would guess that the pearls they loved they must have obtained them in trade too to make craft with the pearls :), and we hear of the mithril chainmail with crystal and pearls, and the necklace of silver and pearls that Dain gave Bilbo.
Bladorthin is one of the more fascinating elements of backstory, adding some depth to the world and detail, it’s fun to speculate about him, one could speculate is he a king of Dorwinion maybe? But if someone would want to imagine him having connection with Dale…maybe he was just an ancestor of Girion? Hence “long since dead” :)…though by the time when the story takes place it’s all long time since hehe. The value element of the spears, and the gold inlay may have influenced Smaug to take possession of those along with the rest of the treasure, in the end there was a lot of weaponry and armor adorned with precious metals and gems that was part of the hoard. Dragon’s greed simply took what was there en masse as long as it had the beauty and precious element of jewels or precious metals.
The black arrow was special. I’ve always wondered what it was made of, or if it was enchanted. It doesn’t make much sense to preserve only a single arrow through generations. If Bard’s ancestor had a quiver full of arrows from the Lonely Mountain, what happened to them all?
That would be an interesting concept for fan fiction.
Bard seems to have believed it was special, as he says:
“‘Arrow!’ said the bowman. ‘Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!’
The Dragon swooped once more lower than ever, and as he turned and dived down his belly glittered white with sparkling fires of gems in the moon — but not in one place. The great bow twanged. The black arrow sped straight from the string, straight for the hollow by the left breast where the foreleg was flung wide. In it smote and vanished, barb, shaft and feather, so fierce was its flight. With a shriek … Smaug … crashed down from on high in ruin.”
The Hobbit, Ch 14, Fire and Water
So it was always recoverable, it was really durable and had quite a speed and ‘power’ to it when shot :). The arrowhead being forged in the mountain it’s sheer quality would be great, the steel tip probably being dark also could explain it’s name dark steel of special make maybe? Sometimes the objects seem to have interesting properties that are hardly explainable, like those staves of lebethron wood that Faramir gave to Froo and Sam, they supposedly were made by the mountain folk of Gondor:
“The hobbits’ packs were brought to them (a little heavier than they had been), and also two stout staves of polished wood, shod with iron, and with carven heads through which ran plaited leathern thongs.
‘I have no fitting gifts to give you at our parting,’ said Faramir; ‘but take these staves. They may be of service to those who walk or climb in the wild. The men of the White Mountains use them; though these have been cut down to your height and newly shod. They are made of the fair tree lebethron, beloved of the woodwrights of Gondor, and a virtue has been set upon them of finding and returning.'”
One would wonder these were ‘enchanted’ as well? The virtue of ‘finding and returning’ on gondorian wooden staff, so maybe Dwarves could do similar things with a metal arrowhead or whole arrow, shaft and steel tip and make it durable and useable for centuries have higher accuracy or some sheer ‘luck’ in it allowing it to return to it’s owner :). Yeah one material for a fanfic.
Tolkien was an expert in Old Norse as well as Old English. The textual evidence in some sagas mention gold inlaid spears. Archeology backs this up, but only the spear head was inlaid. Dwarf made spears might have metal shafts, though.
As far as ceremonial weapons, the concept is a bit controversial, because archeologists tend to label anything ceremonial that they don’t know the use for. I doubt that ceremonial weapons existed in Middle Earth. Gems and decoration are common on weapons that are used in battle, especially if they are special (special here implying magical)
If I recall it properly, Bladorthin was the first name that Prof Tolkien considered for Gandalf… maybe I read it in his biography by Carpenter? Maybe some hint about the origin or the meaning of the name is there to shed some light on the final character, the great king Bladorthin?
Yes, Bladorthin was the original wizard’s name. I and others have written collectively extensively about the name. My view is in the minority (I don’t think it was ever intended to be Elvish). I don’t think anyone’s been able to derive much from the nomenclature.