skip.knox submitted a new blog post:
History for Fantasy Writers: Miners
by by E.L. Skip Knox
We fantasy fans know this much: mines = dwarves. Short, stocky types with their picks, delving deep beneath the earth. And … er, well, things get a bit fuzzy after that. There’s a ton of details about mining, though, that provide a rich … um … vein to … ah … mine. Yeesh.
Where do precious metals come from?
Without modern understanding of the elements, this is a pretty mysterious question, but that didn’t stop medieval natural philosophers from coming up with ingenious answers.
Like much of medieval understanding of the natural world, we can blame the Greeks, and especially Aristotle (after the 12thc, anyway). Certain core beliefs are relevant here. One, that the earth is a system, usually understood to be a living system in some way or other. Two, that substances are in constant process of growth and change. To stick with mining, raw material becomes base metals which becomes noble metals. Third and finally for our purposes, the celestial affects the terrestrial, right down to the very core of the world.
With that in mind, here are four theories about the formation of noble metals (mostly gold) that I think would be interesting for the fantasy writer.
Continue reading the Original Blog Post.
History for Fantasy Writers: Miners
by by E.L. Skip Knox
![Gold-Ore.jpg](https://mythicscribes.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gold-Ore.jpg)
We fantasy fans know this much: mines = dwarves. Short, stocky types with their picks, delving deep beneath the earth. And … er, well, things get a bit fuzzy after that. There’s a ton of details about mining, though, that provide a rich … um … vein to … ah … mine. Yeesh.
Where do precious metals come from?
Without modern understanding of the elements, this is a pretty mysterious question, but that didn’t stop medieval natural philosophers from coming up with ingenious answers.
Like much of medieval understanding of the natural world, we can blame the Greeks, and especially Aristotle (after the 12thc, anyway). Certain core beliefs are relevant here. One, that the earth is a system, usually understood to be a living system in some way or other. Two, that substances are in constant process of growth and change. To stick with mining, raw material becomes base metals which becomes noble metals. Third and finally for our purposes, the celestial affects the terrestrial, right down to the very core of the world.
With that in mind, here are four theories about the formation of noble metals (mostly gold) that I think would be interesting for the fantasy writer.
Continue reading the Original Blog Post.