Triggered by another post I didn’t want to hijack:
Excalibur.
In the legends, Excalibur comes out of a lake (although some versions have Excalibur as the sword in the stone, those are later…the sword Arthur pulls from the stone breaks and he goes to get a better one).
From the “Lady of the Lake.”
Here’s the thing.
In northern Europe in the Iron Age all the way through to the early Medieval period, most iron came from bog iron. It was hard to smelt, because it was a rather low grade ore, but you didn’t have to mine it and it was a renewable resource (in about twenty years you could just come back and get more, because it formed constantly).
Meaning that the iron used to make a sword came…out of water.
In most fairy stories, fairies don’t like iron. So the vision of the Lady as some kind of fairy or elf? Not likely.
The idea of her as a druid? Maybe.
But what’s far more likely is this: The Lady of the Lake was a smith.
But….but…
The Celtic deity in charge of smiths and ironworking was Bridget, a goddess. The mystical associations with the Lady would fit with her being a priestess of Bridget…and thus, a smith.
IOW, Arthurian people, maybe we should not be visualizing the Lady of the Lake as a slender, graceful woman in a gown…
…but as a jacked smith in an apron.
Yes PLEASE!
Been thinking about this, and wikied bog iron and holy shit, I did not know bog iron was a thing, or that it was the primary source of iron for most of Northern European history. I knew anaerobic, iron-fixating bacteria lived in bogs because I knew they were responsible for a lot of the hydrocarbon production that makes the water shimmery and the air smell distinctively swampy. I did not know that they produced so much iron out of the water that they effectively made metal a renewable resource.
Next you’re going to tell me that Vikings had plastic from bogs, too.
I’m thinking it’s something a lot of Americans don’t know about because early Medieval history is not well taught here.
Loki is the Philosopher King 