The Lord of the Rings’ Mithril, Explained

The only way to obtain a mithril object at the end of the Third Age was to either use heirloom mithril weapons and armour that were produced, or to melt down objects to forge new ones. However, most of the mithril produced by the Dwarves was gathered by Orcs and paid as tribute to Sauron, who was said to covet it. The coat eventually comes into the possession of the dwarves of The Lonely Mountain and becomes part of their massive store of treasures.

According to Wikipedia, the band is composed of Tom Morley (fiddle, bouzouki, mandolin, guitar), Andra Bohnet (Irish flute, penny whistle, fife, Celtic harp), Ben Harper (guitar, bass guitar, flute), and Sam Gaston (djembe, doumbek, percussion, melodica). One original Lord of the Rings trilogy star says he won’t be returning to Middle-earth anytime soon. Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films are widely disliked, but a decade later, it is time to reevaluate these prequels to The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies made Gimli, Merry and Pippin more two-dimensional, robbing film viewers of impactful character arcs.

Properties

It’s also known as the White Ring, the Ring of Water, or the Ring of Adamant. It’s set with a white stone made of adamant (hence the nickname). The name of the ring is derived from the word for “water” in the Quenya Elvish dialect. In the books, it’s described as barely visible to anyone other than a ring-bearer, like Frodo. Sam describes it as looking like a star on Galadrial’s fingers. She took the ring with her after its power faded upon Sauron’s defeat, and she left Middle-earth.

Its beauty was like to that of common silver, but the beauty of mithril did not tarnish or grow dim. Quench hardening does not work with metals that do not undergo the martensitic transition, but the elastic properties of metals more generally can be controlled by varying their microstructure through careful manufacture. There is, however, an intriguing alloy of nickel and titanium that undergoes the martensitic transition — and which, therefore, could be quench-hardened. The wonderful property of this alloy is that it is a ‘memory’ metal — it is light and flexible, but springs back to its original shape once bent. Mithril is just the right thing to make a tough corselet of mail rings.

What is Mithril in The Lord of the Rings?

But any skilled smith might have been able to have enhanced its properties still further, by controlling the crystalline structure of the material — an important determinant of its hardness. Swordsmiths can control the properties of blades by forging them in just the right way to ensure that the edge is extremely hard and brittle, but the main body of the blade is flexible. A key step in the forging of a samurai sword involves wrapping the sword in clay, with only the edge exposed. The sword is then heated to above what is known as the ‘martensitic’ transition, when the steel adopts a different kind of crystalline configuration.

The Rings of Power: What is Mithril, and Why is it Important?

These improved relations even allowed for elves such as Galadriel to pass through the mines and settle Lothlórien. Durin III went so far as to send an army of his own people to aid the elves in the War of the Elves and Sauron. The Dark Lord Sauron had a contentious relationship with the dwarves, knowing he would be hard-pressed to defeat the dwarves who dwelt so protected and strong in numbers deep within the Misty Mountains. Bilbo retrieves the shirt before setting out for the elf city of Rivendell in The Fellowship of the Ring.

1. Sam describes it as looking like a star on Galadrial’s fingers.
2. This song claims the origin of mithril to be when an Elf-warrior and a Balrog fought over a certain tree in the Misty Mountains that contained the light of the last Silmaril.
3. The films follow the adventures of humans, elves, dwarves, hobbits and more in Middle-earth.
4. It’s set with a white stone made of adamant (hence the nickname).

There’s possible contextual evidence that Legolas was one of few elf princes in Middle-earth in the Third Age. Although a mail-shirt of mithril rings isn’t quite the same thing as a sword, one might imagine how a smith might put it through a quench-hardening process. This would leave the core of each ring strong but flexible, and the outer surface brittle but very, very hard — and with a network of microscopically fine cracks that might give the material a sparkly appearance if turned in the light. Mithril is the prized ore of Durin’s Folk in Khazad-dûm, “lighter than silk, harder is mithril real than iron, it would best our proudest blades. Add a little vanadium, chromium and carbon, though, and it becomes an alloy called stainless steel — rustproof and very much harder than pure iron.