I believe surely ancient smiths had their P.R. methods, and hype was as good a selling method then as it is today. Perhaps much better, as ignorance was much more widespread.
But I also believe some of these concepts may derive from the "thought frame" of those times, so different from ours. You see, we are taught the cientific method since we are little children, and it's so natural to us that we can't even conceive a different way of thinking (even if sometimes we relapse in "myth" and "magic" without realizing it).
But the scientific method is a relative novelty.In the middle ages there was no such thing. This doesn't mean the smiths of old times were ignorant or stupid: they just didn't have the anaythic methods we are accustomed to. An attentive, analythic, scientific smith lof today would almost certainly have done as well in those times, compared with other smiths of the same period. He would have been able to detect that when he worked in a certain way he did better than when he worked in some othe way, he just won't have been capable of analyzing the "why" of some effects, because he lacked both intellectual and technical instruments.
A skilled, clever smith would have had a mind capable of observing that certain work he did was better than other, and would have had the curiosity to ask himself why. He would have started observing what he did and when (without any instrument, just by eyeballing the conditions, remember) and would have noted that when he forged facing north, the work was better. When he heat treated in the dark, the work was better.
Today, with analythical, SCIENTIFIC mind we can infer that facing north allowed the light to hit the piece about the same way, and that the smith projected his shade on the piece, allowing a better view of the blade color, or that forging by night you can better see the color (no temometers in the middle ages) and that a full moon was obviously useful to see what you were doing.
But in those times, it was just a matter of seeing that certain ways of forging worked better than others, and the intellectual tools available didn't allow the smith to actually analyze why they did, he could just tell that some ways were "right" and others were "wrong". He probably "seasoned" these intuitions with what notions the knowledge of those times allowed, and so he did something because "it pleased the Gods", even if it was actually because doing so had a certain, physical and beneficial effect: the reasons were fictional, the effects were real.
When he would teach his apprentice how to forge, he would probably tell him just to do so and so, without explaining much, because he wouldn't be able to explain much to himself in the first place, and because usually that was the way of teaching, and how his master taught him the trade, and so the myth would be transmitted and maintained, with each smith adding a little bit to the tale.
So, while some myths are probably just old-timers hype, others may stem from an attempt made by some brilliant smith devoid of modern thought tools of finding an explanation to why some of the work he did was better than other...
(Seems they had been discussing it before I arrived)
