![]() Frodo was saved, but one of the orcs escaped with the shirt. Frodo was taken by the orcs, who fought over the shirt. When Sam Gamgee believed Frodo to be dead outside Shelob's Lair, he left the shirt with Frodo. The mail saved Frodo's life when he was struck by an orc chieftain's spear thrust during the battle in the Chamber of Mazarbul, and again when orc-arrows struck him while escaping Moria and while crossing the River Anduin. Frodo wore the mail underneath his tunic and other shirt unbeknownst to the rest of the fellowship. There, some years later, he gave the shirt to Frodo Baggins when the younger hobbit embarked on his quest in The Lord of the Rings. However he later reclaimed it, and took it with him when he left the Shire for his journey to Rivendell. He donated it to the Mathom-house, a museum in Michel Delving. It shone like moonlit silver, and was studded with white gems.īilbo wore the mithril shirt during the Battle of the Five Armies. It was close-woven of many rings, as supple almost as linen, cold as ice, and harder than steel. He unwound several folds of old cloth, and held up a small shirt of mail. Īlso there is this!" said Bilbo, bringing out a parcel which seemed to be rather heavy for its size. Gandalf stated that the value of this mithril-coat was "greater than the value of the whole Shire and everything in it". The most notable item made of mithril in the works of Tolkien is the "small shirt of mail" that Thorin Oakenshield gave to Bilbo Baggins after it had been retrieved from the hoard of Smaug the dragon. There are indications that mithril was also found in Númenor and Aman. not to make parallels" between Tolkien's descriptions of the deep mines of Moria and the exceptional depth of South African mines, some as much as 4,000 metres (13,000 ft) deep. The mining executive Danièle Barberis notes that Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in a busy mining region. The Tolkien critic Paul Kocher interprets the Dwarves' intense secrecy around mithril and their devotion to artistry in metal and stone as "a sublimation of their sexual frustration", given that they have very few dwarf-women and love beauty with a "jealous possessiveness", or (quoting Tolkien) "being engrossed in their crafts". After the Dwarves abandoned Moria and production of new mithril stopped entirely, it became priceless. Before Moria was abandoned by the Dwarves, while it was still being actively mined, mithril was worth ten times its weight in gold. Once the Balrog destroyed Khazad-dûm, the kingdom of the Dwarves in Moria, the only source of new mithril ore was cut off. In Tolkien's Middle-earth, mithril is extremely rare by the end of the Third Age, as it was now found only in Khazad-dûm. Tolkien was born near deep mines, and may have chosen to use them in his fiction. Semi-schematic drawing of Kimberley Diamond Mine in South Africa, 1885. It is implied at one point that the "moon-letters" featured in The Hobbit were also composed of ithildin. The West Gate of Moria bore inlaid ithildin designs and runes. It was visible only by starlight or moonlight. The Noldor of Eregion, the Elvish land to the west of Moria, made an alloy from it called ithildin ("star moon"), used to decorate gateways, portals and pathways. Its beauty was like to that of common silver, but the beauty of mithril did not tarnish or grow dim. 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. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the wizard Gandalf explained mithril to the rest of the Fellowship in Moria: It was of silver-steel which the elves call mithril". ![]() In The Hobbit, Thorin Oakenshield described some Dwarven treasures as "coats of mail gilded and silvered and impenetrable" and "a coat of dwarf-linked rings the like of which had never been made before, for it was wrought of pure silver to the power and strength of triple steel." A little later the narrator describes "a small coat of mail, wrought for some young elf-prince long ago. The name mithril comes from two words in Tolkien's Sindarin language- mith, meaning "grey", and ril, meaning "glitter". In the first 1937 edition, the mail shirt given to Bilbo Baggins is described as being made of "silvered steel". Tolkien first wrote of it in The Lord of the Rings, and it was retrospectively mentioned in the third, revised edition of The Hobbit in 1966. It is described as resembling silver, but being stronger and lighter than steel. ![]() It appears in many derivative fantasy works by later authors. For other uses, see Mithril (disambiguation). This article is about the metal in Tolkien's mythos.
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