Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Skills: Goldsmithery
The One Ring was famously engraved with the final line of its dark theme song, “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them”. In this essay, I am exploring motifs and myths surrounding goldsmiths, the history of goldsmithery in the Real World, how to make gold things, and attempting to answer a physics question concerning the One Ring.
Motifs and Myths
As discussed when describing the work of Aulë the Vala, most smith deities specialize in bronze and iron rather than gold, a contrast to the elf Celebrimbor who made the other Rings of Power. In Celtic mythology, Lugh represented the sun along with having the epithet Samildánach meaning “skilled with crafts”, suggesting that goldsmithery could be part of his repertoire. Lugh’s other job titles were warrior, even killing his grandfather in combat, and a fili, or a combination of seer and poet. Goldsmithery is also present in Greek mythology. My beloved D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths features a pair of gold and silver robots fashioned by Hephasteus as a walking aid (29).
In folklore, stories describe the origin of “goldsmith work” (A1447.3). A goldsmith might have a magical forge (D2178.7), while their reputations widely vary. Some goldsmiths are protagonists and the lover of the heroine (P447.7) while others merely covet her (P447.8). Still others are treacherous (K2249.3) or unlucky (N256.1), even losing all their friends from cheating them out of money (L353). When considering the two main goldsmiths of The Lord of the Rings, treacherous Sauron while disguised as Annatar teaches unlucky Celebrimbor to create a magical or technologically advanced fire in his forge.
Goldsmithery in the Real World
The science of metallurgy first developed in Eurasia during the eleventh through nineth millennium BC. The earliest known smiths lived in the Levant and used metals that existed naturally and were fairly easy to find, including lead, copper, and silver. They learned to smelt metal, heating it up to high temperatures to burn away other materials. These skills slowly traveled west. By the eight millennium BC, people in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria could smelt metals to create jewelry. By the fifth millennium BC, much of Europe had access to this technology.
Gold entered the picture around this time of the Balkans of Southeastern Europe, likely an invention of this area. This time, the technology spread east to the Levant. Gold smelting reached the British Isles by the mid-third millennium BC. Ancient Egyptians and their Nubian neighbors developed their own gold working techniques around the same time. The word Nubia literally meant “gold land”. Phoenician traders brought these products and technologies around the Mediterranean, leading to new innovations in Ancient Greece and Rome.
Across the water in the central Andes mountains of South America, Chavin, Moche, and Inca people created gold jewelry with different techniques than their European counterparts beginning around the second millennium BC. Rather than using fire to soften the gold, nuggets were hammered into sheets and then sliced into decorative shapes. To me, this seems like a much safer method! Craftspeople were highly honored even in death, and their tools were considered holy.
Holy goldsmiths also existed in medieval Europe. St. Eligius, also called St. Eloy, lived in the late 6th to mid-7th centuries in France and is the patron saint of goldsmiths. He was best known for a unique sense of fashion, wearing a hair shirt underneath his “gold-hemmed silk vestments”, which combined the clothing of simple monks with high ranking bishops. St. Eligius was allegedly so brave that when he encountered the Devil near the monastery forge, he seized the Devil’s nose with red-hot tongs, forced him over the anvil, and beat him flat for many days.
In the Renaissance, goldsmiths were similarly revered, although not to the point of sainthood. Lorenzo Ghiberti lived in Florence during the late 14th to mid-15th centuries, a hundred years before Michelangelo, who admired his work, and around the same time as Donatello. Alas, Ghiberti was never honored with a teenage mutant ninja turtle despite his remarkable skill. His best known work is the doors to the Baptistery of St. John. The north doors depict Stories of Christ, while the east doors depict ten stories from the Old Testament and are called Gates of Paradise. The decorative panels were made by casting individual figures in hot, fluid bronze and attaching them to bronze panels before gently brushing the surface with a gold-mercury paste. Carefully firing the piece smelted away the mercury and fused the gold to the bronze. Once again, the people of the Andes had a much safer method.
While these two goldsmiths were widely beloved, the same respect is not always given to other goldsmiths. The folklore of greedy, treacherous goldsmiths found across Eurasia is rooted in ancient stereotype. In India, the Sunar caste is known for their work as goldsmiths. This caste is part of the Vaishya varna, or the large caste ranked third out of four. Their name comes from Sanskrit, suvarna kar or gold worker, and they historically believed they were made by the goddess Devi to combat a gold giant named Sonwa-Daitya. Sunar occupy a precarious position in society. At times, they are valued, as they create valuable objects. Gold jewelry is highly popular in India regardless of caste and used like money among lower castes, who will pawn jewelry to Sunar smiths in times of need. In this way, the treatment of Sunar is similar to that of moneylenders in late Medieval Europe: they are considered low enough to be disliked and stereotyped, but high enough that people of upper castes tolerate them.
How To Make Gold Things (Safely or Not)
Goldsmiths have historically used a wide range of techniques. Lost-wax casting dates from at least the fourth millennium BC and was developed in Southeast Europe. As the name implies, a model is first carved in soft wax with a low melting point. A soft material that hardens with heat rather than melting is used as a mantle on the outside of the wax, preserving its shape. The piece is heated, and the wax is poured out. Several more complicated steps are needed before the object of precious metal can be molded.
Filigree are gold ornaments cut like lace. These designs were popular in the Mediterranean from Ancient Greece through the European Middle Ages, while a different style was developed in Asia. Also popular to the Ancient Greeks was granulation, although this was first developed in Ur around the mid-3rd millennium BC and perfected by Etruscans during the 7th and 6th centuries BC. For this technique, very fine grains of gold dust were soldered to the surface of jewelry.
In the case of the One Ring, engraving is the most important technique. The engraving tool is known as a burin, a word from French that came to English in the 1660s. The earliest engravers lived in German and northern Italy, especially Florence, during the mid-15th century. Its status as an independent art form did not last long. Painters quickly discovered that engravings could be covered with ink to make copies of their own work, while talented engravers were commissioned to copy famous paintings of deceased artists. Copyright law did not much exist back then.
Historically, rings were engraved by professional jewelers, from carved signets used by kings throughout Eurasia to gifts for their gods. Gems were more often carved than the ring itself in antiquity. The practice was revived during the Renaissance due to a love of all things neoclassical. Engraved messages on the ring band itself seemingly did not become popular until the Late Georgian period and Victorian period in Great Britain. It seemed most popular on memento mori jewelry, meaning “remember you will die” in Latin. The One Ring’s association with death matches this concept. As for modern ring engraving, the tool of choice is a laser, allowing customers to choose from a wide range of fonts and artwork. Sauron likely did not have a laser, as he would have used that technology for killing people.
Final Question about the One Ring
While the history of engraving and goldsmithery in the Real World is now much more clear, this still left me with a question about the One Ring: was it actually made of gold? The melting point of gold is 1,063 °C (1,945 °F). The temperature of volcano lava is between 700 to 1,200 °C (1,300 to 2,200 °F). Accordingly, a cursed volcano has lava hot enough to melt a cursed gold ring.
However, the Ring is cool to the touch within seconds of Gandalf pulling it from the fire. I am not going to attempt in-depth analysis concerning the law of cooling, which was published by Sir Isaac Newton as “Scala Graduum Caloris. Calorum Descriptiones & Figna” in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1701. Based on this law, a ring has low mass and high thermal conductivity, but high density and low surface area. This means the temperature drops from so hot that it would instantly take off your skin to cool enough that it is merely unpleasant within fifteen minutes, much different than Gandalf’s timeline. Even with Gandalf’s tongs creating rapid heat sink, or quickly pulling heat away from the ring, the cooling time would take several minutes. When looking at extant metals, aluminum cools much faster than gold, one reason it is used while cooking, but an aluminum ring would still take several minutes to cool. Unsurprisingly, the One Ring’s magic breaks fundamental laws of physics. The Ring cannot be made of true gold, but what material it could be is unknown.
