Koval

In Ukrainian, koval is simply the smith, from kovaty, to forge. What makes the name unusual is what has been left off it. Most East Slavic surnames carry a suffix doing grammatical work: -ov and -ev for belonging to or descended from, -sky for association with a place, and in Ukrainian and Belarusian the family of endings -ko, -uk and -ych. Run the smith's word through that machinery and out come Kovalenko and Kovalchuk, two of the most numerous surnames in the country. Koval keeps none of it.

That puts the name in the smaller class of East Slavic surnames that are the plain noun and nothing more, alongside Lebed, a swan, and Zhuk, a beetle. It lines up exactly with Smith, Schmidt and Kowalski: the same indispensable job named the same way in one language after another, because every settlement had a man at the anvil and the byname stuck to him. The bare form does not bend for gender either. A Russian adjectival surname splits into Ivanov and Ivanova; Koval is Koval for both.

Everything a koval could do rested on one property of his material. Iron does not switch from solid to liquid at a line the way water does: it is firmly solid at around 427 C and then, over the next 820 C or so, grows steadily softer and more taffy-like. Temperature was read by eye, because the metal announces it: red first, then orange, then yellow, then white, with the bright yellow-orange being forging heat.

The craft came down to seven operations: drawing down, shrinking, bending, upsetting, swaging, punching and forge welding. Welding was the test. The faces had to reach near-molten white heat with nothing between them, so the fire was banked to burn all heat and very little oxygen, with borax or silica sand as flux to carry the scale out of the joint. To judge the moment, a smith would prod the fire with a scrap of steel wire; when the wire stuck, the heat was right.

Heavy forging needed two pairs of hands. The smith held the hot iron at the anvil with tongs and tapped the exact spot with a small hammer; the striker, very often his apprentice, swung a sledgehammer down on the mark. Trip hammers and power hammers made the striker unnecessary over the twentieth century, and the oldest working relationship in the shop quietly ended.

Before the Industrial Revolution the village smithy was a staple of every town, often sited in the middle of it. The smith was valued because he was not a specialist: he knew how to make and repair many things, from the most complex weapons and armour down to nails and lengths of chain, and medieval scholarship counted his craft among the seven mechanical arts. The fuel was charcoal until Britain's forests were largely stripped in the seventeenth century, and the coal that replaced it made iron red short where it carried sulphur, crumbly instead of plastic at red heat.

One of the earliest iron horseshoes recovered came out of the tomb of the Merovingian king Childeric I, who reigned from 458 to 481 or 482. Adrien Quinquin made the find in 1653 and Jean-Jacques Chifflet wrote it up in 1655: the shoe was so rusted it fell apart as he cleaned it, but he drew it first and counted four nail holes on each side. Then the trail goes cold. The Carolingian capitularies list what a summoned horseman had to bring and never mention shoes, and Viking-age burials give up bits, stirrups and saddle parts with none. The first mention in literature is in Ekkehard's Waltharius, around 920.

Shoeing began as the smith's work and split away from it. Edward III of England (1327-1377) issued a London ordinance in 1350 that named farriers and forbade them to charge more than they had taken before the pestilence, placing them as a separate craft by 1346 at the latest; a statute of the same year made the court's shoer of horses the ferrour des chivaux, sworn before judges to keep to that craft alone. It paid off in war: Edward's army went into France in the first phase of the Hundred Years War with a baggage train carrying its own forges, so the Sergeant-Farrier could shoe in the field.

Most of the smiths named in medieval Britain were men, but not all of them. Katherine Le Fevre was appointed by Edward III in 1346 to maintain the king's forge inside the Tower and keep its work going, at the wages that went with the office. Alice la Haubergere, whose byname means mail-maker, owned an armour shop and worked as an armourer in Cheapside in the early 1300s, and in 1348 Eustachia l'Armurer was training her husband's daughter, likely in the same trade.

In York in 1403 Agnes Hecche was left her father's mail-making equipment in his will and carried the family business on with her brother; the bell founder Johanna Hill and the cutler Agnes Cotiller worked the neighbouring metal trades. Farriery held out as a men's occupation far longer. Women now enter it in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Senegal, the United Kingdom and the United States, and in Britain they reach master farrier and Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Farriers.

The trade was undone by precision. Henry Maudslay built the first screw-cutting lathe in the 1790s, and the insistence of Samuel Colt and other industrialists that parts be interchangeable did the rest: the hardware a population needed began coming from machinists in factories rather than the man at the forge. Smiths made up the shortfall by taking in horses, so much so that the word farrier ended up absorbing the word blacksmith, and when the motor car arrived many became the first generation of mechanics.

The recovery came out of the self-sufficiency turn of the 1970s. The Artists Blacksmiths' Association of North America was founded in 1973 with 27 members and had nearly 4,000 by 2013; the British Artist Blacksmiths Association followed in 1978 with 30 charter members. Elsewhere the collapse never happened: in many developing countries smiths went on making and repairing the iron and steel tools their own districts needed.

Ukrainian football carries more of the name than any other field. Andriy Koval (born 1983), Volodymyr Koval (born 1992) and Stanislav Koval (born 2002) have all played the professional game, and Maksym Koval (born 1992) keeps goal. Two went from the pitch to the bench: Oleksandr Koval (born 1974) and Yuriy Koval (born 1958) are both recorded as player and coach. The name travelled with the game, to the Ukrainian-Canadian footballer Vladimir Koval (born 1975), the American soccer player J. J. Koval (born 1992) and the Russian footballer Yevgeni Koval (born 1973).

Elsewhere in sport the spread is wide. Anastasia Koval (born 1992) is a Ukrainian artistic gymnast, Viktoriya Koval (born 1985) an archer and Kate Koval (born 2006) a basketball player, and a second Yuriy Koval, born in 1980 and no relation on record to the coach born in 1958, wrestles Greco-Roman. Beyond Ukraine the name is on the Belarusian ice hockey player Vital Koval (born 1980), the Russian judoka Vera Koval (born 1983), the speed skater Denis Koval (born 1991) and the tennis player Vlada Koval (born 2001).

Ivan Koval-Samborsky (1893-1962) worked as a Ukrainian stage and film actor, and Mykola Koval (born 1952) sings as an operatic baritone. The name is well represented in Russian letters too, in the author Yury Koval (1938-1995) and in Viktor Koval (1947-2021), who was writer, poet and actor at once.

Others carry it in public life and abroad: Ihor Koval (born 1955), a Ukrainian historian and political scholar; Mykhailo Koval (born 1956), a military officer; Vitaliy Koval (born 1981), an entrepreneur; Vitalina Koval (born 1990), an LGBT rights activist. In the diaspora it belongs to the Australian reporter Ramona Koval (born 1954), the American businesswoman Robin Koval (born 1955) and the American photographer Peter Koval (born 1965). It is the same word every time, the smith, still doing the work it was given when a village needed one man who could make anything out of iron.