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2019-04-20, 02:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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#5
Barbarian in the Playground
Re: Various metals in folklore/fantasy? (E.g. silver, cold iron, etc.)
The meta- problem to your request is that the lore isn't there, for the most part. Alchemists loved "as above, so below" and thus attributed meaning to those metals, but either there's no ancient lore or (more likely) time has taken the most ancient tropes and shunted them onto newer materials. Lead, copper, tin worldwide were just tool-making materials that were superior to other materials in specific contexts. Silver was valued as ornamental and as bullion. Gold and iron had alchemical significance. Mercury was viewed as anomalous and amazing by natural philosophers, but was basically irrelevant to common folklore.
Copper and tin don't really have "stories, perhaps because they normalized as commercial materials earliest but also dropped out of use such that they don't turn up in pseudo-lore of fantasy fiction (which is all about iron and steel). I've never really encountered tales in which they had mystic significance, only histories in which specific alloys (such as hepatizon or Corinthian bronze) were viewed as rare, beautiful and "almost as good as gold." Tin and tin mining in the Near East had a certain cachet of mystery, because tin ores were comparatively rare and the fabled "Casserides" islands were the equivalent of the Cities of Gold. In ritual terms, copper had the the same association with the sun and light that gold did, for people who couldn't afford or obtain gold to make ornaments and implements out of. Bronze and bass formulas were, in turn, viewed as gold substitutes in aesthetic works, and one subset of alchemy was the metallurgy of creating gold-appearing alloys from baser metals.
I've never actually seen a clean explanation for why iron is a ward against evil stuff, and the story exists in multiple folklore systems, not just Celtic tales of faeries. For example, in the Caucus Mountains and in Tibet. I suspect the background is that properties attributed to meteoric iron--sky metal with strange appearance, like are used for thokcha--and/or naturally magnetized iron were extended across all smelted items. A lot of fantasy standards--magic unstoppable swords and such--have been transferred over to more and more sophisticated varieties of steel..."Damascus," wootz, adamant, vibranium, et cetera...but ultimately comes from an era in which the comparison was copper and bronze versus iron.
Lead really only has significance to alchemists, because its weight is close to that of gold and the archetypal transformation is lead to gold--the base to the precious. Other than that...no real mythology.
Silver is attributing healing and cleansing properties by some New Age systems, but its unclear in the past if it had a firm mystical power set. The idea of silver as weapon versus supernatural things is comparatively modern and seems to come from a French story.
Gold's lore isn't really that deep either. Gold is associated with light because of its lustre, and permanence because it didn't corrode. There's the alchemy correspondence of Gold to the Sun, and transmutation to create Gold was the most basic description of Magnus Opus, but it's hard at any moment to tell how metaphorical versus literal any given alchemical text is being. Pretty much everybody prizes gold, but it's generally not seen as magic or supernatural.
Pretty much the only classical metal with a really deep field of mystic implications in mercury, and that's all about alchemy--European, Middle Eastern, Indian, Chinese--in which it ability to amalgamate and self-heal is seen as the means by which transmutation can be achieved. "Treated" mercury was a panacea taken internally for longevity and sexual vigor. Vessels full of mercury and mercury pools have been found in burials in India and China...in some way reflecting its role as immortality source...but also in Mesoamerica (where its attributed properties are not understood because of the devastation of the traditional mysticism by conquest and disease).
Sorry, that's a disappointing answer, but I tried the same avenue of research years ago and almost nothing. Folklore for ancient people explained unusual and foreign things, and most of these metals became familiar and comfortable...things you made ornaments and vessels out of...and lost their mystery before there was even writing. The ones that maintained some cachet were rarer and became entwined with prestige economy--so valuable they existed outside of normal purchase and consumption patterns--but eventually became bullion. There's probably a lost past in which material tropes we're familiar with...amazing weapon metal, secret recipe alloy, better than gold...were at some point attributed to copper or bronze (when the contrast was flint or wood) but tropes and narratives tend to migrate. The story remains even as it migrates to a new substance or object.