Ohoy, villain! Wretched iron!
Wretched iron! Cursed bog ore!
You flesh-eater, gnawer of bones,
You spiller of innocent blood!
Scoundrel, how did you get power?
Tell how you became so haughty!
Damn you, bastard! Wretched iron!
I know your birth, you purblind fool,
I know well your source, you villain!
Once there walked three nature spirits,
three fiery daughters of the sky.
They milked their swelling breasts to earth,
they squeezed their milk onto the fens.
From the first maid spurted black iron,
this turned into soft wrought iron.
White milk squirted the second maid,
this was the source of tempered steel.
The third maid spouted blood-red milk,
this gave birth to bog iron ore.
Ohoy, villain! Wretched iron!
Wretched iron! Cursed bog ore!
Then you were not high and mighty,
not yet mighty, not yet haughty,
when you sloshed in swamps and marshes,
when in bogholes you were trampled.
Damn you, bastard! Wretched iron!
I know your birth, you purblind fool!
I know well your source, you villain!
A wolf then ran across the fen,
a shambling bear walked in the moor.
And the swamp stirred in the wolf tracks,
under the bear's paws moved the moor.
And there sprouted iron seedlings
in the traces of the wolf’s claws,
in the hollows of the bear tracks.
Ohoy, iron! Child of boghole!
Swamp's red rust and gentle smooth milk!
Tell me, who made you so baleful!
Who decreed your works of evil?
Death was riding through the marshes,
plague was on a winter journey.
Seedling steel it found in swampland,
rusty iron in a boghole.
The great death then began to talk,
the killer plague then spoke and said:
In a pine grove on a hillside,
in a field behind the village,
far beyond the farmers' granges,
right here will be the forge of death.
Here I'll build the forge's furnace,
here I'll place the widest bellows,
here I'll start to boil the iron,
fan and blast the rust-red bog ore,
hammer anger into iron.
Iron, poor man, shivered, trembled,
shivered, trembled, shuddered, quavered,
when he heard the call for fire,
heard the plea for flaming anger.
Ohoy, villain! Wretched iron!
Then you were not high and mighty,
not yet mighty, not yet haughty,
moaning in the white-hot furnace,
whining under beating hammers.
Droned the old man on the oven,
groaned the greybeard from the furnace:
Iron stretches, spreads like blubber,
Trickles, flows like dripping spittle,
oozing from the blazing furnace,
flowing from the scorching fire.
Iron, you're still soft and gentle.
How have you yet to be tempered
to make steel from harmless iron?
Get the spittle from an adder!
Bring the venom from a viper!
For iron wouldn't harbor evil
without spittle from a serpent,
without venom from a black snake.
Droned the old man on the oven,
groaned the greybeard from the furnace:
Shelter us, supreme Creator!
Keep us safe now, God Almighty!
So that mankind would not perish,
mother's child vanish without trace
from the face of the earth, from life,
from existence, God's creation.
New eras. New gods and heroes.
And cannons and airplanes
and tanks, and guns.
New steel and iron.
Brand-new, intelligent,
precise, powerful killers,
equipped with automated guiding devices,
armed with nuclear warheads.
Missiles invulnerable to defensive rocketry.
Knives and spears,
axes, halberds, sabers,
and slings and tomahawks and boomerangs,
bows and arrows, rocks and warclubs,
and claws and teeth, sand and salt,
dust and tar, napalm and coal.
Brand-new and up-to-date technology,
the ultimate word in electronics,
ready to fly in any direction,
stay undeflected on its course, hit the target,
paralyze, and knock out of action, obliterate,
render helpless and defenseless,
harm and hurt, cause unknowable loss,
and kill, kill with iron and with steel,
with chromium, titanium, uranium, plutonium,
and with a multitude of other elements.
Ohoy, villain! Evil iron!
Blade of the sword, mother of war!
Boghole ore's the golden guardian,
but you, steel, are kin to evil!
Damn you, bastard! Wretched iron!
We are kinsmen, of the same breed,
of the same seed we have sprouted.
You are earth-born, I am earth-born,
in the black soil we are brethren.
For we both live on the same earth
and in that earth we two will merge.
There will be land enough for both.
