My name is Tyler Benson, I am a writer, a blogger, a language enthusiast, a father, a husband, a nerd, and a behavioral health worker. Four months ago I added an item to that list of jobs and hobbies, a Blacksmith.
I never intended to add that to my list, but the story of how that happened is the first step on our journey.
A few years ago I started writing a fantasy story that involved sword smithing pretty heavily. It was an amazing story, and I still want to write it. However, I found that when I wrote the parts about the creation of a sword it sounded ingenuous and unrealistic. I felt the problem was that I had never experienced anything even remotely close to sword smithing. I could not accurately write about what it was like to pull a white hot piece of metal from a forge and mold it with hammer and anvil to my will. Certainly it would be hot work, but what would it smell like? What does it feel like to strike hot steel with a hammer? There are a lot of things I write about which I have never experienced, that is the power of imagination and language, but I felt pretty strongly that I needed to experience blacksmithing in order to write it authentically. Last Christmas, 2018, my wife bought me a knife making class with Jordan Borstelmann at Crooked Path Forge. It was a 1 day class which would produce a blacksmith's knife. I took the class in July of 2019. When I walked into Jordan's forge I had never swung a hammer at anything more than nails and wood mauls, and I had no knowledge of Blacksmithing beyond the basic tools and very basic procedures (Hammering, quenching, tempering ect.) I felt a little out of place in the class, the other guys were hunters and knife enthusiasts. These guys already knew something about metal... All three knew how to weld. I was just a nerd, and a writer, my experience with knifes was in filleting fish and simple pocket knives. So for the first five or ten minutes of the class I felt a little out of place, but Jordan and I started cracking D&D jokes and I felt more comfortable. After a short safety briefing we started up the gas forge and went over the first steps of forging a knife. The first time I pulled my steel from the fire and set it on the anvil, something interesting happened to me. It's like my body knew what to do! When the hammer connected with the steel and moved it, I felt a connection to the work. It was surreal, here I was using nothing but a simple hammer to change something that was the benchmark of what is "hard". I was taking the bones of the Earth and molding it to my will, like a Potter molds clay. The instructions given seemed obvious to me, and I seemed to have a knack for consistent strikes. The class ended too quickly for me. I wanted more. I craved more!
Over the next few weeks I read obsessively about blacksmithing. I started listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos about blacksmithing. I have not slowed down. The second time I went to a forge I started to make a hammer. The third time I helped create an amazing piece of art that will be auctioned off at a conference. Two weeks ago, in October of 2019, two friends and I built our own forge, and I have started blacksmithing on my own.
I have never really felt a connection like this to any other craft or hobby, not even writing.
Already on my journey I have encountered questions and mysteries. Consuming media about the craft you will find that most videos have an assumed level of knowledge. Being a guy who has very little or no experience with tools or metal, I hope with this blog I can appeal both to the fellow baby-blacksmith and the veteran. I will try to be as transparent as possible, documenting my successes as well as my failures... and there will be failures.
So that being said, where do we start an understanding of Blacksmithing? Do we start from a historic perspective or a scientific one?
I'll tell you want, let's do both!
Billions of years ago there was a star somewhere nearby where our solar system is now. Exactly where is not known, but it is suspected the sun was born in a star cluster about 2600 light-years away. The star that birthed that star cluster would have been very large; many times the size of our sun. The story of blacksmithing starts there, in the center of that star. Stars are massive nuclear fusion reactors. They convert hydrogen into helium by subjecting the gasses within to tremendous heat and pressure. Estimations about how much helium a star produces in it's lifetime are the definition of mind-blowing. As a star moves towards the end of its life it begins to run out of hydrogen to fuse into helium, so it starts to fuse helium into lithium, then into beryllium, sodium, and on and on until the heat and pressure are not enough to fuse the bits of atoms together. During this phase the star grows into a red super giant and swells to the size of Jupiter's orbit. Even at this size it cannot readily fuse iron into heavier elements, and a core of solid iron begins to form within the star. At some point, when the iron core is about the size of the Earth, it reaches a critical point where gravity stops winning in the tub of war that is fusing more atoms together. When gravity looses the iron core explodes, and a supernova happens. In this instant all the heavier elements are created; gold, platinum, uranium, and others. These are expelled from the explosion and spread over a huge area.
This was a much simplified explanation of solar nucleosynthesis, but it is basically how all the elements we interact with were made. Think about that the next time you touch a steel kitchen knife or pair of scissors. Especially think about that if you are shaping iron, either with a forge or with machines; the iron you are working with is quite literally a piece of a long dead star... Yeah. Humanity's success is directly linked with our relationship with these elements. Our first implements were reeds, bone, stone, and sharpened wood. Over millennia we began to use flint, and eventually copper and bronze. All these forms if metalworking started with using small found nodules of metal found on the ground. Even in the case of iron the first iron blades were made from found iron and even meteorites, such as the dagger found in King Tutankhamen's tomb.
Smelting and casting copper, tin, and bronze came after the metals had been found and used in small amounts.
Around 3000 years ago Iron began to be produced in amounts large enough to supplant bronze as the main tool metal.
The Advent of iron tools caused an agricultural explosion across Europe. This is really where our historical narrative begins, the Advent of ironworking.
Having laid a broad historical foundation, along with some science about the origins of iron, I think we can split our attention between telling the story of blacksmithing and actually doing it. Like I said, I am learning all this as we go, we will likely jump around as we learn. We will jump from project to project, topic to topic as we go. So let's jump into it! Next time I want to talk about the forge I built, and some of the things a forge has to do.
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