Mining towns prayed for deliverance from the kobolds’ destructive ways.Ī kobold terrorizes a crew of German miners in this illustration from The Playbook of Metals, 1862. They were blamed for accidents, cave-ins, and rockslides and for replacing precious metals with worthless ones. Sometimes they throw pebbles at the workmen, but they rarely injure them unless the workers first ridicule or curse them.” Different regions of Germany believed different things about the kobolds, though, and some people thought they were quite evil. Agricola writes that kobolds do “not often trouble miners, but they idle about in shafts and tunnels and really do nothing, although they pretend to be busy in all kinds of labour, sometimes digging ore, and sometimes putting into buckets that which has been dug. Dwarfish in stature and dressed like miners, kobolds were thought to be expert miners and metalworkers who could be heard constantly drilling, hammering, and shoveling. Not all of the supernatural entities in Agricola’s book were as intimidating as poisonous demon horses. “ mentions one called Annebergius, ‘who only with his breath killed more than twelve labourers in a cave. . . .’ Apparently the demon appeared as a horse with the poisonous gas issuing from his mouth.” “Some are cruel and terrible to behold, and these annoy and hurt the miners,” explains Peter Wothers in his new book, Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf. In 1549 Georgius Agricola-best known for his iconic On the Nature of Metals-published a book on subterranean animals, including the various demons thought to be found in mines. You’d forgive miners for being a little superstitious. And if we’re thinking about mines slighting, there is literally no place on earth darker: it is total, all-encompassing, relentless darkness. You’re far underground and frequently at the mercy of what you cannot see or anticipate-falling rocks, poisonous gases. Mines are spooky places: dark, echoing, labyrinthine, home to unfamiliar sounds and smells. Antimony, Gold, and Jupiter’s Wolf: How the Elements Were Named.

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