Iron in folklore

"Cold iron"[definition needed] is historically believed to repel, contain, or harm ghosts, fairies, witches, and other malevolent supernatural creatures.

This belief continued into later superstitions in a number of forms: "Cold iron" is a substitute name used for various animals and incidences considered unlucky by Irish fishermen.

[1] Horseshoes are considered a good luck charm in many cultures, including those of England, Denmark,[2] Lithuania, and Estonia, and its shape, fabrication, placement and manner of sourcing are all important.

Meteoric iron was highly prized throughout the Himalayas, where it was included in sophisticated polymetallic alloys for ritual implements such as the singing bowl (Jansen, 1992) and phurba (Müller-Ebeling, et al., 2002).

gnam lcags) is the supreme substance for forging the physical representation of the vajra or other iron weapons, since it has already been tempered by the celestial gods in its passage across the heavens.

Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines cold iron as "A sword, or any other weapon for cutting or stabbing."

Rudyard Kipling's poem "Cold Iron", found in his 1910 collection of stories Rewards and Fairies, used the term poetically to mean "weapon".

In his novel Redgauntlet, the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott wrote, "Your wife's a witch, man; you should nail a horse-shoe on your chamber-door."

In the Disney film Maleficent, the title character reveals early on that iron is lethal to fairies, and that the metal burns them on contact.

In the Lords and Ladies novel of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, the Elves are a fey and maleficent race, strongly sensitive to what a modern reader will recognize to be magnetic fields.