A To Z Blogging Challenge 2023: Folk Tale And Myth In Fiction - I Is For Iron

 Iron, as I read on someone’s blog, is “kryptonite for fairies”. They can’t touch it, which is why, in the real world, parents would place something made of iron into baby’s cradles, to avoid the risk of changelings. Mind you, changelings supposedly happened anyway, but no matter. 

Why iron? That might be a real-world thing. The Bronze Age happened, followed by the Iron Age. Weapons made of bronze were not much use against weapons made of iron. The Dorian invasion which probably ended the Mycenaean era is an example of this. In Richard Powell’s Trojan War novel Whom The Gods Would Destroy, Odysseus and some companions, including the children who are the main characters in the novel, go on a journey during which they encounter some Dorians with iron swords. On Midsummer Eve, when everyone is busy celebrating the religious holy day, they sneak over to where some swords are being kept and steal two. Odysseus is not pleased, but gets the girl with them to weave them into the wool of some of their sheep. Later in the novel, the hero, Helios, has a vision of those people with their iron weapons invading all of his world.  

That novel is mostly out of print, but you can still get it in hardback or ebook on Amazon.

There was a belief that putting a horseshoe above your door was lucky. In Good Omens there is a horseshoe above the door at Jasmine Cottage, where the heroine Anathema Device is staying. It glows hot when Anti-Christ Adam Young’s dog, Dog, walks through(Dog is a hellhound).

 

In Pratchett’s Lords And Ladies it is explained that the probable reason for the horseshoe is because it was the cheapest form of iron for people who couldn’t afford anything else to protect their homes. That makes sense!

In any case, there is a lot of reference to iron in this novel as it’s about an invasion by the Elves.  The king, Verence, is stolen away because his fiancée, Magrat, refuses to take the invasion seriously and removes the iron from around a girl she is treating, who is mind controlled into doing what the Elves want. At the end of the novel, witch Granny Weatherwax has the unicorn that has been rampaging around the kingdom shod by the blacksmith, but with silver, not iron, which would be cruel. She is able to lead it into town using a hair, being a virgin, who can control unicorns.

Rudyard Kipling had a chapter on the subject of fairies and iron in his novel Rewards And Fairies. Here is a link to that chapter, in which Puck explains to the children who are the main characters why iron is an issue for fairies. 

 https://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/RewardsFaries/coldiron.html

I do wonder how fairies would cope in our world, in this Iron Age of ours; maybe that’s why we don’t see them any more?

Tomorrow: J Is For Japan