cold iron

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by thrash

There's also an American folk ballad called "The Silver Dagger," which was published as early as 1849 and first recorded in 1926.

Careful interpretation of the Baez version can get you a cambion nun, which is a cool character by anyone's reckoning. Otherwise silver generally gets in through werewolf legends (presumably through the lunar connection) but is pretty inconsistent in how it is applied (I recall the old quote about "a silver bullet, or a silver knife … or a stick with a silver handle" … unless, of course, the werewolf was beaten to death with the silver end which would be more congruent).

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by thrash

There's also an American folk ballad called "The Silver Dagger," which was published as early as 1849 and first recorded in 1926.

Yeah, but it's got nothing to do with magical creatures or any such a thing, it's just about men being jerks, and sometimes also honour killings and/or lovers' suicides, and occasionally slope. AFAICT 'sliver' is just there for scansion.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

Yeah, but it's got nothing to do with magical creatures or any such a thing, it's just about men being jerks, and sometimes also honour killings and/or lovers' suicides, and occasionally slope. AFAICT 'sliver' is just there for scansion.

...in one version her father has a golden dagger, and I don't recall anyone being daft enough to make weapon out of gold... (except that Bond villain, and I think that was gold plated).

[Anders]

The only use I can think of for gold in weaponry would be as a mace head.

[Black Leviathan]

I had been told that "Cold Iron" was an olde-timey reference to primitive steel. I never questioned it or tried to find a source.

Originally Posted by Dalillama

Afaict the idea of silver melee weapons was also invented by D&D. .

The old Time-Life supernatural books mention silver a lot in legends of ghosts and fae creatures because of it's supernatural purity. I haven't checked publishing dates but I'm reasonably sure those books predate D&D by a bit. I wouldn't wager that they have any more academic value and they could use the same iffy source material for all I know.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

AFAICT 'sliver' is just there for scansion.

Any number of things would scan just as well. Point being, weapons made of or plated with precious metals (whether sensible or merely poetic) had currency in folklore long before D&D.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by copeab

However, silver is generally more limited in what supernatural creatures it is useful against.

Werewolves, vampires and demons covers a lot of territory.

[copeab]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Werewolves, vampires and demons covers a lot of territory.

Not werewolves, unless you are only using the Hollywood version. I have a ebook on werewolves written in the late 1980's and the word "silver" never appears in it. My print mythology encyclopedia doesn't mention werewolves under "silver" either.

The one werewolf myth I know of involving silver also had a strong religious component attached to it, which is conveniently forgotten in Hollywood use of silver vs werewolves.

[Inky]

What's that then?

Werewolf myths do seem to be a bit of a mess altogether - I was looking them up on Wikipedia a while ago, and it's very mixed. The point I was curious about at the time was whether there was anything in the traditional stories about this "wolf-man" form that a lot of people seemed to think of as the defining feature of a werewolf, or whether it was a recent Hollywood development. As it happened, all the werewolves in the books I grew up on were ones that turned from a human into a wolf and no messing about, therefore I was puzzled and rather annoyed by the wolf-man-monster stealing the limelight!

Turns out the traditional legends are indeed nearly always the man-or-wolf-but-not-both-at-once kind, although sometimes the wolf is not a normal wolf, but that's about all they have in common. For instance, some talk about it as a phenomenon in itself as in most fantasy stories today, but in a lot of others they're wicked magicians who have learnt the secret of turning into a wolf as one of their tricks. There's apparently even one account of a brotherhood of good werewolves, which is famous among folklore historians, as it looks like the ghost of some kind of pre-Christian tradition mangled almost beyond recognition.

[copeab]

The ebook I was referring to is "The Book of Were-Wolves" by Sabine Baring-Gould, originally published in 1865. I'm not claiming it is the best work on the topic, but it is free of any Hollywood influnce, and still an interesting read.

I also like his "Curious Myths of the Middle Ages" (1866) which doesn't really have a bearing on this thread.