How Would the Relations Between Dwarf-Realms Have Worked?

Q: How Would the Relations Between Dwarf-Realms Have Worked?

ANSWER: The original question as submitted was much longer and more detailed, broken down into sub-questions. The sub-questions were:

• Did Khazad-Dûm had some sort of precedence over non-Longbeard cities such as Nogrod?
• That the murder of Thrór by Azog [led to gathering] all Dwarven Houses [together]; [that] could show an at least symbolical importance of King of Durin’s folk for all Dwarves, but was it completed by some sort of political role (maybe as tiny as a superficial suzerainty?) over non-Longbeard Dwarf-realms?
• What were the relationship between the King of Durin’s Folk and the various Longbeards sub-kings and lords?
• Were Iron Hills, Thráin’s Halls, and over various settlement considered more or less independents even if vassals, or at the contrary these lords and sub-kings were more subservients?
• Eventually, what was the relationship between the King of Durin’s Folk and the Dwarves of Firebeards and Broadbeams after the War of Wrath, when these peoples either migrated to Khazad-Dûm or remained in Ered Luin?
• Did all of them [have] to merge with Longbeards?
• Was Ered Luin not [a] holding of Durin’s Folk kings before Durin’s Bane awaken?

I should note that of all the named Dwarven cities and communities only Mount Gundabad is assigned any special significance with respect to all seven “houses” of the Dwarves.  It was, in one passage, said to be their capital.  But Tolkien doesn’t really explain what that means.  I have always treated Gundabad as something akin to New York City (where the United Nations is headquartered).  That does not necessarily have to be what Tolkien had in mind.  Tolkien might have thought of Gundabad and its occasional delegate assemblies as something more closely resembling the Congress of Vienna, where delegations from the great European powers of the early 1800s met to establish a long-term peace for Europe after the Napoleonic Wars had been concluded.  The Concert of Europe succeeded the Vienna Congress and was represented by several more formal assemblies of delegates but eventually the great powers of Europe ceased collaborating although they built subsequent international agreements in part on the framework of the original Final Act of the Congress of Vienna.

So let me begin by saying that we are told very little about the four eastern Dwarven realms. We know a little bit about the histories of the Longbeards, Firebeards, and Broadbeams. But we don’t even know which cities belonged to the Firebeards and Broadbeams. In the past I have speculated that Belegost may have been the city of the Broadbeams and Nogrod may have been the city of the Firebeards. People often infer these relationships based on the word order in Tolkien’s list of the seven dwarven clans or tribes. Here is what Tolkien wrote of the Broadbeams and Firebeards (in a text Christopher Tolkien published posthumously in The Peoples of Middle-earth):

In the Dwarvish traditions of the Third Age the names of the places where each of the Seven Ancestors had ‘awakened’ were remembered; but only two of them were known to Elves and Men of the West: the most westerly, the awakening place of the ancestors of the Firebeards and the Broadbeams; and that of the ancestor of the Longbeards,(24) the eldest in making and awakening. The first had been in the north of the Ered Lindon, the great eastern wall of Beleriand, of which the Blue Mountains of the Second and later ages were the remnant; the second had been Mount Gundabad (in origin a Khuzdul name), which was therefore revered by the Dwarves, and its occupation in the Third Age by the Orks of Sauron was one of the chief reasons for their great hatred of the Orks.(25) The other two places were eastward, at distances as great or greater than that between the Blue Mountains and Gundabad: the arising of the Ironfists and Stiffbeards, and that of the Blacklocks and Stonefoots. Though these four points were far sundered the Dwarves of different kindreds were in communication, and in the early ages often held assemblies of delegates at Mount Gundabad. In times of great need even the most distant would send help to any of their people; as was the case in the great War against the Orks (Third Age 2793 to 2799). Though they were loth to migrate and make homes, except under great pressure from enemies or after some catastrophe such as the ruin of Beleriand, they were great and hardy travellers and skilled road-makers; also, all the kindreds shared a common language.(26)

Note 24 reads:

24. He alone had no companions; cf. ‘he slept alone’ (III.352). [The reference is to the beginning of Appendix A, III. The passage in the text is difficult to interpret. My father refers here to four places of awakening of the Seven Ancestors of the Dwarves: those of ‘the ancestors of the Firebeards and the Broadbeams’, ‘the ancestor of the Longbeards’, ‘the Ironfists and Stiffbeards’, and ‘the Blacklocks and Stonefoots’. (None of these names of the other six kindreds of the Dwarves has ever been given before. Since the ancestors of the Firebeards and the Broadbeams awoke in the Ered Lindon, these kindreds must be presumed to be the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost.) It seems that he was here referring to Durin’s having ‘slept alone’ in contrast to the other kindreds, whose Fathers were laid to sleep in pairs. If this is so, it is a different conception from that cited in XI.213, where Iluvatar ‘commanded Aule to lay the fathers of the Dwarves severally in deep places, each with his mate, save Durin the eldest who had none.’ On the subject of the ‘mates’ of the Fathers of the Dwarves see XI.211-13. – In the margin of the typescript my father wrote later (against the present note): ‘He wandered widely after awakening: his people were Dwarves that joined him from other kindreds west and east’; and at the head of the page he suggested that the legend of the Making of the Dwarves should be altered (indeed very radically altered) to a form in which other Dwarves were laid to sleep near to the Fathers.]

Note 25 reads:

25. [In the rejected conclusion of note 21 the place of the awakening of the ancestor of the Longbeards was ‘a valley in the Ered Mithrin’ (the Grey Mountains in the far North). There has of course been no previous reference to this ancient significance of Mount Gundabad. That mountain originally appeared in the chapter The Clouds Burst in The Hobbit, where it is told that the Goblins ‘marched and gathered by hill and valley, going ever by tunnel or under dark, until around and beneath the great mountain Gundabad of the North, where was their capital, a vast host was assembled’; and it is shown on the map of Wilderland in The Hobbit as a great isolated mass at the northern end of the Misty Mountains where the Grey Mountains drew towards them. In The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A (III), Gundabad appears in the account of the War of the Dwarves and Orcs late in the Third Age, where the Dwarves ‘assailed and sacked one by one all the strongholds of the Orcs that they could [find] from Gundabad to the Gladden’ (the word ‘find’ was erroneously dropped in the Second Edition).]

Note 26 reads:

26. According to their legends their begetter, Aulë the Vala, had made this for them and had taught it to the Seven Fathers before they were laid to sleep until the time for their awakening should come. After their awakening this language (as all languages and all other things in Arda) changed in time, and divergently in the mansions that were far-sundered. But the change was so slow and the divergence so small that even in the Third Age converse between all Dwarves in their own tongue was easy. As they said, the change in Khuzdul as compared with the tongue of the Elves, and still more with those of Men, was ‘like the weathering of hard rock compared with the melting of snow.’

There is literally nothing else about the Broadbeams and Firebeards.  Note that it is Christopher who sets the word order for the names of the two western cities (Nogrod and Belegost), not his father’s original text.  There is no (in)correct argument that I or anyone else could make on the basis of these passages and the names given to (dis)prove the identification of the Firebeards with Nogrod and the Broadbeams with Belegost.  And I don’t know if it would be helpful for us to be able to identify the homes of the clans as Tolkien imagined them.

As for the supremacy of the Khazad-Dûm, we only know that they commanded the allegiance of the Longbeard Dwarves and we assume that of any other Dwarves who chose to settle among them.  But in the early Second Age, we are told, many of the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost migrated to Khazad-Dûm; one of the many unanswered questions about Dwarvish history is what became of their royal lines.  The story of Thráin’s war (the War of the Dwarves and Orcs) seems to imply there were six other ruling families, but they don’t necessarily have to have been any better organized than the Longbeards (or even so well organized).

We know that Dwarves continued to live in the Ered Luin throughout the Second and Third Ages.  We also know that Thráin eventually settled in the Ered Luin, but when he summoned the other houses to help in the war he was living in Dunland.  The tale of the war doesn’t say who commanded the united armies but it’s reasonable to assume that Thráin would have been held in high esteem by the soldiers of the other six houses.  And yet when he wanted to reclaim Khazad-Dûm after the battle of Azanulbizar the other houses withdrew.  Clearly, they were not under Thráin’s direct command, so they must have been acting in the capacity of allies.

As King of the Longbeards Thráin had the authority of a tribal leader.  He did not have a capital city.  Therefore he was living in exile, but that doesn’t mean his father’s realm had ceased to exist.  The Longbeard Dwarves had been driven out of Khazad-Dûm and Erebor but the various surviving communities always answered the call of their rightful kings.  When Thorin was besieged in Erebor Dáin came to his help and the text says other Longbeard Dwarves were also summoned.  The Longbeards therefore maintained a tribal kingdom more than a territorial kingdom, directly controlling only as much land as they needed to survive.  The idea that the Misty Mountains were their territory seems to be true only with respect to other Dwarves.

By the same token, Tolkien doesn’t mention any need for special permission when Thráin settles in the Ered Luin.  Nogrod and Belegost, if they still existed, were apparently on the westward side of the mountains anyway were on the eastern side of the mountains.  But if the cities were ruined and rendered uninhabitable then any Dwarves who remained in the Ered Luin throughout the Second and Third Ages must have built new homes, which could have been anywhere.  Nonethless, Dwarvish claims on territory appear to work differently from territorial claims made by Elves and Men.

While I could infer from Thráin’s presence in Ered Luin that other Dwarvish kings could have settled in the Misty Mountains, there is no textual support for the idea that any but the Kings of Durin’s Folk could have ruled in Khazad-Dûm.  A foreign king might be welcomed there and allowed to bring some of his people, but he would have lacked certain rights concerning the governance of the vast complex of mansions.  There is a non-Dwarvish precedent in Tolkien’s fiction for such relationships.  We just don’t have enough information know if he would have extended that kind of arrangement to the Dwarves.

There is a passage that says the Longbeard Dwarves claimed Gundabad as one of their habitations.  And given the above citation about the Dwarves holding assemblies of delegates there, one can ask if that meant the Longbeard kings were like High Kings.  But there is no textual support for the idea that the Kings of Durin’s Folk would have held authority over the other six kings prior to the Balrog seizing control over Khazad-Dûm.  Hence, you cannot argue that Khazad-Dûm ruled over the Ered Luin or any other Dwarvish lands in general.  The idea that delegates assembled at Gundabad implies the other Dwarvish kings were considered equals, not vassals, of Durin’s heirs.

At best I think we can say that the Dwarves seem to have gotten along better with each other than Elves got along with Elves or Men got along with Men.  Tolkien implies they may have fought some wars with each other but if there were Dwarf-on-Dwarf conflicts they were not important to Tolkien’s historical narratives.  Their politics are thus largely a mystery.  But there are no mentions of rebellions among the Dwarves.  No one resisted the authority of the Kings of Durin’s Line, for example.  They came when called out of loyalty and reverence.  It could be argued that there were probably occasional bad kings, or at least unpopular decisions by the kings.  But at no time did any Dwarvish dissent enter into Tolkien’s histories.

The lack of established inter-tribal warfare and intra-tribal dissent, and the fact that the various communities of Durin’s Folk banded together when called, suggests that the Dwarves were more loyal to each other than the other great peoples of Middle-earth.  But they respected the bounds of authority (among their own people) in all ways, and so I don’t think that Durin’s Line held any authority over the other kings.

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