>> And of course we have yet another stab at the elemental metals relation. >> At least silver got linked to moon as it should be, but Tin is, yet >> again another sky metal and we have the _alloy_ brass for Air.
Alex Ferguson
> The change here is simply from bronze to brass, unless your Way Back
> When machine is getting different results very different from mine.
Another proof that the real world parallels are limping, to say the best.
Brass is the Lunar (or Carmanian) bronze - bright and shiny. Heortling bronze tends to be dirty brownish in colour.
> In the RQ3 and HW eras it was pretty clearly estbalished that tin=sky,
> copper=earth, and their alloy bronze corresponded to air, just as air is
> their mythic union. If RQ2 said anything much different, those synapses
> have been elided, not by the Canon Cops, but by Entropy. It's not clear
> if HQ is proposing any material change from that (unless it's that brass
> is in some sense _not_ an alloy, despite being "almost identical" to
> one, a slightly confusing concept, but that's mythology/alchemy for ya;
> I suspect it's in effect saying that brass is a 'special case' of bronze).
Things you really don't want to know about brass and bronze:
Bronze in the narrower sense is the copper/tin alloy with tin contents around 5%. Bronze in a wider sense are copper alloys with other metals. Arsenic copper (as used by the Hissarlik culture of Anatolia) hasn't been called bronze to my knowledge (and is about as poisonous as are lead waterleads), but has similar properties.
Brass is the name for two distinct mixed crystals of copper and zinc. I forget the actual compositions, but the point is that for a given number of copper atoms there are a given number of zinc atoms in the crystal lattice. The variations in composition within a crystal are minimal, instead you get a mixture of crystals of the two types of brass.
Back to Glorantha:
I suppose that crystallography is something of an art in Glorantha. Crystals are minerals (but can be made up of organic matter, think of sugar) which form parallel planes as outer boundaries. They can be cubes, octahedrons, or any number of more complex geometrical bodies. The brilliant cut of diamonds is made possible by internal properties of the material, and this much is understood by gem-cutters anywhere on Glorantha. Nobody can make a brilliant cut out of quartz.
Usually, we don't regard metals as crystalline. We can hammer them into any desired shape, can't we? Yes. Because what we do (mostly) is rearrange how the microscopic crystals are aligned to one another. (Brass and gold interestingly are ductile enough so that crystals can be hammered into another shape, like leaf gold or brass trumpets.)
This leaves interesting questions about whether gods' bones may contain monocrystalline metal which can be carved rather than hammered into a special blade. IMO adamantine tools ("worked Truestone") are monocrystalline. A few legendary metal ones might be.
For further information, please ask Martaler of the Blazing Forge, Gemborg.
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