Talk:Iron in mythology

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An entry from Iron in mythology appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 21 March 2007.

[edit] Supernovas and mythology?

I'm not sure that this excerpt from the first section of this article really belongs in an entry on "Iron in Mythology":

Lawlor (1999: p.103-104) charts the lifecycle, origins and transmutations of iron from supernova to helium:

Supernova explosions are believed to be triggered by the iron of the star's core collapsing and dispersing. Looked at :symbolically, stars burst like germinating seeds, and the core iron, which completes the cycle of internal densification, converts :back to helium, the original element that was formed in the heavens.

As iron and nickel have the highest binding energy per nucleon of all the elements,[1] iron cannot produce energy when fused, and an :iron core grows.[2] This iron core is under huge gravitational pressure. As there is no fusion to further raise the star's :temperature to support it against collapse, it is supported only by degeneracy pressure of electrons. When the core's size exceeds :the Chandrasekhar limit, degeneracy pressure can no longer support it, and catastrophic collapse ensues.[3]

This seems more like information that would belong in a more general article on iron rather than an article that is supposed to be focusing on iron in mythology. Nortonew 13:49, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I recently found an interesting reference in "Pan's Travail" by J. Donald Hughes. On p. 175, "Each year the Avaral Brethren, a Roman priesthood who had care of a large forest dedicated to Dea Dia near the city, 'offered two young pigs in order to expiate theunavoidable desecration of the sacred grove by the use of the axe in pruning and belling it...whenever iron was brought into the grove, as for...the lopping and felling of the trees...there were sacrifices ob ferrum illatum ["for the bringing in of iron'], and, when the work was done, ob ferrum elatum ["for the taking out of iron"].'" (footnoted to "Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities", NY, 1923; pp. 686-88, on 'Fratres Arvales'.) This is the earliest reference to the issue of iron in the cutting of trees and the 'desecration' it produces. Course, we know fairies don't like iron, perhaps the dryads don't like them either. Glenn A. Turner 01:38, 26 July 2007 (UTC)