The late Sir Terry Pratchett might not have been as well-known as his modern day contemporaries, but he was still a fairly well-known author in his own right. He was most well-known for creating the Discworld series of books. The Discworld series tells the tale of a fantasy world in a shape of a disc lying on the back of four elephants, standing on the shell of the great space turtle A’tuin.
He was knighted in 2009 for literary honours. After the awards he said “You can’t ask a fantasy writer not to want a knighthood. You know, for two pins I’d get myself a horse and a sword.” And indeed he eventually did get himself a proper sword fit for knight.
In late 2009, he with a group of friends, went and made his own swords. They dug out Iron ore from a field 10 miles away and made their own kiln in which they melted the iron ore. With the help from Colin Smythe, his friend and agent, Terry managed to get some meteorite ore.
Terry Pratchett said this about the Meotorite ore: “Thunderbolt iron has a special place in magic and we put that in the smelt, and I remember when we sawed the iron apart it looked like silver. Everything about it I touched, handled and so forth … And everything was as it should have been, it seemed to me.” As well as “several pieces of meteorites – thunderbolt iron, you see – highly magical, you’ve got to chuck that stuff in whether you believe in it or not.”
picture from Discworld News (Link)
The iron ingot was then shaped into the sword and finished with silverwork by a local blacksmith. When the sword was finished it was hidden by Terry Pratchett as he was worried it might pique the interest of the authorities. “It annoys me that knights aren’t allowed to carry their swords,” he said. “That would be knife crime.”
And so with Terry Pratchett making his own sword all the while battling a rare form of Alzheimer’s during the creation of the sword, is there any way you can think of Sir Terry Pratchett as nothing but as a bad ass.
GNU Terry Pratchett
