Intro: I have watched one too many blacksmithing videos and now I have a question: is it possible to forge steel (either just reshape or "forge-weld") inside a no-oxygen environment?
Scenario: considering the amount of material that turns into iron oxide during the forging process, would it be possible (or plausible) to fill a room with some non reactive noble gas (maybe helium or neon) and proceed to forge inside this room? Or would it be possible to forge in a complete vacuum?
If any of these two options are possible, what are the hindrances and requirements?
Extra info: I am not from the chemistry area and I haven't studied chemistry in years. I took a look at some old textbooks of mine and also did some research on on Google but did not find anything specific to this question. This is purely out of curiosity, and since I don't know how reddit works (therefore can't do a more relaxed inquiry there) , I thought it was not a bad idea to ask here.