Where does the name “MIThril” come from?
The name MIThril comes from the imaginative fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. It was coined in the book, The Hobbit, which was first published in 1937, and later used in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. In these stories, mithril is the Elvish name of a metal (also called “silver steel” or “true silver”) with near-magical properties of strength, beauty, and lightness. This metal was worked by the Dwarves into intricate ring-mail armor tunics, light in weight and comfortable enough to be worn constantly, yet unobtrusive and nearly indestructible. Frodo, the protagonist and hero of the Lord of the Rings, wears a mithril tunic under his traveling clothes; not even his companions know of its existance until at a critical moment in the story it stops an Orc spear, saving his life. Frodo’s mithril tunic is the inspiration and metaphor for the MIThril project; our goal is to create technology that is light weight, unobtrusive, reliable, and always doing its job.
