A blade forged past mortal skill decides its owner's fate more surely than his arm does. In Apollodorus's Library — a Greek mythography of the 1st or 2nd century CE — Peleus is left sleeping alone in the wild by his treacherous host Acastus, who takes the one thing that could save him, "hiding his sword in the cows’" dung before returning home. Peleus wakes weaponless among the centaurs and would have died "if he had not been saved by Chiron", the wise centaur, "who also restored" "him his sword" once it was sought and found. What that sword was, the editor's note makes plain: "a magic sword wrought by the divine smith" "Hephaestus and bestowed on Peleus" by the pitying gods, a brand with which its bearer was everywhere victorious in fight and chase. The whole disaster turns on separating a man from a blade no ordinary hand could match.

The Kalevala (Finnish oral song, compiled 1835–1849) arms its heroes from the same otherworldly forge. Bound for the wars of the far North, young Lemminkainen calls for his father's "sword of honor", and takes up a broadsword "That Tuoni had been grinding" — sharpened by the lord of death himself — "That the gods had brightly burnished". When even that is not enough, he prays past steel to the storm-god: "Grant me now thy mighty fire-sword", the lightning-blade of Ukko, to blunt the spears of the Lapland wizards.

Both witnesses agree that the sword's power lives in its maker, not its edge — Hephaestus in the Greek, Tuoni and the gods in the Finnish, the smith standing behind the steel. And both know the blade's other half is loss: a sword hidden in dung, a sword that must be prayed for. The Greek and Finnish shelves are wired to served text here, while the Japanese and further Finnish authorities gathered nearby wait unread. When the weapon is the god's work and not the hero's, whose victory is it that the magic sword wins?