Follow-Up Report on the Circumstances surrounding the Miracle of Grabthar's Hammer

Follow-Up Report on the Circumstances surrounding the Miracle of Grabthar's Hammer

(With apologies to Alan Rickman; just assume it's a case of "Name's the Same".)


High Lordminister of Culture Garlond,

I, your humble servant, the Fifteenth Subminister of Fabrications, submit to you this report;

While a properly, thoroughly, exhaustingly-detailed report is beyond the scope of my remit, as it will undoubtedly involve a great deal of forensic work at home, I have completed a sufficiently detailed analysis of the events on the planet Earth, homeworld of the Human species, involved in their end of the Miracle of the Restoration of Grabthar's Hammer.

My conclusion is that no human individual or group is to be held criminally liable for their actions in this matter, as they were committed in all innocence. Additionally, I feel the totality of the success of their endeavors would certainly be held to be a mitigating factor should it go to trial.

Obviously, it is a matter for High Lordprosecutor Yorulon if pursuit of the culprit or culprits of our own race is in the Parliamenton's interest.

In any event, for form's sake I shall provide a summary of the events leading up to the report, properly contextualized, though in this matter it seems asinine to do so, owing to the following information being common knowledge that all Gorlocks are aware of. In any event...

Saint Grabthar of Gorlo (from whence the name Gorlock comes) is, according to popular legends and accorded some likelihood of historicity by historical scientists, held to be the first Great Unifier. She hailed from the city-state of Gorl, that was to give its name to the continent Gorlo, and ultimately to our species), and unified - with words if she could, with coin and trade if words alone did not suffice, and ultimately by the spear if both failed. She is renowned as a master of words, of trade, and of war, and when she took the field herself, she was known to favor the use of a weapon which legend says she caused to be fabricated to her own design; a weapon with a haft and hilt long enough to be weilded comfortably with one or two hands, with a small crescent-shaped blade on one side and a long, tapered steel spike on the other.

In terms of ornamentation the weapon was exquisitely carved, but neither gilded nor inlaid, as befit its use in that time peroid for actual fighting. Grabthar was legendarily successful, defying age and foes until she had spawned a dynasty that encompassed three-quarters of our planet's largest single continent.

Grabthar's Hammer, however, was reputedly shattered in the battle that claimed her life. Whether or not this was true is beyond my ability to relate; what is undisputible is that it was at some point in its history shattered in the intervening three hundred years between Grabthar's life and its being placed in the Room of Most High Honor in the Parliamenton Primary Museum in what is today the capitol building's environs.

There it lay for the five thousand years between then and a year ago, being viewable directly only by historians, priests and high politicians, and of course the scienticians who conserved it. It was in a sorry state at that time, reputedly quite adorned with rust before our conservators finally prevailed over the priesthood to allow it to be carefully cleaned of (most) of the ferrous oxide that besmirched it, and re-interred it in a chamber full of non-reactive argon gas.

Twelve months ago, Grabthar's Hammer was stolen. Four months later, it was returned to us; not only returned, but returned restored! The steel of the hammer gleams, polished with care. It was restored to such an incredible extent that, frankly, seemed impossible. It seemed to be a machine-made replica, like those sold to tourists, but our scientists confirmed, after sampling a sliver, that the metal did indeed bear the signature forensic traces of being the same metal with foreign inclusions, but it had been worked anew. The haft and hilt, which had been long lost to time and as such we only had competing artist's interpretation of what it must have looked like, had been made anew as well, of some rich, unknown hardwood, with a design not quite like anything known to us, but rather as if a fusion of many of the different competing interpretations of the haft.

It was a genetic analysis of that wood, ordered by you over the priesthood's objections, that led to Earth. I was, upon arrival, at a bit of a loss as Gorlocks and Humans do not conventionally travel in the same spheres or compete often in the same industries, but a helpful travel agent at the starport terminal understood that I was enquiring about woods, and, after making a few enquiries of their own, gave me a list of names and the places containing the people those names belonged to, to make enquiries about the wood.

Earth has such a variety of woods, for so many purposes. The sheer number of them boggle my mind; upon further review, I learned that our homeworld, in its distant past (the time of Saint Grabthar and before) had similarly huge numbers of tree varieties, but we steadily pared them down until only the twenty or so most commonly-useful varieties, all which grow foods, were present, and in massive abundance. Earth, it seems, preserved much of its biodiversity, though sadly not all, according to the humans, but I digress; I made my way to an expert in matters to do with wood.

The expert I first met astonished me; they were not an agricultural expert, nor a related genetics expert. This expert was a craftsman, a man who made things. From wood! I was, to say the least, dumbfounded to find myself in a building, made of wood, filled with such tools whose purposes I could scarcely divine, both of the most primitive sort - such as axes - and the most modern imaginable, laser-guided mono-edged saws.

The craftsman explained to me that he was a carpenter. I was astonished; were the people of Earth so poor that they had to resort to wood? No, he explained, in point of fact very often handmade wooden furniture and furnishings were considered luxury items, used where a composite or metal implement would suffice and probably, he readily admitted, be at least as practical, but some people just liked wood, and would, if they had the desire, commission it.

I explained to him the purpose of my visit, being to identify a wood I had come across and genetically tracked to Earth, and he asked me to produce the offending haft for him to examine. I regretted that I could not, but I had a genetic profile of it. He had me produce that, then, and he showed me to a wooden desk - such a desk as I could not imagine an ordinary man owning, it seemed an heirloom from a museum, but he told me he'd made it himself in his own workshop. Upon it was a fantastically modern computer, with many additional devices, and taking the genetic profile of the haft, he readily identified it as fraxinus excelsior, which he dubbed the European Ash.

I was bedazzled by his explanation of all the uses this wood could be put to, and I asked if it was suitable for a weapon. He was somewhat taken aback by this, but agreed that such a wood was a fine choice for such a thing, though he did not and would not trade in weaponry. He asked if I meant furniture for a firearm (a confusing suggestion to my mind), and I explained that I was referring to a striking weapon, not unlike the axes and hammers in his workshop.

He produced an axe which had a haft of this 'European Ash' wood, and I agreed that it seemed quite like the offending article whose nature I was attempting to track down. In full I explained to him the story of Grabthar's Hammer's vanishing and being returned with this haft, and he explained to me that I was probably looking for a very specialised type of craftsman; a weaponsmith.

The carpenter bid me to return the next day, after he made some enquiries on my behalf, for which I agreed to compensate him. When I did, he was in a video-call with a woman, whom he informed me was the person to go to for any kind of historical armament replicas. I was very puzzled, but he explained that he'd engaged her to help, and she knew exactly what I was talking about. I was given a name and a location, and thus it was I found myself departing from my landing site on the continent of 'North America,' in a place called 'Maine,' to a place half-way across the world, an island called 'Great Britain,' to a place called 'Yorkshire.'

I made my way to the place my navigation system told me to make my way to, traveling far from my landing place in 'Heathrow,' until I was quite far from the cosmopolitan cities and into the countryside, which, frankly, I found confusing. Things here seem so very primitive, but it only a seeming. I saw herdsmen, herding beasts which they tend and raise for food, for meat and for wool and for milk, using both the most ancient methods of trained auxiliary animals to control the herd, and yet also using the most modern of devices to such ancient ends; they used drones and sensors and beacon tags to keep tabs upon and control their flocks.

I found this quite so bewildering that, chancing upon such a herdsman leaning against a stone fence beside the road, I stopped and made enquiries that had nothing to do with my mission. He was, to say the least, quite taken aback to find himself conversing with a two-and-a-half-meter green Gorlock, as I quite towered over him, but after his canine beast-companion sniffed at me and apparently decided I was nonthreatening, he was perfectly amiable to conversation.

I asked him, did not humans use protein and other nutrient synthesizers to provide for the people? To produce perfectly sturdy garments of the best synthetics? He explained that of course they did, and showed me a pair of gloves that he used for handling his sheep; perfectly modern, perfectly self-sterilizing and which would harden to resist impact and force. This I found quite confusing, in conjunction with his trousers and jacket which appeared to be made of similar wool to that on the beasts in the neighboring field, and he explained that that's because the wool that made them was from that herd.

Although the reasoning still escaped me, I deduced then, and asked for confirmation or rebuttal, that he was wearing the sheep wool by choice rather than by necessity, and he agreed with me that it was thus. He himself farmed the far-larger, though not wool-bearing beasts, called cattle, which they milked for milk and sometimes slaughtered for beef (the proper name for the meat of the cattle), and some humans (such as farmers such as himself) had a preference for things in the old ways, while some (and he seemed somewhat derisive) preferred everything to be 'ultramodern'. Further he elaborated that while milk and dairy products from a food synthesizer might be perfectly edible and even (he begrudged to admit) sometimes indistinguishable from 'the real thing,' many humans had such a preference for 'the real thing' that they would go out of their way to have it, even if it was at times materially inferior. He fingered a thread-bare section of his coat to elaborate upon this point.

I thanked him and continued my journey. I found myself at last in another workshop, this one whose walls were built of stone mortared together in quite an ancient way, and in fact the structure itself seemed to be a properly ancient one. Within I found a place for working metal, but it was not like any machine shop I had seen. There were no molecular bonders or nanofabricators, not even any welding torches or lathes. There were machine tools, but they were primitive by comparison to the tools I'm familiar with; grinders and mechanically-actuated hammers. There was an anvil, a great many tools of the sort a person strikes with, and a great many more that have a dizzying variety of purposes that eluded me. That is not to say that it was the hut of a primitive; there were tables and benches of perfectly modern construction, and measuring tools of fully-modern construction whose purpose was immediately apparent to me, even if the units of measure were foreign.

The proprietor I met explained to me that he was a blacksmith, one who specialized in Earth's medieval era. I requested elaboration about what 'blacksmithy' was, and he explained that, by mostly-historically-accurate techniques (using machine tools chiefly to accomplish things that could and were done historically but which were incredibly labor intensive; such as using a machine to fuel the furnace rather than a couple of apprentices pumping bellows, or using a machine hammer to do very quickly what would otherwise take a long time with apprentices striking with big sledgehammer,) he 'forged' - for that is the proper word for the making of metal implements by hand, on a 'forge' - metal into historically-accurate, historically-plausible, and ahistorical-but-historically-doable implements. Chiefly weapons and armor, as most people given to romanticizing the past romanticize warriors rather than, say, carpenters, though from time to time a tool as well.

I could not believe this. I asked for further elaboration, and he showed me the piece he was working on at that time; a sword, half-finished. I had arrived late in the day, and this was what he and his apprentice had accomplished over the course of the working day, having taken them about ten hours. He bid me return tomorrow, and gave me the name and place of a lodging I could take in the locality, calling the proprietor ahead to make sure she understood that I was not human, and explained to her (in error, though I did not correct him) that I was a tourist.

The next day I watched, astonished, as he and his apprentice - a young female human, whom he explained to be his niece - turned the length of metal they had shown me the day before into a blade. He explained to me that he was one of about two hundred or so 'master' smiths in the island of Great Britain, ones who could basically do everything related to the craft; there were another five hundred or so who focused specifically on one aspect of the craft, such as forging blades, or forging armor. He showed me his art of turning the blade into a work of art, etching little grooves in it and pounding twists of other, lesser metals into it for design. Some of them - he explained, showing me a holographic catalogue of his works - were far more elaborate than the piece he had just made. Some of what he showed me was jaw-droppingly beautiful. Some, were far less elaborated, but no less beautiful - in his eyes. One he'd done recently, he explained, was a very complicated job, to reforge a battle axe which was in all honestly not in the top hundred most beautifully elaborate pieces he'd done, but which was still one of the most challenging and rewarding jobs he'd even taken.

He showed me a holograph of Grabthar's Hammer; my hearts skipped a beat each. The weapon, he said, had been brought to him by another Gorlock, who wanted it restored. She had represented it to him as a family heirloom, and showed him various images of what it was believed to have looked like in its prime, as well as images taken at various points in its conservation.

This, he explained, was quite the feat. To begin with, the haft would have to be his best guess, based on the various and often-impractical artist's interpretation, and ultimately he 'outsourced' making the haft to a friend of his, a specialist woodworker with whom he did quite a lot of work. The hammer and blade were badly rusted, even after the work of our conservators, and quite a lot of the original metal mass had been lost. He explained to me that he had, using his forge and furnaces, remade the metal anew, with the unavoidable addition of some more iron to make up the lost mass, being careful to control the carbon content of the finished steel. Once he had sufficient billet, he had re-forged the blade of the weapon, and mated it to the haft his friend had made.

I could not believe it. I was dumbfounded. I unfortunately accused him of fraudulence, of having replaced Grabthar's Hammer with a fake; or worse, having put Grabthar's Hammer into a nanoforge recycler!

He looked at me, rather offended, and I quickly explained that the weapon he had worked upon was a priceless planetary heirloom, not a family piece, and it had been stolen. He was taken aback by that, but insisted that he had worked upon the piece as he represented it; and he offered to prove it.

I did not see how he could, but I agreed my amenability to this proof. He took me, then, from his workshop to a nearby farm, where there were quite some several pieces of rusted scrap, ancient farm equipment. The farmer was his brother; his apprentice's father. They spoke at length, and the farmer agreed that he could take some extremely rusted old plows and chains. We took them, and retired to the forge again, and he added in some rusted old nail to the metal. It was a lengthy process which took days, but I understand now I inadvertently challenged his pride.

He began by using his forge, a pile of carbon in the form of coal, to make soft all the rusted steel, which he broke and hammered together. Very often I found myself conscripted into the work, using tongs and my prodigious strength compared to a human to hold things in place whilst the two humans hammered away at them, whilst I held them, as directed, firm against a massive piece of metal.

It was a laborious process, and not fast. The conditions were not overly harsh though the heat was uncomfortable to me, as it was to them. In time we had produced a gargantuan ingot of steel, forged anew from horribly rusted old steel. From this we cut off a smaller billet, with me wielding the hammer whilst his apprentice held it and the master workman wielding a wedge. The process was recorded, I need not, I think, elaborate upon it in full in text as I have submitted the record attached; by and by, day by day, we worked on the piece; a crude bar of metal became a complex shape; the complex shape became the obvious form of Grabthar's Hammer, which he identified to me as being familiar to him, being 'mostly a standard battle axe, but with the spike on the reverse side mounted at the top of the axe instead of the center.' By and by we progressed; by now I was convinced, having seen steel made anew from scrap that I would have consigned to a nanoforge, but the shared pride in crafting which we all had would not let us cease with the project half-finished.

By our perserverence we continued, until a weapon like Grabthar's Hammer was complete save for the sharpening of the blade; that would come after the detail work. This, he demonstrated, was the most mentally laborious part of the process even though it was less physically-demanding than the main forging. After all, even a major mistake that sectioned the piece into halves earlier in the process could be salvaged by forge-welding it back together, but at this point, any goofs were permanent, unless we were to recycle the entire piece and start anew.

I watched in awe as the apprentice worked. The master, I am told, did the actual work on the real Grabthar's Hammer, but this time his niece got the experience, under his direction, as this piece was of lesser importance, being a mere replica.

When it was completed, I held, gazing in reverent awe, the head of Grabthar's Hammer - or a hammer-head just like it, save for the blade being not sharpened. The haft arrived that morning - the smith had commissioned his friend to make another haft just like the first - and we mated them together. I am certain, of course, that if the pieces were placed side-by-side and scanned to millimeter precision they would be obviously unalike, just as I am certain that if a sample of metal were taken and the two were compared, they would obviously be not the same - after all, this process of working by hand, with holographic guidelines, cannot be as precise as the results in a proper fabrication shop, let alone the identical results of mass-production nanofabricators.

Even so, holding it in my hand, it was a hammer, just like Grabthar's; the etchings, the markings quite so alike that I could not tell them apart save by side-by-side comparison; and of course, this blade, unlike the original, bore the maker's mark of the smith, his niece, and myself. I had, he explained, worked on the piece, so it was right and proper by the hand-fabrication tradition of Earth that a mark for myself (which I hurriedly invented on the spot) should go on the blade.

I was convinced, and thus I submit to you, High Lordminister of Culture Garlond, that the piece currently under dispute is Grabthar's Hammer, remade anew in the most reverent way possible, using skills that are lost to our history but alive and well on Earth.

I then asked the question burning in my mind; how was it that Earth retained these skills? Surely for all practical purposes, using a fabricator would be better? The blacksmith readily agreed, and showed me that he had a nanoforge in the shop, which was used chiefly for recycling scrap and the like when it was not important that traditional techniques be used - he also used it to make things for his own use.

He then explained to me the concept of heritage skills and devices; kept intact not for any practical purposes, but simply because humans valuate the history and culture therein so much that there are persons who master techniques handed down through generations, sometimes lost save in manuals only to be remastered anew; and sometimes, even, lost even to manuscripts, which they laboriously reinvent.

He took me then back to London, as the timing, he explained, was perfect, to show me something incredible. Presently I found myself, in the very early morning hours, in a massive machine shop, standing before a gargantuan edifice of iron and steel, painted in a shade of green quite like the fairer Gorlock skin tones, edged with red and yellow and black. It was a behemoth device the size of a grav locomotive; and it was, in fact, a locomotive, built for exactly the same purpose as a maglev locomotive, that being to haul carriages full of passengers and cargo. This behemoth, though, was not a gravitationally-suspended machine, nor even magnetically-suspended. It was not suspended at all, and it sat on twin rails of steel, upon absolutely massive wheels of iron and steel, so large that I myself scarcely came up to the top rim, and my human companion was dwarfed.

I asked, in jest, if it was even powered by electricity, and to my surprise he told me it was not; this machine, and other conserved steam locomotives like her, was powered by the combustion of fuel coal in a chamber within the locomotive, that heated up water within the boiler, which was expended as steam to cause the pistons connecting the mammoth drive wheels to turn.

She was being readied for her run that morning, that we would be on - as he had purchased tickets for us. He knew many of the fellows involved in the restoration and maintenance of this seven-hundred-and-fifty-year-old iron behemoth. Being privledged to see the part of the 'heritage railroad run' that few laypersons see, thanks largely to my newfound acquaintance's connections, we were there to watch the workmen conduct maintenance and prepare the machine, which had been warming since the day previously - as they could not be readied with but a few hour's work like a rail locomotive which was only a half-century more modern than this one, which I learned they also considered historical heirlooms and maintained in small numbers.

Presently the beast began to move, and its whistle shook me to the bones with its loudness, the chuff of steam escaping caused me to quiver. Of course I know that we can harness far larger quantities of energy very easily; I have done so personally in the larger engineering projects I have undertaken in both private and public work before coming to the Ministry of Fabrication, but very few of them save the titanic earthmovers I worked on for public works projects gave the same sense of power contained in machinery as this ancient, primitive-yet-technical iron monster. The ground trembled as she rolled out, and I found that unlike our translation implants, the numbers and lettering on the side of the beast had no accompanying ID chips to translate them for me. My friend translated: this beast's number, which she had worn for most of the time she had been around, was 60103; its name Flying Scotsman. 'Flying' I understood, by implication, to mean that it was fast, and Scotsman was a name referring to a culture of people found to the north of here.

Presently still we found ourselves in a dining carriage, traveling along the countryside, whilst we spoke at length about the comparative histories of our worlds. The journey was not the blur of a hyperfast gravlev train, but it gave us plenty of time to talk, and at times to eat, and looking outside I could see that the speed, though slow compared to modern mass transit, was comparable to speeds that modern private vehicles are limited to for safety's sake, so the machine was hardly plodding. My new friend, the blacksmith, expressed the opinion that it seemed a shame that so many of my people's arts had been lost to history in our relentless urge to modernize. I am forced now to agree; whilst surely we have all that we practically need, there does seem to be something missing. I even went to the trouble of getting a hypercomm connection to Gorlond and downloading the planetary history library; sure enough I did find conclusive evidence that in the past, we Gorlocks did indeed create steel and iron locomotives powered by combustion and and travel along steel rails in them, but I know of no evidence of their existence today.

I mused that it was curious that we so quite-difference races, from quite different planets, nevertheless made such similar things - then of course it hit me, and at the same time we noted that it was clearly a case of form following function. We spoke at length about the various historical arts and heritage crafts, and my friend made many suggestions. I have spent quite a lot of time traveling this planet to see further examples of historical crafts and heritage-preserved pieces (and I thank Your Excellency for giving me such a generous expense account and broad enough parameters that I was able to justify this as obtaining conclusive proof that humans most definitely keep primitve crafts alive even in the midst of modernity). I have even met a human who creates knives and other tools of out raw stone, as the most primitive of primitives must have done. That's her hobby; her trade is that of starship realspace-drive maintenance engineer.

In any event, Your Excellency, thus is the totality of my report. Grabthar's Hammer has been returned to us; it is the real article in every meaningful sense, and it has not been outraged by being fed through a nano-recycler. No criminality can be ascribed to the blacksmith who worked upon it, as this work was done in innocence. My conclusion is that the returned piece should be considered a gift from Earth, from the people of Earth to the people of Gorlond; a minor amount of the steel and the totality of the haft are the stuff of Earth; the skill of the smith of Earth combined to remake what the skill of the smith of Gorlond once made from raw steel, using tools and techniques which are, if not identical, substantially similar to the same ends.

I also tender my resignation, effective immediately if you wish it rather than to grant my preference for a sabbatical. I intend to spend some time here on Earth, acquiring if not a mastery than at least a functional familiarity with a great many of these lost crafts, and upon my return to Gorlond to scour the historical record for the artifacts which are the equivalent tools from our homeworld. I plan to begin rediscovering our history of tools and artifice using the skills and knowledge gained here as a place to start.## TLDR Summary:

The hammer and blade were badly rusted, even after the work of our conservators, and quite a lot of the original metal mass had been lost. Chiefly weapons and armor, as most people given to romanticizing the past romanticize warriors rather than, say, carpenters, though from time to time a tool as well. By our perserverence we continued, until a weapon like Grabthar's Hammer was complete save for the sharpening of the blade; that would come after the detail work. The haft arrived that morning - the smith had commissioned his friend to make another haft just like the first - and we mated them together. In time we had produced a gargantuan ingot of steel, forged anew from horribly rusted old steel. Within I found a place for working metal, but it was not like any machine shop I had seen. Some of them - he explained, showing me a holographic catalogue of his works - were far more elaborate than the piece he had just made.

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