“Iron seemeth a simple metal, but in its nature are many mysteries,” wrote Joseph Glanvill, a seventeenth-century English churchman. To the contrary, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, two centuries later, found nothing mysterious about the worker in iron. His brawny blacksmith (long hair and all) embodied every simple virtue: he owed money to no man, prayed in church on Sundays, and earned an honest living by the sweat of his honest brow.

Longfellow may have realized that he was penning a swan song for the village blacksmith, whose forge and anvil could not last far into the factory age. Most probably, however, the poet did not think of himself as reducing to the level of small-town banality the lusty craftsman whose precursors forged thunderbolts for the gods.

To primitive peoples, it seems, there has always been something supernatural about the smith. He tamed fire to his will. He turned the ores of earth into magic and invincible weapons, or into prosaically peaceful tools. He himself became a god: Osiris of Egypt, Hephaestus to the ancient Greeks, Vulcan of Roman theology, Odin in Norse myth. Or he turned into a whole race of demigods—giant Cyclops or dwarf Nibelungs—having mystical skills in metalwork.