The Rings of Power: What Is Mithril, and Why Is It Important?

It’s in Rivendell that Frodo finds Bilbo after he leaves the Shire upon the discovery of the One Ring. Bilbo gifts Frodo the shirt, and it remains in his possession until his brief captivity by Sauron’s forces in Mordor in The Return of the King. Gandalf returns it to Frodo after Sauron’s defeat, and it returns with him to the Shire at the end of The War of the Ring. It’s not clear if he took it with him to the Undying Lands or left it to Sam Gamgee. However, were it to have remained in Middle-earth, it’s possible it would have wound up back at Mathom-house.

Impenetrable armour occurs in Norse mythology in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, a story that Tolkien certainly knew and could have used for his mithril mail-coat. Mithril is the only invented mineral in his Middle-earth writings. Chemists note mithril’s remarkable properties, strong and light like titanium, perhaps when made into alloys with elements such as titanium or nickel, and in its pure form malleable like gold. It has physical properties that are impossible in a non-magical world. Carbon fiber or titanium alloys may be light and strong, but weave them into chain mail and you’ll still be plenty hurt if skewered with a high-mass is mithril real spearhead. It could be beaten like copper, and polished like glass; and the Dwarves could make of it a metal, light and yet harder than tempered steel.

The Rings of Power: What Is Mithril, and Why Is It Important?

The metal appears in many derivative fantasy works by later authors.

Tolkien

The Elves loved it for its beauty and presumably used it for jewelry and attire rather than weapons or armour. Of all items made of mithril, the most famous is the “small shirt of mail” retrieved from the hoard of the dragon Smaug, and given to Bilbo Baggins by Thorin Oakenshield. “It was close-woven of many rings, as supple almost as linen, cold as ice, and harder than steel…” and studded with white gems of unknown variety. In modern times, aluminum and its alloys are used for many industrial purposes due to its light weight — at 35 to 45% less weight than steel, when built to the same standards, it is considered much stronger per unit weight. It also has a nice silverish gleam when polished and was in use for over a century by the time of Tolkien’s writings. Galadrial’s ring, Nenya, is one of the three rings given to the elves by Sauron in the Second Age and is made of mithril.

Brass is a mixture of copper and zinc, and bronze is a mixture of copper and tin. There is even an alloy called electrum, a combination of silver and gold in various proportions used in ancient times for coinage. It could be used in various alloys to produce extremely lightweight, hard and durable armour.

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

The Dwarves mined for mithril “too greedily and too deep”, ultimately releasing a Balrog, Durin’s Bane. Once it destroyed the kingdom of the Dwarves at Khazad-dûm, Middle-earth’s only source of new Mithril ore was cut off. Even if each link perfectly holds its shape, when a cave troll puts his bulk behind a spear, you have a spearhead-shaped piece of Mithril piercing your chest cavity nearly as deeply as the spearhead would have. Effectively, you have reduced the sharpness of the edge, but the pounds per square inch have not been reduced sufficiently to withstand the mass of a pissed-off cave troll and convert a potential puncture into a mere bruise.

1. Afterwards, Elrond recounts an apocryphal tale called The Song of the Roots of Hithaeglir.
2. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies made Gimli, Merry and Pippin more two-dimensional, robbing film viewers of impactful character arcs.
3. The coat eventually comes into the possession of the dwarves of The Lonely Mountain and becomes part of their massive store of treasures.
4. In the books, Tolkien describes the coat as having been made for a young elf prince.

Or we would be, were it not for the extremely recent discovery of a family of simple intermetallics that are shiny, strong, light — and ductile. They all consist of a regular metal, such as copper or silver, allied with one of a member of the intriguing and exotic ‘rare earth’ metals, hardly known to the general public outside Tom Lehrer’s song The Elements. The researchers’ favourite is yttrium silver, an intermetallic in which atoms of silver and atoms of the rare-earth element yttrium occur in precisely equal amounts.

These are contradictory material properties, so no, there is no existing substance that can match. Plate armor has the problem of penetration between the plates, but a hybrid of chain-mail or woven kevlar protecting the inter-plate areas could be effective, though not exactly as light or thin as Egyptian cotton. It was in the Third Age that the dwarves awakened the aforementioned Balrog and failed in their attempts to fight it.

It’s during The Hobbit that Thorin presents the mail shirt to Bilbo. After returning to the Shire following the events of The Hobbit, Bilbo lends the shirt to Mathom-house. Michel-Delving, Located in the Shire capital of Michel-Delving Mathom-house is a museum where hobbits store some of their many mathoms (a hobbit term for anything they couldn’t part with). As a linguist, Tolkien placed meaning on mithril even when naming it.