I think what we're really missing is that there was a time when people had work that they was proud of and felt like they were needed in their community!

I absolutely agree! Working together allowed for specialization. If everybody had to do all the work individually, there wouldn’t be enough time in the day.

Back then you knew as a little boy what your profession was going to be. The same profession as your father.

@@fugu4163 yes, and people weren't educated beyond their intelligence level at everyone else's expense.

@thehound9638 I enjoy my job. Nobody is forcing anyone to take dumb jobs. Nobody is stopping people from creating their own jobs. You can quite literally still be a blacksmith and make a living. Problem is everyone's sole concern is money and trinkets.

That's really insane you can trace your history that far. I've only managed to trace mine back to my great great great grandma Pamfila.

@@FirstnameLastname-ob1bp it's my dad's research. He's been working on our tree for 50+ years :) Apparently the same ancestors also got fined for working on Sunday too. The Puritans didn't like them but needed their services lol

Awesome !

Dude this is such an awesome bit of family history thank you for sharing it ! my great great grand father was a black smith. and i my self dabble a good bit with it as a hobby

one day hopefully you can find a way to treat arthritis and the technology for perfect prosthetics to be made become the blacksmith to make his own hands

I really enjoyed that little story! I've never heard it before but if you reply to this comment then I can return to it and memorise it.

I’d like to tell this to our blacksmith, too. 👍 I don’t know if he has heard those. The Blacksmith’s shop is one of our most popular interpretations on Student Living History Day… I’m a bread baker. That’s popular, too.

Sass Squatch.....I've only been smithing for three years and have never heard that story. Thank you for your story and comment

Sounds almost like a variation of the Irish myth of Lugh. When the king of Ireland called a war council to plan a defense against an invading force of raiders, he told his castle guard, "Let none enter who does not possess a skill useful to us." When Lugh arrived late and found the doors barred and guarded, he asked to be let in, for he was a great builder. The guards replied they already had a mason, so they wouldn't let him in. "Well that's alright, because I'm also a champion warrior. Let me in." "Got warriors, and a champion too. No, you can't come in." Bard? No. Sorcerer? Got 3 witches already. Blacksmith? Carpenter? Dancer? No dice. Finally, Lugh says "All right, I concede you have the specialties filled. But please, go and ask the King if he has someone who possesses *all* of these skills." And when the king heard this, he leapt to his feet and told his guards, "Bring him here at once, and sit him beside me in the place of highest honor. For never has such a man been in our presence." And that's how Lugh (eventually) became King of the Fey.

@@thehound9638 not OP but hopefully this gets you a notification for this story. 🫶🏻

Call me a pedant, but I'm questioning the particular title caption for this video series. They already used that for their last one on farmers. And saying one profession is the single most important one in the town is like how most people assume the brain is the most important one in the body at face value.

​@@PaszerDyeallow the man to work the algorithms so he pops up.

​​@@PaszerDyet's just the title of this series of videos and it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek

I like the worm insect thing they focused on for whatever reason at 5:17

It makes the history learning feel so alive!!!

Amen to that

As a middling amateur smith I am inclined to agree

@toddellner5283 No, not amateur. If you forge, you're a smith. Self talk is important, don't put yourself and your skills down. Take it from someone who also has a self-esteem issue when it comes to their work lol

@@The_Gentleman_Blacksmith Heh. You know our tribe too well. It's one big Imposter Syndrome and ADHD support group. The most important lesson I've had was a few months ago when Brian Brazeale stopped in the middle of a demo, looked at what he had just pulled out of the fire, tossed it in the scrap bucket, shrugged, and started again.

@toddellner5283 yep, at the end of the day it's just steel. It can be infinitely recycled and remade into something new. If things don't work out, chuck it and try again. There's always some fresh stock to take your frustrations out on 🫠

No, its the banker. 😏

Here in the Northwest we are lucky enough to have a very active blacksmithing community. I feel very fortunate to have connected with them.

There's even a movie about it, called Erementari I think. A blacksmith who trapped a devil. Based on a folk tale I believe. (Don't remember if it was a GOOD movie or not)

Especially some of the Dwarves mythical weaponry.

Great scott, I'm so stupid, I read "Smoothies" and was so confused 😂. There is definitely something magical about smithing, I always loved to watch it.

As a blacksmit of 3yrs, I will say it hasn’t completely changed. It is pretty mutch like learning alchemy unless you stop at making nails. Also people still view things made by us as inherently magical and of superior qualities.

​@@SheyD78 I happen to know that on, Its also why blacksmiths "ring" their anvils... So once there was a blacksmith along this road, no one remembers where as it was so long ago now. But one day as the smith was working in his smithy hammering away, when this man comes up to him seaking a pair of shoes. Being quite tired from his toils he didn't ask too many questions just set to measuring the man for his shoes, and set to work stoking his forge, and building up his fires hot. Soon he had his coals glowing nicely and set a billet in to heat, and as he was working on shaping the first shoe, he got to thinking, what kind of man needs iron shoes and has hooves instead of feet, and did he not have a forked tail. WHY!?! I bet he was hiding a set of horns beneath that large hat he was wearing. The more he worked the iron the more sure he was that he had the devil himself come to his shop, and when he paused working he kept rapping the hammer on the anvil so as to sound busy. Now this was a moral dilemma indeed, for if he finished the shoes he would have had shod and aided, the Devil in his works, and would become complicit. No that wouldn't do at all. But If he refused to complete the shoes would he not be breaking his word? He decided that he must finish his work, but as he grudgingly heated and hammered, an idea came to him. Is not a poorly shod horse soon nearly lame from the pain? He would sabotage the Devils shoes! The first shoe he made slightly warped and bent so that the hoof wearing it could never sit flat and would rock back and forth. The second shoe he made too small and made this one warped as well, but this one was warped in such a way that in use it would cause the hoof to split!. Finally finished with his work he called the Devil in to be shod with his new shoes, and the Devil being quite smug with himself hadn't thought that a simple blacksmith could trick him, didn't even inspect his new shoes. Then as the blacksmith, trimmed the hooves he trimed them uneven so that one was taller than the other, and on the short one he was sure to nip the quick, causing the Devil to howl in pain! But the Devil did not protest, he needed the shoes did he not? Next as the blacksmith nailed the shoes on he used extra long nails and drove them right through the hoof. Now normally when a nail goes through a hoof you trim the nail, so you can get the shoe off. But that wasn't the plan, the plan was to make it impossible to take those shoes off because a bent nail can not be drawn out of a hoof. Soon the Devil was simply writhing in pain, as the last nail was peened over. As he left the shop he could barely stand and could hardly walk. But he remembers for all time what the blacksmith had did to him. Now this fable is used to explain a few different things 1, why blacksmiths ring the anvil (keeps the devil away because he is now afraid of the sound) 2, why you should never ring an anvil unless you are working (because although he fears the sound it also gets his attention and and if he sees you aren't actually working on anything, he will come right on into the shop) 3, why horseshoes are lucky (they remind the devil of his pain and cause him to not want anything to do with them) Neat little story, best told to children around a fire, and told in a very loud and animated way, lots of pantomime.

Sadly so far i only find one case where its a playable job: Ragnarok Online 😢

@@SetuwoKecik Lord Of The Rings Online has it split into several categories, but you can make an alright profit with them.

The Elder Scrolls franchise. nuff said.

@@FirebladesSong neat

The smiths in monster hunter are always great lads

How was it to compete, wow, I'm jealous I hope to train and enter one day

I certainly hope your username doesn't reflect your works! Hahaha

all you need a a good nail and a threader, you can do it. Just don't expect it to be shiny like the modern crap.

​@@Feribrat99 Isn't it always going to be shiny when you cut the thread with a threader? 😅🤔

the farmer would not be in the field without the blacksmith because he would still have that rotten tooth in his head and would be sick as a dog. I am an old time blacksmith. I know about this shit.

This blacksmith is also a farmer. When you don't have iron, you use wood and stone.

chicken or egg? no question about that at all! God made all the animals first! God made the chicken, and the chicken laid the egg. then along came colonel Sanders,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,:))

If a village loses one farmer it can get by because others with the same skills will take over the land. If the village loses a carpenter it will be harder, but several people will have rough carpentry skills. If it loses the miller or blacksmith it will be much worse because those are complicated skills which are not always intuitive and take many years of extra training. Not having them means the deadly serious business of turning seeds into food drops like a stone. Draft animals don't get shod. Tools break and can't be repaired in time. The mill stops working, and grain has to be ground by hand which means pulling lots of people off of other productive work. It's not that metalworking is more important than farming. It means that the impact of losing a few members of that trade makes the marginal life of subsistence farming a lot more marginal.

Ya it's not really an equal comparison the way you make it seem. Like Todd said the farmer is a very basic skill, you can teach almost anyone botany to the degree to plant and harvest food. Blacksmithing takes years to learn to the extent of making complicated tools and to make them structurally sound for that matter, it's an incredibly in depth process and if you do it wrong it's not only a broken tool it's wasted resources. Farming is a 1 to 1 transfer of time, you put the seed in the tilled ground and you get a plant, you use different techniques with soil for different results but it's the same return, blacksmithing requires immense resources to produce a product and if you're a novice you just wasted a whole lot of other people's time than just a few seeds.

They were the unsung hero in almost every major military endeavor from 2,000 BC to the 1920's. They're weapon making skills as a group effort could make or break an army at times.

If I may ask, can Blacksmithing still be a reliable living in this day and age where it's easier for so many people to just buy cheap, mass produced stuff that just ends up thrown away and replaced within so little time?

If you worked a little faster you could be part time ;)

When I was 9, I took a class on Saturday afternoons where I took a hunk of steel, a piece of brass, a block of wood, and a scrap of hide and made knife all by myself. I have never been prouder of anything else I have ever made in my life. I think everyone should have the experience of making real, useful tools from scratch, or near scratch at least. 45 years later, I still keep it with me wherever I go.

Well, the anvil had to be forged 😅

go to a scrapyard and ask for a big hunk of steel

Yes, there's no need for a London pattern anvil, most blacksmithing in the history of the world was done on square blocks of steel. Mass and a few square edges are far more important than a horn. A vise mounted nearby can hold Hardy tools and pipes or round bars to form curves.

Ooo, inchworm! Aaaaw, he fell.

lmao

*Insert femur breaker scream here*

Good point. 👍 Without iron, there is no blacksmithing and without miners, there’d be no foundry. But my vote is on farmers. Everybody needs to eat.

Bloomery

Nah, blacksmiths making blooms and refining iron predates foundries by quite some time; seperate foundries are just something that makes blacksmithing more efficient.

Back in the Earlies the smith and the foundryman were often the same person. At the very least there might be a bloom furnace where scrap was remelted back into usable metal

What's the best way to get into it? And where do y'all find work?