From a technical point of view, making a sword (assuming that you're going to be folding the metal and annealing it) is harder than making a horseshoe.
However, making and fitting a horseshoe is an entirely different skill. Actually making the shoe is the easy bit- the hard part is getting the perfect fit, handling the horse, making sure that it is the right shoe for the horse, taking into account any conditions the horse has (for example taking pressure off certain parts of the hoof). A farrier's skills are more veteranary than metalworking (although they have to be able to do that too)
king_pellinor seems to think that the folding, annealing etc may have been an optional extra for swanky models...
I'm guessing people at the time would not have divided things up into animal-handling and metalwork, but were more likely to see things as 'swordsmith's jobs' and 'farriers jobs'... I wonder how they might have compared the skills involved.
Well in smaller communities, the blacksmith would have combined both roles, but I suspect that in larger towns there would have been more specialisation.
I think you have to do some folding with the poor iron you get early on, but the more you do the better the sword (within limits) but the more expensive it is. Partly it's time, but partly also you lose metal every time you hit it. So your cheap ones will have had less folding done, which is why they're cheap.
Annealing also needs to be done, or the sword will just break instead of bending, but the better the smith the better the annealing will be. It's easy to do (you just heat the sword up), but hard to do well - I'm told.
Presumably you'd also need to anneal knives, chisels, axes etc in that case?
The emphasis when you read about these things tends to be on pretty swords, but I do wonder if people realise just how much easier it is to work wood with a really decent chisel, and how hard it is to work with a duff one (specially in oak, my god! Working oak with bad steel is *painful*). Even nowadays, people don't tend to chuck really good chisels away, there is a second hand/reconditioned market for the things and people tend to only get rid of them when they are worn down to nubs - so I'm guessing their archaeological footprint may be misleadingly small.
With fine carving, you don't hit the chisel at all, most of the work is done with the sharp edge and sliding it along the grain of the wood rather than forcing the blade across it. Which supports your general argument!
Actually making the shoe is the easy bit- the hard part is getting the perfect fit, handling the horse, making sure that it is the right shoe for the horse, taking into account any conditions the horse has (for example taking pressure off certain parts of the hoof). A farrier's skills are more veteranary than metalworking (although they have to be able to do that too)
However, making and fitting a horseshoe is an entirely different skill. Actually making the shoe is the easy bit- the hard part is getting the perfect fit, handling the horse, making sure that it is the right shoe for the horse, taking into account any conditions the horse has (for example taking pressure off certain parts of the hoof). A farrier's skills are more veteranary than metalworking (although they have to be able to do that too)
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I'm guessing people at the time would not have divided things up into animal-handling and metalwork, but were more likely to see things as 'swordsmith's jobs' and 'farriers jobs'... I wonder how they might have compared the skills involved.
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Annealing also needs to be done, or the sword will just break instead of bending, but the better the smith the better the annealing will be. It's easy to do (you just heat the sword up), but hard to do well - I'm told.
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The emphasis when you read about these things tends to be on pretty swords, but I do wonder if people realise just how much easier it is to work wood with a really decent chisel, and how hard it is to work with a duff one (specially in oak, my god! Working oak with bad steel is *painful*). Even nowadays, people don't tend to chuck really good chisels away, there is a second hand/reconditioned market for the things and people tend to only get rid of them when they are worn down to nubs - so I'm guessing their archaeological footprint may be misleadingly small.
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Much more succinct than me! :-)
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