Adamant: Encyclopedia - Adamant

Adamant

Adamant and similar words are used to refer to any especially hard substance, whether composed of diamond, some other gemstone, or some type of metal. Both adamant and diamond derive from the Greek word αδαμας (adamas), meaning "untameable". The word adamant is comparable to the word brimstone, an archaic word for sulphur.

Since diamond is now used exclusively for the hardest gemstone, the increasingly archaic adamant–and its adjectival form adamantine–has a mostly poetic or figurative use. For instance, in mediæval mythology, "adamant" was a hypothetical impenetrably hard mineral, and a similar use is often seen in fantasy fiction. Adamantium and adamantite are also common variants.

Adamant as an adjective means resistant to reason, determined or inflexible.

Adamant - Examples of use

• In Greek mythology, Cronus uses an adamantine sickle to castrate his father, the Titan Uranus. Unlike iron, adamant can affect the gods.
• In Roman mythology, Tartarus is sealed with columns of solid adamant (see Aeneid book VI, Virgil).
• In Norse mythology, Loki is bound underground by adamantine chains.
• In the King James Version of the Bible the word adamant is also used in several verses, including: "As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead: fear them not, neither be dismayed at their looks, though they [be] a rebellious house." (Ezekiel 3:9), although later translations substitute the word diamond for adamant.
• In Edmund Spenser's poem The Faerie Queene, Sir Artegal's golden sword Chrysaor was said to be "Tempred [sic] with Adamant".
• In Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, the bottom of the flying isle of Laputa is made of adamant. The gigantic lodestone in the Astronomers' Cave that enables the island to move is also supported by adamant.
• In John Milton's Paradise Lost Satan is bound in adamantine chains.
• In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Galadriel's ring Nenya is named the "Ring of Adamant". Also, it is mentioned that the Tower of Orthanc was made of an adamant-like material.
• In the movie Forbidden Planet, adamantine steel was the material used to build "cloud piercing towers".
• The TV cartoon character Atom Ant's name is likely a pun on adamant.
• In the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, adamant is a material which weapons and armor can be made of. Adamantine weapons can bypass the hardness of most other materials, thereby cutting through, e.g., stone walls like butter.
• In the MMORPG RuneScape, adamant is a type of metal used to make armour and weaponry. The raw ore, and in RuneScape Classic also the finished metal, is known as Adamantite . Adamantite and Adamant are depicted as dark green in color. Adamantite is more powerful than Mithril, but not as powerful as Runite.
• In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, the tower of the fortress built by the character Lord Asriel is made of adamant.
• In the Marvel Universe, adamantium is one of the strongest known metals, used in Wolverine's and Sabretooth's claws and skeleton, Bullseye's skeleton and some of Ultron's robotic bodies.
• In the Console RPG series Final Fantasy, Adamantite is made from the shells of turtles (called Adamantoises) and is forged into weapons, armor, etc.

See also

• A list of fictional chemical substances.
• Mithril, a strong, silvery metal from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
• Adamantium, the super-strong metal from various fictional universes.

Category: Fictional materials

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Adamant", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamant, used and available under the GNU Free Documentation License.