Mithril-coat

The shirt has no proper name of its own and is called throughout by what it is made of or by who gave it. Bilbo Baggins, handing it on at Rivendell, speaks of it simply as the dwarf-mail he had from Thorin, naming it for the giver rather than for any smith. On the road to Lothlórien, a few miles beyond the Gates of Moria, when Frodo's hidden gear is uncovered, Gimli identifies it at once as a mithril-coat and reckons he has never seen or heard of a finer piece of that work, so that the Elvish name of the metal becomes the usual name of the object. Later usage in the tale follows both habits without settling on one, so that mail-shirt, mithril-coat and dwarf-mail all refer to the same small corslet of rings.

The naming therefore rests on the metal, and for that the fullest account in the narrative is Gandalf's, given on the road through the mines. He explains that the Elves call the substance mithril, which may be rendered in the Common Speech as true-silver, and that it was also spoken of as Moria-silver, since the mines beneath the Misty Mountains were the one place where it was ever found. The Dwarves, he adds, had their own word for it and did not share it. In the same passage he sets the worth of Bilbo's corslet above that of the whole Shire, a valuation that says more about the rarity of the metal than about the craftsmanship of the shirt.

Of the making itself very little is attested. When Thorin drew the corslet out of the treasure under the Lonely Mountain, it is described only as a small mail-shirt of silver-steel that had been wrought a long age earlier for a prince of the Elves while he was still young, which accounts for its being of a size that fitted a hobbit. Neither the smith nor the prince is named, nor is it said how the piece came into Smaug's hoard. The single firm link is the metal's one source in Moria; any attribution of the workmanship beyond that is inference and not statement.

As an object the corslet is slight. It is a shirt of very small rings, close enough to fall like cloth rather than to hang stiffly, and in the account of the hoard under the Lonely Mountain it comes with a belt of pearls and crystals; Bilbo, trying it on, is said to have felt splendid in it while privately suspecting that he cut a ridiculous figure. Its lightness and suppleness are what allow the later use to which it is put: Frodo wears it over a soft leather shirt, under tunic and outer clothing, from Rivendell onward, and none of his companions knows it is there until the fighting in Moria forces the matter into the open and his gear is uncovered at the halt a few miles beyond the Gates of Moria. That concealment is a property of the fabric, not a virtue of the thing; nothing in the narrative suggests the mail hides its wearer in any other sense.

For the behaviour of the metal itself the narrative relies on Gandalf's account in the mines. Mithril, he says, could be worked as easily as copper under the hammer and would take a polish like glass, yet when the Dwarves had wrought it the result was lighter than steel and harder than tempered steel besides. Its look was that of common silver, but it neither tarnished nor lost its brightness with time. The same passage notes that the Elves valued it highly and used it in making ithildin, the substance of the moon-letters on the western doors, so that the metal's uses are not confined to armour.

What the coat demonstrably does is stop a thrust. In the Chamber of Mazarbul an orc-chieftain drives a spear into Frodo's side hard enough to pin him against the wall, and the mail holds; Aragorn, examining him afterwards, finds him bruised and sore but otherwise whole, where the blow should have killed him. The limits are equally plain. It covers the body and no more, and Shelob's sting takes Frodo at the neck above it. It gives no protection against poison, exhaustion or the weight of the Ring, and it does not prevent his capture: the orcs who carry him into the tower strip it from him and quarrel over it as a trophy to be sent to their master. Nothing beyond hardness and lightness is ever claimed for it.

Between its making and its appearance under the Lonely Mountain the corslet has no recorded history at all. The mountain kingdom of the Dwarves was overthrown in the year 2770 of the Third Age, when Smaug came down upon Erebor and Dale and drew the wealth of both into a single bed in the deep hall, and the shirt lay somewhere in that heap for the whole of the dragon's tenancy; how it travelled from an Elvish prince to a Dwarvish treasury is never said. It comes back into the record in 2941, after the dragon's death and the reopening of the mountain, when Bilbo Baggins was picking his way over the hoard and Thorin Oakenshield drew the small mail-shirt out of the treasure and set it on the hobbit's shoulders as the first payment of the share he had been promised. Bilbo still had it on him when the armies met before the Gate later in the same year, though a stone struck his helm as the battle neared its end at sunset, and he saw nothing of how it was won. He carried it back to the Shire with the rest of his profit from the journey.

For the next sixty years the coat was a curiosity rather than a piece of war-gear. Bilbo placed it on loan in the Mathom-house at Michel Delving, the Shire's repository for objects that nobody had a use for and nobody would throw away, and there it stayed among the hoarded oddments of the Westfarthing. He reclaimed it before his departure in 3001 and took it east with him to Rivendell, where it remained in his keeping while he grew old in Elrond's house. When the Company was made up and about to leave at the end of 3018, Bilbo fetched it out again together with his old sword and pressed both on Frodo, remarking that he had never worn the mail since he came back from the north. The gift was made quietly and Frodo put the shirt on under his other clothes without telling anyone; from that point the object passes to a bearer who would use it far harder than its first owner had.

Frodo wore it continuously from the crossing of the Misty Mountains onward. On the thirteenth of January 3019 it took the thrust that would otherwise have ended the quest in the Chamber of Mazarbul, and thereafter it went with him down Anduin, through the Emyn Muil and the marshes and into Ithilien, unremarked because unseen. It left him on the thirteenth of March in the pass above Minas Morgul, when the orc garrisons of Cirith Ungol and Minas Morgul carried his body up to the tower and stripped him of everything he had. The mail became at once the chief prize of the haul, and the argument over who had the right to send it to Barad-dûr was what set the two companies of orcs at each other's throats. The fighting spread through the tower and destroyed almost the entire garrison, which is the single reason Sam was able to climb it; Shagrat broke out with the bundle of tokens and got them away east.

The tokens reached their destination and were put to the use Sauron intended. On the twenty-fifth of March, before the Black Gate, his lieutenant brought them out one by one before the captains of the West — a short sword, a grey cloak with an elven brooch, and the mail-shirt — and offered them as proof that the errand of the West was already in his master's hands, naming terms for the prisoner's life. Gandalf took all three from him without ceremony and the parley broke off. Beyond that recovery the narrative does not follow the coat further, and no later owner or resting place is given for it.

Within the larger tale the corslet works first as a piece of inheritance. It comes out of a treasure-hunt that ended well and passes, with an old sword, into a journey of a wholly different temper, so that the earlier book is present in the later one not as reminiscence but as equipment. Its worth, however, is never established by those who own it. The hobbits keep it as a memento of an adventure, and it takes outsiders to say what it is: Gandalf, talking of Moria-silver in the dark of the mines, and Gimli, who looks at the uncovered rings at the halt beyond the Gates of Moria with the recognition of a craftsman. The pattern is characteristic of the book's treatment of the Shire, where things of consequence sit unregarded among the ordinary until someone from outside names them.

Dramatically the shirt is a withheld fact. Frodo puts it on privately and the narrative says nothing more of it until the spear-thrust in Mazarbul, so that his survival arrives as a genuine reversal rather than as an arranged rescue. Gandalf's remark afterwards, that there is more to the hobbit than appears, is the point the episode is made to carry: the quest continues not by strength but by a provision made long before and for other reasons. That the protection was a gift, and an accidental one, matters more to the story than the hardness of the metal.

Once taken from Frodo the coat reverts to being treasure, and behaves as treasure does in Tolkien. Its value sets its captors quarrelling until the garrison has largely destroyed itself, so the object opens Frodo's road a second time by way of greed rather than by protection, in a manner that recalls the hoard it was drawn from. Before the Black Gate it is put to a third use, as evidence in an argument, where the plain fact of the rings is meant to do what no assertion could. In each case the shirt persuades or destroys by being worth something, which is the burden the tale hangs on it.

In Peter Jackson's trilogy the corslet keeps its place in the plot but not all of its detail. Bilbo, played by Ian Holm, hands it to Frodo (Elijah Wood) at Rivendell along with the sword, as in the narrative; what changes is the blow it stops. The spear in the tomb-chamber of Moria is given to the cave-troll rather than to an orc-chieftain, so that the survival and Gandalf's dry observation about the hobbit are preserved while the assailant is not. The naming of the metal is also brought forward: Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) recognises the rings in the mines immediately after the fight, which leaves the later scene in Lothlórien, where the coat is uncovered in the book, without a counterpart on film. The parley at the Black Gate fared worse in the cutting room; the Mouth of Sauron, played by Bruce Spence, was dropped from the theatrical Return of the King and survives only in the extended version, where he produces the mail and Gandalf takes it from him.

The later Hobbit trilogy supplies the scene the earlier films had assumed, with Thorin (Richard Armitage) making the gift to Bilbo (Martin Freeman) inside the reclaimed mountain, though the film places it in the course of the quarrel over the treasure rather than as the quiet first instalment of a promised share. The oldest of the sound adaptations remains the closest: the BBC Radio series of 1981, running to twenty-six parts, retains both the gift at Rivendell and Gandalf's account of true-silver on the road through the mines, where the whole worth of the Shire is set against the one shirt. Bilbo is spoken there by John Le Mesurier, Gandalf by Michael Hordern, and Frodo by Ian Holm, who would later take the other hobbit's part in the films — so that the two ends of the coat's descent are voiced, across twenty years, by the same actor.