Some of those bladesmiths are akin to magicians.
And some people are just very skilled with it to the point of seeming magical.
I'd still love to know how they do it.
(And make one or three myself.)
We used to go with biker friends to Renn faires and Colonial re-enactments but they stopped wanting to go with us because I'd stand and gawp at the smiths for hours until I was literally dragged away.....:))
And smiths *were* once considered "magicians" which is why all the legendary smith gods like Vulcan, Goibhnu and Haephestus were "crippled" in their mythologies.
Kings and landowners would intentionally cripple a good smith to prevent them from running off.
Hubby is a welder/metal fabricator and even he gets annoyed when I sit out in the shop and watch the fire and sparks as he hammers chunks of "useless" steel into amazing things.
Even my house is involved in all this weirdness.
It's about 250 years old and belonged to a smith who serviced wagons on the old National Pike.
The two nearest neighbor's houses were also part of the "complex" and all three houses have welders and/or metal fabricators living in them.
[spirit of place?]...;)
Not far from here was the Green Springs Iron Furnace.
There are holes all over the woods where they dug the iron ore.
The stream by my house has "rusty" algae and in the summer especially, the water looks like blood because so much iron oxide is leeched from the rocks and the heat slows the stream down enough that it builds up.
Oh...and hubby's surname means "blacksmith" in Italian.
[well, ancient Celtic, actually]