: : That is, unless they didn't have that technology, and there really was a vein of pure titanium in Moria. Maybe an asteroid made of pure titanium hit the earth there many eons ago, buried itself deep beneath Caradrhas, and remained there until the dwarves discovered it. That would explain why it was just about the only place where the metal occurred.

: Ok, and a peice of that same asteroid might have broken off in the atmosphere and landed in Numenor.

: The only problem with that theory is that any asteroid upon striking the surface would have exploded in something like an atomic blast. The titanium would have been scattered all over the area and, depending on the size, could have leveled the mountain and left a nice little crater. Especially if it was made of pure titanium, it would be like a armor peircing bullet, a planet killing event.

There wouldn`t be any craters or marks on the landscape by the time the dwarves woke up. The mountain range would have been created after an asteroid hit, extremely recently (geologically speaking), by Morgoth, to stop the elves from reaching the sea. Any craters etc would have been completely removed. The actual asteroids hitting Arda, and if this theory`s right I expect there were plenty, would have probably occured much much earlier, and have been part of Melkor`s attempts to destroy the world the Valar were creating - and they would have done a lot of damage, although obviously none were large enough to succeed. Most would have fallen into the sea, or what later became the sea, and all of them, as you suggest, would have been buried too far underground to be reached by the dwarves.

The key to the veins of mithril, and the reason why it *could* be pure titanium, is that neither the Misty Mountains nor Numenor were nnatural occurences, but were artificial creations by the Valar in historic times. Both would have drawn up material buried far in the depths of the earth, and I think that is the reason why they are the only places in which mithril was found, at any rate in extractable form.

: I tried to find some way to wrap some numbers around how much mithril might have been mined from Khazad Dum, but I can't find anything to even begin a basis. I thought there was a reference to how much a coat of mithril would be worth, but there was only awe expressed at its value without actually giving it one. If it eqated to its weight in gold then there was likely a great deal of mithril mined, in which case, the asteroid theory won't work for the reasons I mention above.

Gandalf makes it quite clear how much it was worth. It`s worth was ten times that of gold, and was based on its beauty, its usefulness (in making ithildin, and a metal stronger than any other, and lighter than steel) and its rarity, for it could not be obtained (at least in recognisable and useable form) anywhere in Middle-Earth outside Moria. Later, after the fall of Moria and Sauron`s gathering what was left, it became "beyond price" simply because there was nowhere in the world that produced it any more. Durin`s folk retained some, Minas Tirith retained some heirlooms, and Sauron had grabbed nearly all the rest.

There was one further reference to its value at the time of the war of the ring. Gandalf says that Frodo`s (fairly light) mithril coat was worth as much as the whole of the shire, and everything in it. Through various hints (the fact that thirty silver pennies were a fair price for five ponies; the relative value of ponies as opposed to land and other forms of property in countries of equivalent stage of development and density of population as the shire at the end of the third age; the normal relative value of silver and gold in classical and medieval times - I think it ranged between 12 to 1 to 16 to 1 at different times and places; even the 500 gold ducats - each roughly a ninth of an ounce - that the Return of the Shadow suggests Bilbo spent on his party) - through these hints I think one *can* make a *very* rough estimate for how much the Shire was worth, but it would take quite a bit of thought, and even more guesswork.

: I think, at the end of the day, mithril can't be titanium simply because there isn't enough of it scattered around ME.

Pure titanium would be extremely rare - as mithril is. The unique nature of the formation Misty Mountains and Numenor are the only plausible explanation of why veins of it exist there at all.

I had thought it odd that Sauron wouldn`t know how to extract it from an impure form, were it present, given that he had been probably the greatest Maia of Aule`s. However, the more I think about it, the more credible it seems. The Valar didn`t know quite a lot about the possibilities of their creations, and even Ulmo was surprised by the snowflake - the possibility of it only occurred as a by-product of the bitter cold that was the invention of Melkor (we`re in the mythological rather than the historical era now, but I think that example still holds - there were limits to a Vala`s knowledge even of the substance of his own special province). And as I suggested above, while Sauron had enough pure knowledge about the substances of which Arda was made to make use of explosives, he did not have the imagination to think of effective firearms; so even if he had known that mithril existed in titanium ore, he might easily not have been able to imagine how it might be extracted - except perhaps by the squandering of his own innate power by putting it into the material. It`s even possible he didn`t know. His explosives didn`t approach modern ones in effectiveness, so his knowledge of chemistry certainly had limits.