green slime said:
For example, give me more examples of references to Cold Iron, OTHER than that oft refered to poem.
Okay. For one, there was a character in the British TV comedy
Dad's Army, who had been a sergeant in some colonial war, who always said things like "the Fuzzy-Wuzzies don't like cold steel, they don't like it up 'em" whenever anyone mentioned a bayonet. This is presumably a caricarture of retired British NCOs. (As it happens, the Australians and New Zealanders are much more recent enthusiasts of the bayonet than the British, but my sergeant never once mentioned 'cold steel').
In his monumental history of
The Civil War, Shelby Foote quoted a report by a British observer who ignorantly criticised American cavalry practice in terms like this (I am quoting from memory): "The cavalry of both sides rides up to half pistol-shot and there, at a range where experience has shown that only a charge pressed home hard with cold steel is capable of effecting a result, they stop, exchange desultory fire with pistols, and withdraw."
Apart from other occurrences in Kipling (in the story cycles
Puck of Pook's Hill and
Rewards and Fairies) the phrase is not one I have come across very often. It isn't listed in my
Webster's dictionary or any of my materials science references, it isn't mentioned in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I have never come across it in decades of casual reading about the history of metallurgy or the history of technology. If it were a metallurgical technicality, I would expect to have run across it, or that one of the proponents of this view would have been able to cite a reference. As it is, it seems that there is more imagination than knowledge behind those statements.
If it were not for the Kipling (in which ordinary nails, boot-nails, a slave-collar, a cast-iron bathtub, and other everyday ferrous things frustrate fairy magic because they are 'cold iron') I might be persuaded to the view that 'cold' iron specifically referred to iron and steel made into weapons. That is what stereotypal British military types mean by the phrase. Fantasy writers probably picked up the term either from Kipling or from the same sources in folklore that he drew on. (For example the belief that an iron horse-shoe over the door scares away demons because the Devil was once beaten up by a blacksmith.)
I remain ready to be convinced that 'cold iron' is something special if someone can cite a reputable dictionary, encyclopaedia, or text-book. But as things stand it looks to me like 'hollow ships', 'noisy dogs', 'the fishy sea', etc.: not even as special as 'hot lead'.
Regards,
Agback
