The word adamant: From Greek Hardness to Magnetic Attraction
A sickle used against Uranus, bonds holding Prometheus to jagged rock, and the pillars at the gate of Tartarus all share a material in ancient literature: adamant. The word adamant comes from the Greek adamas, meaning unconquerable or untameable. Its history begins with resistance and hardness, rather than a Latin expression of love. Yet a later association with magnets brought affection into its linguistic story. During the Middle Ages, people confused adamant with lodestone, a magnetic rock, and connected its name with the Latin adamare, meaning to love or be attached to.
In classical use, adamant was an archaic form of diamond, but it also acquired qualities associated with hard metal, probably steel. Those metallic qualities helped it become an independent concept instead of remaining simply another name for a gemstone. Diamond itself traces back to adamas through Late Latin diamas and Old French diamant. As diamond became the contemporary name of the hardest gemstone, adamant grew more archaic as a noun. Diamond is a form of carbon with atoms arranged in a rigid crystal structure. Its physical hardness has practical uses in cutting and polishing tools. Diamond also has the highest thermal conductivity of any natural material, and its pure form is colorless, tasteless, and odorless.
Greek legends gave that strength a violent setting. Gaia provided Cronus with an adamant sickle, which he used to castrate his father Uranus. Perseus likewise used an adamantine sickle or sword to decapitate the sleeping Medusa. In these tales, the extraordinary material appeared in the weapons that enabled attacks on powerful figures. Ovid's Metamorphoses added a different transformation: after Rhea became offended by Celmis, a childhood companion of Zeus, she asked Zeus to turn him into diamond-hard adamant. The resulting substance was compared with a tempered blade, preserving the association between adamant and the hardness of worked metal.
Other ancient works placed adamant around captives or at defended boundaries. In Prometheus Bound, Hephaestus binds Prometheus to jagged rocks with adamantine bonds. Hesiod's Works and Days compares the third race of men to adamant to express their strength. In Virgil's Aeneid, solid adamant forms pillars framing the gate of Tartarus, beyond the power of men or heavenly beings to uproot in war. Some versions of the Alexander Romance give Alexander the Great adamantine walls to keep Gog and Magog from attacking peaceful southern lands. The word adamant also appears in the King James Bible as a translation of the Hebrew Shamir in Ezekiel.
Another belief held that adamant, understood as diamond, could block a magnet's effects; Pseudodoxia Epidemica addressed that belief. John Donne later used the attractive image in Holy Sonnet I, first published in 1635, asking for his iron heart to be drawn like adamant. The word adamant appears in line fourteen of that sonnet.
Medieval and early modern literature continued to give the material different jobs. Gahmuret wears an adamant helmet in Parzival, where goat blood compromises its hardness. In Dante's Divine Comedy, completed around 1321, the angel at the gate of purgatory sits on adamant. Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, published in 1590, makes Sir Artegal's sword Chrysaor from it. Physical diamonds can be scratched by other diamonds and worn down over time by softer materials. Their resistance to scratching differs from toughness, which measures resistance to breakage from forceful impact. Diamond cutters use a cleavage plane to split some stones before faceting them.
John Milton gave adamant several roles in Paradise Lost. Satan is cast into a place of adamantine chains and fire, and the gates of hell are described as adamantine. The material also appears in armor: Satan wears adamant and gold, his shield has tenfold adamant, and the fallen angels wear adamantine protection. Later, pins and chains of adamant bind the world to Satan and to sin and death. The word adamant and its derivative adamantine occur eight times across books one, two, six, and ten of the poem. Jonathan Swift used a different construction in Gulliver's Travels, making the underside of the flying island Laputa from adamant.
Modern fantasy found room for both gemstone and building material. In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, the ring Nenya carries a gem of adamant, while Barad-dur is partly built from it and Gondor's crown has seven adamant gems. Dungeons & Dragons uses adamantine as an unusually strong metal. Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass gives Lord Asriel a tower made of adamant. The Hypostasis of the Archons gives the word adamant another setting: the Adamantine Land, an incorruptible place above, from which spirit comes to dwell within a human being.