What Was the Cause of Strife Between Elves and Dwarves?

Q: What Was the Cause of Strife Between Elves and Dwarves?

ANSWER: Many strongly-worded opinions have been written about the apparent enmity between Elves and Dwarves in The Lord of the Rings, although there is hardly any reference to such enmity in the story. Legolas and Gimli get off to a poor start but eventually become such close friends that it is considered remarkable. The debates begin with a rather brief passage found in “The Council of Elrond” in The Fellowship of the Ring, where Legolas tells how Gollum was taken from the Elves of Mirkwood:

‘…But Gandalf bade us hope still for his cure, and we had not the heart to keep him ever in dungeons under the earth, where he would fall back into his old black thoughts.’

‘You were less tender to me,’ said Glóin with a flash of his eyes as old memories were stirred of his imprisonment in the deep places of the Elven-king’s halls.

‘Now come!’ said Gandalf. `Pray do not interrupt, my good Glóin. That was a regrettable misunderstanding, long set right. If all the grievances that stand between Elves and Dwarves are to be brought up here, we may as well abandon this Council.’

For some reason people “interpret” this passage to mean there are special grievances (past wars and disputes) between Elves and Dwarves unlike those differences between Elves and Men or between Dwarves and Men. Elves, Dwarves, and Men all played roles in complex relationships in Tolkien’s stories. One of those stories is related in The Hobbit, where the narrator interrupts the tale to explain why the Wood-elves are so unkind to Thorin Oakenshield:

It was also the dungeon of his prisoners. So to the cave they dragged Thorin-not too gently, for they did not love dwarves, and thought he was an enemy. In ancient days they [MY NOTE: “they” = “the Elves”] had had wars with some of the dwarves, whom they accused of stealing their treasure. It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a different account, and said that they only took what was their due, for the elf-king [MY NOTE: Thingol Greycloak of Beleriand] had bargained with them to shape his raw gold and silver, and had afterwards refused to give them their pay. If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially for silver and white gems; and though his hoard was rich, he was ever eager for more, since he had not yet as great a treasure as other elf-lords of old. His people neither mined nor worked metals or jewels, nor did they bother much with trade or with tilling the earth. All this was well known to every dwarf, though Thorin’s family had had nothing to do with the old quarrel I have spoken of. Consequently Thorin was angry at their treatment of him, when they took their spell off him and he came to his senses; and also he was determined that no word of gold or jewels should be dragged out of him.

This brief summary of the tale of Thingol and his people was composed in the mid-1930s before the “final” version of that story was composed (by Christopher Tolkien with some help from Guy Gavriel Kay) for The Silmarillion in 1977. There are some differences between the Hobbit account and the Silmarillion account. In fact, it is hard to find much consistency between any two versions of the story. If you go all the way back to The Book of Lost Tales and look at the tale of the Nauglafring, you find King Tinwelint was an unpleasant fellow who consorted with evil Dwarves. Many of Tolkien’s stories involve or revolve around treachery. Elves betrayed Elves, Elves betrayed Dwarves, Men betrayed Elves — the histories of Beleriand are filled with betrayal after betrayal. By the time Tolkien had a fairly coherent history of the First Age composed he had transformed Thingol’s relationship with the Dwarves into one of long-enduring but somewhat “cool” friendship.

Nonetheless, it’s plain and clear from all the notes and manuscripts that Tolkien intended for the war between Thingol and the Dwarves to somehow still take place. He was never able to fully contrive a satisfactory explanation of how two races who had been allies for the equivalent of thousands of years should suddenly fall out of sorts with each other. And, in fact, the grievance did not lay between Elves and Dwarves but rather between Thingol (and Doriath) and the Dwarves of Nogrod. The Dwarves of Belegost did not participate in the war (in the later versions). Nor did the Dwarves of Khazad-dum or the other four houses — but these Seven Houses of the Dwarves did not exist in Tolkien’s literature until he set down the first account of Dwarven history while working on The Lord of the Rings. Still, the anecdote in The Hobbit assumes an entirely new context after 1950 (when Tolkien began radically transforming the history of the Dwarves of Middle-earth).

In other words, the war between Thingol and the Dwarves of Nogrod cannot be the source of this long-abiding grievance between Elves and Dwarves. In fact, the scene where the Fellowship puzzles over the riddle of the Moria-gate shows that Elves and Dwarves got along just fine for thousands of years AFTER Thingol’s war with Nogrod:

‘Well, here we are at last!’ said Gandalf. ‘Here the Elven-way from Hollin ended. Holly was the token of the people of that land, and they planted it here to mark the end of their domain; for the West-door was made chiefly for their use in their traffic with the Lords of Moria. Those were happier days, when there was still close friendship at times between folk of different race, even between Dwarves and Elves.’

‘It was not the fault of the Dwarves that the friendship waned,’ said Gimli.

‘I have not heard that it was the fault of the Elves,’ said Legolas.

‘I have heard both,’ said Gandalf; ‘and I will not give judgement now. But I beg you two, Legolas and Gimli, at least to be friends, and to help me. I need you both. The doors are shut and hidden, and the sooner we find them the better. Night is at hand!’

In fact, this passage could be read to mean that whatever happened to distance Elves from Dwarves took place after Moria’s west-gate was shut and Eregion was destroyed. But there is a passage in the section on Translation in the appendices where Tolkien writes:

…But in the Third Age something of their old character and power is still glimpsed, if already a little dimmed: these are the descendants of the Naugrim of the Elder Days, in whose hearts still burns the ancient fire of Aulë the Smith, and the embers smoulder of their long grudge against the Elves; and in whose hands still lives the skill in works of stone that none have surpassed.

This long grudge is not explained anywhere in the book; nor does Tolkien address it in the Letters, although in his very lengthy letter (No. 131) to Milton Waldman (publisher at Collins) he wrote of Eregion and Moria: “…There arose a friendship between the usually hostile folk (of Elves and Dwarves) for the first and only time, and smithcraft reached its highest development….” These enigmatic statements are juxtaposed against very clear references to strong and/or long-lasting friendship between Elves and Dwarves, and yet they suggest that Tolkien had some very specific thing or event in mind when he wrote these passages (in more-or-less the same timeframe as Letter No. 131 was probably written in late 1951, after Tolkien had devoted substantial work to explaining the history and nature of the Dwarves).

Readers constructed very flimsy and often quite illogical arguments to explain Tolkien’s inconsistencies, but as it turns out all the fudgery was completely unnecessary. There was indeed an explanation which renders all compelling interests in the arguments moot. In the essay “Quendi and Eldar”, which was published in The War of the Jewels, we finally learned the details of the most ancient grudge between Elves and Dwarves:

The Petty-dwarves. See also Note 7. The Eldar did not at first recognize these as Incarnates, for they seldom caught sight of them in clear light. They only became aware of their existence indeed when they attacked the Eldar by stealth at night, or if they caught them alone in wild places. The Eldar therefore thought that they were a kind of cunning two-legged animals living in caves, and they called them Levain tad-dail, or simply Tad-dail, and they hunted them. But after the Eldar had made the acquaintance of the Naugrim, the Tad-dail were recognized as a variety of Dwarves and were left alone. There were then few of them surviving, and they were very wary, and too fearful to attack any Elf, unless their hiding-places were approached too nearly. The Sindar gave them the names Nogotheg ‘Dwarflet’, or Nogoth niben ‘Petty Dwarf’.^[20]

The great Dwarves despised the Petty-dwarves, who were (it is said) the descendants of Dwarves who had left or been driven out from the Communities, being deformed or undersized, or slothful and rebellious. But they still acknowledged their kinship and resented any injuries done to them. Indeed it was one of their grievances against the Eldar that they had hunted and slain their lesser kin, who had settled in Beleriand before the Elves came there. This grievance was set aside, when treaties were made between the Dwarves and the Sindar, in consideration of the plea that the Petty-dwarves had never declared themselves to the Eldar, nor presented any claims to land or habitations, but had at once attacked the newcomers in darkness and ambush. But the grievance still smouldered, as was later seen in the case of Mîm, the only Petty-dwarf who played a memorable part in the Annals of Beleriand.

Christopher Tolkien dates the text to the years 1959-60, which is almost ten years after his father took up the task of rewriting the history of the Dwarves — a task necessitated by the unexpected arrival in the mail of galley-proofs for the second edition of The Hobbit, which was based on suggestions that Tolkien had sent to his publisher George Allen & Unwin in 1947. Tolkien never expected those illustrative suggestions to be incorporated into a published story so when he found that they would be he decided to alter the background material he had been developing for The Lord of the Rings.

It is impossible, however, to show definite continuity between the notes prepared for The Lord of the Rings‘s appendices and “Quendi and Eldar”. Nonetheless, there is a brief reference to the hunting of the Petty-Dwarves in The Silmarillion, in the “Tale of Turambar” chapter, where Turin learns about the history of Mîm’s people. I think Christopher Tolkien must have recognized the significance of the passage and accepted it because in The War of Jewels he notes the possible first reference to the Petty-Dwarves in the story called “The Wanderings of Hurin”; this tale grew out of “The Grey Annals”, which J.R.R. Tolkien began composing around 1950-51. “The Wanderings of Hurin” appears to be the last part of the “Grey Annals” material.

It could be that J.R.R. Tolkien never really knew what the “ancient grudge” should be when he wrote about it, and that after he had backwritten the story of the Petty-dwarves — retrofitting it into the framework of the grudge — he simply never updated the narratives that mention the ancient hostility between Elves and Dwarves. He certainly never intended Letter No. 131 to be a canonical text that should be held as an authority over the published books. It provides some enlightenment into Tolkien’s thoughts about Middle-earth in 1951 but is not forward-looking and therefore does not encompass the many changes and additions he made in the following 20+ years.

Nonetheless, I have maintained for years that I believe the hunting of the Petty-dwarves was the source of the ancient grudge that the Dwarves held against the Elves, even though it appears to have been retrofitted into the histories; it is the only explanation Tolkien offered which works with all the various assertions in the published stories. The war between Thingol and Nogrod is just too limited in scope to really satisfy as an explanation of the grudge. I don’t believe that was ever J.R.R. Tolkien’s intention.

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