[kronckew]

i came across a reference to someone who actually made a gold sickle - 9 caret - and used it to cut mistletoe, they did say it worked, for a couple of cuts, before it deformed and needed resharpening & was in general not up to the job.

i do remember gathering mistletoe from my BIL guerney's farm in no. alabama a number of years ago. rather than a golden sickle, he used a browning 12ga. to shoot the infested branch off. we could easily peel it off the oak branch. the berries are rather gooey & sticky i recall.

one of the more constant threads in mythological and fantastic historical fiction is that iron poisons magic, and/or can weaken or kill magical creature like the fair folke (fairies) and elves. the more educated modern wiccans prefer bronze in their ceremonial items to avoid disturbing the magic.

iron IS strange and magical stuff.

iron is only produced by the exothermic decay of radioactive higher elements formed by fusion in high mass stars, every higher radioactive element eventually decays to iron, and it's very energy hungry if you try to make it from fusing lower elements. iron will not engage in either fusion or fission. the iron in our bodies was once in such a star that exploded and distributed it's iron long before the earth was formed. iron is the most common element forming our planet.