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What Are Your Thoughts? On the other hand, Holly Black has faery folk who need to take medicine if they want to live in cities, because all the iron and steel makes them sick.
Best answer: That sounds reasonable to me. Everyone knows that crystalline structure is crucial to the physical and metaphysical properties of matter : posted by muddgirl at PM on June 9, According to wikipedia and other sources cold iron is called cold iron because it is cold to the touch. Not because it is forged in any special way. The reasoning behind fairies having a weakness for iron was because it represented the forces of technology and industry and progress.
Now since iron has gotten really common since the times that many of these stories started when people make new stories they put different more esoteric rules on what a fairies weakness is.
They put all sorts of provisos on it because it would weaken the sense of menace that scary serious fairies are supposed to have if they are especially weak to everything. So people have treated cold iron as meaning weird iron. Would steel work? It basically matters what mythology you are trying to be consistent with and what would make the best narrative for you. I basically think that if your story is set in a time when metal tools are sort of special at all then yes, steel would work, if it is set in a time where metal is problematically common then you would need to change it to special iron.
For practical reasons. According to wiki 'cold iron' is just iron. And apparently the modern usage of this phrase is, in fact, 'cold steel. Also: posting an AskMe in hopes of getting a specific answer is poor form. If you feel like lying to your niece, maybe tell her they are out in the woods and meadows, or something. Ahh, beat! Best answer: Cold Iron is the key This means meteoric iron, or bog iron.
To expand a bit, some faeries are also known as barrow-people, creatures who lived in barrows. Barrows, we modern folk know, were generally bronze-age tombs Hence the legend that they didn't like iron and, I suppose, steel. In the book Steel Magic by Andre Norton if I recall correctly from many many readings as a pre-teen 30 years ago , a stainless steel knife from a picnic set is used in that magical way.
Response by poster: paisley: I'm not looking for a definitie answer from MeFi, I'm actually trying to collect more folklore and try to come up with something satisfactory. So now I'm sorta Asking MeFi for help in choosing which rules are more comon in fiction, and maybe more interesting: 1 faeries are affected by any post-bronze technology; so a lump of cold iron, a wrought iron horseshoe, a steel spoon, or an ipod would each be equally effective against the fey. Meaning that by now, they've all diminshed and gone to the west or whatever because we've polluted the world with technology.
So you've got to get really far away from the things of man to have a chance of running into a faerie that's still around. So there could be faeries under your bed RIGHT NOW, and you'd have to find a rare piece of meteor or bog iron to keep them from taking you in your sleep and leaving a changeling. Lord Dunsany writes about the best description of a magic sword and its making in "The King of Elfland's Daughter" that I have ever read.
So, it's not just the materials. The "Cold iron" is more fun because it allows for terror, suspense, and the necessity for talismans. You could say that it works because the iron straight from the ground or from the sky is more pure than steel and alloys and therefore more damaging. I've read stuff about horseshoes bringing luck and the suggestion that this is a remnant of the idea, but that is speculative to say the least.
I've read about church bells scaring off faeries et. So, can anybody point me to some actual, pre-modern source for the idea that elves, faeries, or whatever have some vulnerability re cold iron? Mortimer Registered User Validated User. Was it Shakespeare?
Something from a Midsummer Nights Dream? On a side note, I always took 'cold iron' just to mean iron, metal tending to be cold when out of direct heat "give 'em a taste of cold steel" sort of thing. It comes from Rudyard Kipling as best as I can tell, who introduced the concept in his "Rewards and Fairies" short stories, which also included the poem "Cold Iron. TheMouse garmonbozia Validated User.
Mortimer said:. Starry Notions She who wonders Validated User. The idea is that fairies are vulnerable to human industry I think. I'm critical of the statement "I've never come across a primary source [for peasant gossip that was only recorded when literate people found it relevant or interesting]" though. We come across a lot of gaps in stuff like this where "common knowledge" was so common no one bothered to record it.
Truth be told, it may never have been a belief of the people who were on the ground floor with the fey.
Especially since when the people who supposedly used this knowledge of cold iron were around, "faeries" were gods or ancestors, not fairies. Validated User. The idea that fairy creatures are allergic to iron is a very old one, probably almost as old as iron working; it might or might not have something to do with distorted re-re-re-re-tellings of some early iron age people's conflicts with more primitive, still bronze-using cultures.
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