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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 7696776" data-attributes="member: 19675">Elves and dwarves made many weapons, true, but AFAIK, the assertion that they made many weapons of such extremely high quality as you describe- analogous to D&D magic weapons- is, I think, unsupported by the text of the novels.It is not a question of imbecility, but rather of the scarcity of material, skill and time.  Look at real-world swordsmithing: in any given culture in which the making of swords is a major concern, there will be many sword makers.  But among those, only a certain small fraction will have the requisite level of skill and available time to fashion a truly well-made weapon.  It is like the difference between the skills needed to make a handcrafted Rolls Royce Drophead Phantom and a Toyota Corolla.  And not every maker is going to be that skilled.Mithril is not going to be as available as simple steel.  I have personally held in my hands actual gemstone material that was so rare that the stone in the palm of my hand represented 30% of the world's supply.  And in the days of Napoleon, aluminum was rarer than gold- the knowledge & technology of how to recognize, find & refine it was limited to just a handful of people.  We don't know precisely what "mithril" is, because it is fantasy unobtanium.  But like the gemstones and aluminum, Middle Earth material scarcity and the limits of societal mining & smelting tech will put some kind of cap on mithril's availability as a resource.  JRRT's Dwarves & Elves weren't going to Gnome Depot to buy tons of the stuff every other weekend.And even if you have the skill and material in sufficient time, it probably isn't as if crafting a fine weapon of mithril is a quick job.  If JRRT imagined the process is analogous to real-world production, working mithril probably takes more time- and possibly specialized equipment- to work as compared to lesser weapons-grade metals.  The very qualities that make it a desirable metal might also make it devilishly hard to work with.  That will increase the time it takes to make any given piece, possibly by orders of magnitude.  Again, the real world illuminates this point: a medieval swordsmith could produce many dozens of weapons of standard steels in the same time it took to craft a single blade of high carbon steel such as you'd find in a master crafted katana or Damascus sword.If you want a titanium alloy steel, for instance, you have to be able to work with titanium, which requires exactly that because of its extremely high melting point.  Ditto platinum as compared to other precious metals: any jeweler who uses it has specialized tools to work with it.  This is even more true if the material is unusually hazardous to work with.  I've had custom guitars made, and when choosing which wood would form the body of the first one, I narrowed it down to a few choices, one of which was cocobolo.  However, I quickly abandoned it: cocobolo requires special tools and safety precautions to work because its oils can ruin certain tools and increase the toxicity of its dust.  As a result, not many woodworkers use it, despite its beauty.  Those that do invest in tools that they only use on cocobolo, and on having better than average workshop ventilation or even full-on respirators.So I reiterate: just because Dwarves and Elves had Mithril weapons, it does not necessarily follow that they had lots of them.</blockquote>

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