Tonight I have Photobucket, so I can explain what I learned over the weekend.

I knew Touchstone Magazine. And I’d heard and read the word “touchstone” many times. I vaguely understood that it had to do with testing the value and authenticity of something or other.

Sam the Viking, down in Story City, the guy who owns the Viking boat, showed me how it actually works. He does some silversmithing, and knows about these things.

Sam and I have similar whetstones. His is a little prettier than mine, but the shape is the same. Here’s mine.

These stones are quarried from the very places where the Vikings got theirs, a thousand years ago. They’re made of Norwegian schist, and have an extremely fine grit. Not the kind of stone you want for sharpening a dull knife, but excellent for making a sharp knife razor sharp. Such stones were a major Norwegian export during the Viking Age.

There’s even a myth about them. As the story goes, Thor was challenged to fight a duel with a giant whose weapon was a huge whetstone. Thor smashed the whetstone so that it burst into a thousand pieces, and one of them buried itself in Thor’s own forehead. A witch, called in to administer First Aid, was unable to pull it out, so Thor carries it permanently in his head, and it gives him occasional headaches.

The whole story is rather complicated, and I don’t think anybody really knows what it means. But there was clearly believed to be a connection between Thor and whetstones.

But a touchstone is a further dimension. A touchstone is a whetstone used for the purpose of testing precious metal.

If you’ve got a piece of silver, and a piece of pewter, and you’re having trouble telling which is which, you can scrape them on the whetstone/touchstone. The silver leaves a bright silver line behind, while the pewter leaves dull gray line. I’ve tried this experiment myself, and can vouch for the results.

The same differentiation can be made, or so I understand, between gold and brass.

And they say that an experienced goldsmith can tell the proportion of precious metal in an alloy merely by observing the line on the touchstone.

So now you know. A touchstone is something that tests value and purity.

You knew this already?

Don’t tell me about it. Let me think I enriched your life.