Quote Originally Posted by Lowenklee
Thanks for the replies Blitzkrieg and Watchman,

Hmm, it's an interesting point Watchman. While i'm familiar with the extensive use of germanic manpower for mercenary work in later Roman times i'm not so sure at what point in history this became a widespread phenomenon. Perhaps you could shed some light on this for me?
I doubt the Romans made much use of them prior to their expansion northwards into Gaul, so that leaves the Gauls themselves and perhaps eastern european elements.
Naturally. And they'd make use of mercenaries and allies like everyone else according to situation, whatever their lofty warrior ideals might theoretically have against the idea.

I'll also have to plead ignorance as to the exact nature of trade between early germans and neighboring celts or eastern cultures. Blitzkrieg did mention the carpathian cultures. What high value items would the germans have traded to procure large amounts of mail or weaponry other than baltic amber?
The services of skilled and willing fighters have usually been regarded as valuable you know... But other stuff I can think off the top of my head include various furs and hides (sealskins were exported from the Baltic already around Stone Age - and finds of Aegean bronze swords ought to suggest what kind of stuff might filter the other way - and some Finns were still paying their taxes in squirrel hides by the Early Modern period), walrus tusks from the far north, and probably also assorted craft products already for their exoticism. Salt from some regions too, probably. Less high-profile but rather larger-volume stuff would include things like fish, wool, metal (such as Swedish copper) both raw and worked, maybe honey... all the odds and ends common people now traded.

The idea of large scale trade for mail or weapons also seems to contradict the notion of the scarcity of iron weaponry and armor within early german society.
Large scale, hardly. Enough to outfit some of the senior nobility and their retinues, why not ? (Remember that the Gastiz/Herthoz are actually the only ones in armour; the current Gastiz-model Hundaskaspiz are a placeholder AFAIK, and the Ridoharjoz are also nobles...)

To my knowledge, ironware manufacture increased in volume following the introduction of technical know how from celtic neighbors centuries earlier. This information concerned the extraction of small amounts of iron ore from bogs and swamps in which deposits form due to exposure of iron elements in the water to air. Traditionally it is considered quite soft and poor stock as it contains many impurities. It also happens to be painstakingly tedious and unpleasant work.
I'd be interested in knowing the actual nature of early metal working among germans...such as what folding or laminant process may have been used to make better use of such poor quality iron.
From the museum here I got the impression ironworking spread into Scandinavia already before the main Celtic expansion across Europe - the most logical route would be the very ancient Amber Road, as that one went directly into the proto-Celtic heartlands. The Germans could hardly have failed to pick it up as well. Anyway, by what I know of it whatever its quality issues might be bog iron (slightly a misnomer - around here at least you coud fish the stuff up from lakes too) formed a perfectly serviceable basis for the Northern European Iron Age. If it's good enough for spears and axes and eventually swords, it's sure as Heck good enough for mail.
Heat and hammer iron enough, and most of the impurities go as far as I'm aware of. Apparently the iron-prospectors carried out a preliminary reduction on-site in small furnaces (to get rid of crystallized water and such) so they wouldn't be hauling overmuch useless slag back home.

Watchman i'm under the impression the over lapping ring design of mail is whats intended to provide the bulk of the protection from missile fire, spears, and knives/swords, this would require that the rings stay interlinked even under stress. Given the unrivited nature of early mail i'm actually quite curious to what extant soft iron mail would provide adequate protection before "splitting"?
"Butted" mail only really has trouble with pointy things, which obviously have a relatively easy time forcing a link open. Much Celtic mail was left that way by what I've read (although the Romans apparently insisted on properly closing all the links in theirs), and far as I know it performs against most things beyond the pointy stuff essentially as well as "closed" mail does. Mail largely relies on the sheer difficulty of cutting through the overlapping links, the diffusion of the impact energy into the yieldings but difficult to breach structure, and the fact it becomes functionally a smooth surface if the blow comes in at too shallow an angle, and thus glances off.

And you want the links to be soft and flexible, iron or mild steel (bronze behaves much the same AFAIK). If they're soft and tough, they'll just deform under a blow for the most part. That's okay, since it's more or less part of the whole "absorptive" operative idea of the armour. If you make them hard - high-carbon steel and such - you strip them of their ability to "give in" under a blow and instead render them brittle - and that's Bad News because not only will they shatter, they will also be driven into the wound that much easier which isn't exactly pleasant.

Also I suppose it really depends on the answer to the above question concerning early german methods of removing or compensating for ore impurities. An unaccounted for concentration of impurities in an axe head or spearhead can lead to disastrous structural weakness as i'm sure you know, but that same possibility for structural weakness could lead to the drawing of iron wire as an impossibility without great losses due to breakage no?
So ? One very convenient thing about metals is their recyclability - if a part of the iron wire turns out to have an unacceptably high slag content (likely going to become apparent already during the drawing process), just put that bit aside, work with the rest, and melt and remake the deficient part later. It's actually much less a problem with wire than it is with weapons (nevermind, God forbid, long swords) far as I can figure, since you're here cutting the wire into short segments and the process of working it into thin bars for drawing ought to already get rid of much of the slag deposits. With the weapons you're making a more or less big lump that really should not have weak spots if possible, but I would imagine there is rather less concern with mail given the small size of the component parts and the way it works by "cumulative" effect.

If later germanic sagas and mythos are indicative smiths were a very secretive group that kept ore extraction and metal working techniques very secret.
I wonder about that ore extraction bit. I'm under the impression that part of the process was usually handled by other folks, the smith's main concern being working the metal rather than producing it. But certainly it has always been very typical that specialists who covered and important and demanding profession were regarded (and regarded themselves as) somehow special or downright arcane in premodern societies, with all kinds of ritual and sundry being tacked on both their status and work. (The cathedral-builders' fraternities the Freemasons grew out of would be a Medieval example, not that most craft guilds did not have their elements of mysticism.) In many sub-Saharan African cultures the blacksmith was regarded as a kind of shaman or witchman all but equal to, if different from, the primary specialists of the supernatural for example.

I also wonder if large industrial smithing complexes were present within early german society as they were among the celts? I happen to know for bronze age materials that a large bulk of bronzeware for military use actually came from only a handful of places. Presumably these were the only places where the sufficient technical know how or natural resources existed.
Bronze isn't readily comparable as with that stuff you had the peculiar availability issues of tin and copper to deal with (namely, the two rarely turn out in the same region). Iron is by far more abundant in many parts, or in Northern Europe anyway (although Sweden is rotten with copper, and the "tin isles" of Britain weren't that far away by sea...). Specialist stuff like swords would almost certainly have been mainly Celtic and other imports (although doubtless a powerful king or prosperous chieftain or community could also sponsor the presence of a specialist with the necessary skills - just think of the profit they could turn from selling his wares further, or the presitge and followers the head honcho would get by giving real swords as gifts...), but as things like axes and spears and arrows were both by far easier to make and vitally important to everyday life their production would by necessity already have been handled locally.