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[EOR]
[BOC]
Adding carbon is a very different process than adding tin; tin is a metal like copper, and you melt them together to make bronze. But carbon is added either during smelting as a result of furnace temperature and oxygenation, in the forge through prolonged contact with the fuel in which the iron is heated, or through a deliberate process of carburization in which something like bone is burned, in a low oxygen environment, next to the metal so the CO can be absorbed by the iron. It's a very different kind of technological / ritual process.

Learning how heat treatment works is pretty straightforward - when iron cools slowly, it's soft. When it cools at air temperature, it's a little harder. If you heat hard iron to a low temperature so it starts to turn colors, it gets a little softer. You can observe all this through the course of forging the material, and any smith who spent a decent amount of time at the anvil could learn it. Learning to quench steel in water might be as simple as wanting to cool the metal more rapidly, which again isn't an empirical leap (everyone knows that fire puts out water, and smiths can easily observe that iron cooled more slowly is softer than iron cooled more rapidly in the air, so why not see what happens if you go even faster by tossing water onto the hot iron?). But it might also be connected with views on the four elements (iron is forged from earth, fire, and air, so all that's missing is water), or perhaps even a blood ritual in the forging of a weapon (phrases like 'heathoswaete' - 'battle-blood hardened' - in Beowulf have provoked a lot of wild speculation) through which the right kind of liquid was thought to imbue a weapon with specific properties.


[EOC]
