Talk:Iron in folklore

message: I'm not sure that this excerpt from the first section of this article really belongs in an entry on "Iron in Mythology":
:Lawlor (1999: p.103-104) charts the lifecycle, origins and transmutations of iron from supernova to helium:
:
:    Supernova explosions are believed to be triggered by the iron of the star's core collapsing and dispersing. Looked at :symbolically, stars burst like germinating seeds, and the core iron, which completes the cycle of internal densification, converts :back to helium, the original element that was formed in the heavens.
:
:As iron and nickel have the highest binding energy per nucleon of all the elements,[1] iron cannot produce energy when fused, and an :iron core grows.[2] This iron core is under huge gravitational pressure. As there is no fusion to further raise the star's :temperature to support it against collapse, it is supported only by degeneracy pressure of electrons. When the core's size exceeds :the Chandrasekhar limit, degeneracy pressure can no longer support it, and catastrophic collapse ensues.[3]
This seems more like information that would belong in a more general article on iron rather than an article that is supposed to be focusing on iron in mythology. Nortonew 13:49, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Supernovas and mythology? 

message: I fail to recognize the relevance of the section on magnetic fields and wayfinding to mythology. Should we delete or move it?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.65.233.238 (talk) 16:30, 25 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It's totally irrelevant; I'm removing it (nearly a decade after it was brought up). -165.234.252.11 (talk) 15:56, 16 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irrelevant section? 

message: I've heard it claimed that "cold iron" being a distinct form of metal rather than just a poetic flourish in description is a completely modern invention.
Newtkeeper (talk) 21:02, 8 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I've heard it both ways and am curious myself.  I've read, for example, that "cold iron" describes to an iron object made by hammering soft bog-iron into shape without heating it, but to me that seems implausible from the perspective of metallurgy--impure soft iron tends not to be especially malleable nor ductile, and prone to crystallization and then fracture when deformed beyond rather narrow limits.  You can't even really do that with metal as soft and malleable as copper unless you anneal it regularly to prevent crystallization and embrittlement, said annealing normally being done with a gas torch.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.41.40.24 (talk) 13:38, 3 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cold iron 

message: When this was done, the following section was gutted. In other words, something is lost when the subject changes from "cold iron in general" to "only as regards folklore". But who decides when "folklore" ends and "modern usages" begin? 
I've readded a version of the first paragraph of the archived fantasy fiction section below, to maintain a minimal note of how the concept of "cold" iron is very much alive even in today's storytelling.
CapnZapp (talk) 10:58, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merging Cold Iron into Iron in folklore 

message: No reference for this, but: the dislike of the fae for iron might be about the invasion of the stone-age tribes of the British Isles by Celts who had discovered iron.
203.13.3.89 (talk) 03:18, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Faeries 

message: The article mentions "Cold iron" in quotes but doesn't clarify its meaning.  The quotes seem to suggest that there is a specific meaning to that phrase besides the literal interpretation of "low-temperature Fe", or perhaps that the phrase is being quoted from folklore, but this is never clarified.  The article should explicitly clarify whether "cold iron" refers to a particular state or composition of iron, some particular natural/supernatural treatment of it, some "magical variety", or if its meaning is unclear or left to interpretation. —Cousteau (talk) 11:52, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: There are some definitions afterwards in "In fiction", but these seem to be modern uses of the term (and, in any case, these definitions come after the section using the term).  If the term didn't have a clear definition in folklore usage, this should just be clarified in some way. —Cousteau (talk) 12:11, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition (or lack of) for "Cold iron"