On Cold Iron

I am out of town this week, but I hoped to write a Saturday Note! I thought I’d try to talk about something again instead of doing a sort of argument/criticism piece. And not about Assassin’s Creed this time! 

RIP Anthony Head.

On Cold Iron

So, in folklore, faeries (and other creatures, but faeries are the famous ones) are weak to iron; specifically, cold iron. This is why people hang up horseshoes! The bad fae can’t get into your house if there’s a horseshoe hung up on the doorframe! Now precisely what is meant by ‘cold iron’ is sort of up in the air. In a lot of fiction, because it’s easier, they generally go with just iron.

Someone in the comments on ImpishIdea (now dead–I can probably find a Wayback page, but I expect it to take way too long to be worth it) once explained that it referred to a specific type of iron, forged in a way that didn’t require full smelting. You heated it to shape it, sure, but you didn’t necessarily pour molten iron into a mold or something.

Or it could just mean that iron is sort of, like, specially cold to faeries. Which sounds weird, but if you were to grab a chunk of ice with your bare hands, or heck, dry ice, it might hurt quite a bit! I think a lot about the line from Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke where the sea serpent describes Nettlebrand’s scales by saying that they “burn like ice.”

I have a friend who, when I brought this whole thing up to him, wondered if blood counted? Because blood has iron in it. Most blood, anyway; some creatures, like horseshoe crabs, have a different metal base. Interestingly, the elves of Discworld also have the same-colored blood (blue green), with the implication that their blood is based off of copper. If you have a setting where fae-creatures might eat humans or use their blood, I have some questions about how the iron in blood affects them.

And the idea that iron, an element found in the Earth, is of the Earth, and is in our blood, is something that is potent against faeries–creatures who are often seen as coming from another world entirely–there’s something appealing in that line of worldbuilding.

When I was sporking Hexed by Kevin Hearne, that book presents a very weird take on the idea: that ‘cold iron’ means ‘meteoric iron’. His reasoning is that faerie magic is born from the Earth, and so iron that isn’t from Earth is particularly potent. I suppose there’s a sort of logic to it. I’m not against the idea that meteoric iron has special, magical properties; however, the concept that it’s the thing everyone recognizes as ‘cold iron’ is just… well, it’s more than a little silly. The whole idea was that it was something an everyday person might get a hold of, and most people throughout history do NOT have access to meteoric iron.

Dresden Files just goes with iron–any iron, and that includes things that are alloys, like steel. Makes it a bit easy when it comes to finding the right things, though it does make a sort of sense. If iron is toxic to faeries, then anything with iron in it should also be pretty poisonous. Then again, if the idea is that it’s magic, magic doesn’t have to work with consistency like that. It’s still immensely satisfying to see characters get the upper hand on fae assailants by using whatever they had on hand.

But Dresden Files also comes with an interesting rule of power: yeah, there are beings out there with phenomenal sets of magical powers, only those powers come with drawbacks. You’re so much more powerful as a Black Court vampire than an ordinary human could ever be…except you’re hurt by garlic of all things. Likewise, faeries can be incredibly powerful, yet all of them can be hurt by a commonly found metal.

Which is part of the fantasy of using iron at all–that sure, there’s something magical and maybe scary out there, but with something common and everyday, like iron, something ordinary and so very, very mortal, you have a chance at beating back the forces of Chaos if you’re calm enough to remember what to do. 

And that’s a cool idea.

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