Having been knighted by the Queen, Sir Terry Pratchett decided he needed a sword, so he made one. He mined the ore from a field near his house, chucked in a bunch of meteoric ore ("thunderbolt iron, you see — highly magical, you've got to chuck that stuff in whether you believe in it or not") and then got a local blacksmith to help him fashion a silver-chased blade out of it. Then he hid it away, because he was worried that England's knife-crime-maddened coppers would come over to his house and confiscate it.
With help from his friend Jake Keen — an expert on ancient metal-making techniques — the author dug up 81kg of ore and smelted it in the grounds of his house, using a makeshift kiln built from clay and hay and fuelled with damp sheep manure…
He said: "It annoys me that knights aren't allowed to carry their swords. That would be knife crime."
Terry Pratchett creates a sword with meteorites
(Thanks, Eric!)
(Image: Terry Pratchett, Powell's, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from firepile's photostream)
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