Let’s talk about Dwarves. I imagine John Rhys-Davies’ portrayal of Gimli will result in quite a few Web site homages to both the actor and the character. Right now I can’t find anything really useful for Dwarf research. Oh, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of Web sites which mention the fact that Dwarves were one of the races of Middle-earth, and they may cite the Appendices in some fashion and rehash what anyone with a complete copy of The Lord of the Rings and maybe even The Silmarillion could easily find out by skimming a few pages.
But does anyone really know the full score on Tolkien’s Dwarves? Did Tolkien know the full score? Well, probably not even Tolkien himself knew enough about his Dwarves to write much beyond what has been published, but a great deal of information has come to light through the years. Let’s take a look at how the Dwarven civilization arose, and see what Tolkien told us, and what we may reasonably infer about it. But it’s important to understand how Tolkien’s conception of the Dwarves evolved, for as his ideas changed so did their imaginary history.
Most people know the Dwarves of The Hobbit were given names from Scandinavian mythology in a rather haphazard fashion. When Tolkien used the demand for a sequel to the popular story as an opportunity to publish something about his personal mythology, he found himself confronted by the necessity of incorporating the Scandinavian Dwarf names into the complex world he’d been inventing for years.
At first Tolkien tried to explain away the names as an “editorial concession”: “These dwarves are not quite the dwarfs of better known lore. They have been given Scandinavian names, it is true; that is an editorial concession. Too many names in the tongues proper to the period might have been alarming….” (J.R.R. Tolkien, “Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”, p. 31).
In fact, Tolkien was a bit put off by his own use of the Scandinavian names at first. The story of The Hobbit was, after all, devised originally to entertain his children. Tolkien contrived many tales, most of which have been lost because they were either never written down or were only slightly begun. But it is apparent from at least three of Tolkien’s fairy-tales that he enjoyed borrowing from his linguistically inspired mythology to provide some color and depth to these stories.
Hence, Elrond and the fall of Gondolin intrude into Bilbo’s business with the Dwarves, and later on there is an obscure reference to Thingol’s mysterious conflict with a family of Dwarves not related to Thorin Oakenshield’s people. In Roverandom the enchanted toy dog wanders around the world and eventually is brought close to the shores of Aman, the Blessed Realm, which appears again as the fantastic Elfland visited by Smith in Smith of Wootton Major.
The casual borrowings of elements from the mythology was never the product of intent, but rather the good fortune of necessary story-telling. Story-tellers often reuse the same ideas, names, themes, and even descriptions to keep their stories moving. The repetition of whole passages is common in oral traditions where poets and story-tellers memorize great sagas in pieces and retell the old tales with familiar phrases and descriptions that may or may not always be used in the same fashion for each retelling.
In December 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to E.G. Selby: “I don’t much approve of The Hobbit myself, preferring my own mythology (which is just touched on) with its consistent nomenclature — Elrond, Gondolin, and Esgaroth have escaped out of it — and organized history, to this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Voluspa, newfangled hobbits and gollums (invented in an idle hour) and Anglo-Saxon runes.” (Christopher Tolkien, “The Return of the Shadow”, p. 7)
Clearly when Tolkien first published The Hobbit he viewed it as a separate work, a tale which stood on its own and which merely borrowed some things for convenience’ sake from the older, larger mythology which until that time had been shared only with family, C.S. Lewis, and one other close acquaintance.
Christopher Tolkien discusses the issue at some length in The Peoples of Middle-earth: “In this, ‘language of Dale = Norse (used by Dwarves of that region)’ shows plainly that a major obstacle, perhaps the chief obstacle, to a coherent ‘authentication’ had by this time been resolved. When my father wrote The Hobbit he had of course no notion that the Old Norse names of the Dwarves required any explanation, within the terms of the story: those were their names and that was all there was to it….But now this inescapable Norse element had to be accounted for; and from that ‘rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Voluspa’ the conception emerged that the Dwarves had ‘outer names’ derived from the tongues of Men with whom they had dealings….” (Christopher Tolkien, “Peoples of Middle-earth”, pp. 70-1)
This apparent difficulty, so easily resolved by a quickly scrawled note which defined the linguistic fiction Tolkien utilized to explain the relationships of the languages he employed in The Lord of the Rings, eventually led Tolkien to devise a complex and (to me, at least) interesting history for the Dwarves which he had originally never foreseen. Of course, everything which occurred in the Second and Third Ages was contrived directly as a result of Tolkien’s agreeing to write a sequel to The Hobbit, with the exception of the story of Numenor. Its downfall, at least, had been written in story form by Tolkien for several years before he wrote The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien’s original conception of Dwarves was radically different from the noble yet oh-so-haughty race of brave warriors and kings we meet in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In his first mythology, the “mythology for England” which was laid out (nearly completely) in The Book of Lost Tales, the Dwarves were an evil race, led by Fangli or Fankil (a servant of Melko, the Dark Lord). These early Dwarves were enemies of the fairies (Elves) and they fought a terrible war with the Eldar.
These early evil dwarves gave way to a more neutral race, who were old and never-dying. “Never comes a child among them, nor do they laugh,” Tolkien wrote in “The Nauglafring”, the first story in which his Dwarves played a prominent role. “They are squat in stature, and yet are strong, and their beards reach even to their toes, but the beards of the Indrafengs are he longest of all, and are forked, and they bind them about their middles when they walk around.” (Tolkien, “The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two”, p. 224).
The Nauglath were master smiths and scientists in this early conception. They traded freely with Elves, Men, and Orcs, having no particular dislike for any race above others. In “The Nauglafring” the hoard of the dragon Glomund is brought to Tinwelint, king of the woodland Elves and father of Tinuviel, and though he at first seeks to dispose of the cursed gold he is persuaded by Ufedhin, a Gnome who has lived among the Nauglath, to contract with them to work the treasure into a new colection of wonders. But Urin’s curse immediately takes effect, and Tinwelint has no sooner made his bargain with Ufedhin than he begins to suspect the motives of the Gnome.
So Tinwelint alters the terms of the bargain and keeps Ufedhin and most of his followers prisoners while the Nauglath work on half the treasure. True to their word and friendship, the Nauglath appear at the appointed time with the reworked treasure and Tinwelint agrees to let them work on the other half of the hoard. But now Ifedhin is embittered by months of imprisonment, and he persuades the Nauglath to demand an unreasonable price from Tinwelint for shaping the gold into new treasure. Thus the curse ensnares the Nauglath, who demand bags of gold and silver and Elven maidens to take home with them, and Tinwelint becomes enraged.
The story hardly resembles the reconstruction Christopher Tolkien published in The Silmarillion, and it need not be compared closely with “The Ruin of Doriath”. “The Nauglafring” belongs to a different mythology, a different world completely. And its evil Dwarves, like old men steeped in craft and science and bereft of female counterparts in their race, have no place in the Middle-earth which took shape in the 1930s and 1940s.
Tolkien retained some of the ideas of the relationship between Tinwelint and the Nauglath, but as he expanded his history and world to encompass the hobbits and their world the Dwarves became a new race. They retained their traditional affinity with mining, smithing, and living below ground, but now they became the product of the good-hearted meddling of Aule the Smith, the impetuous Vala who couldn’t wait for the Children of Iluvatar to awaken.
Aule’s children, the first Dwarves, experienced a brief period of awareness before Iluvatar and Aule put them to sleep. Aule then placed them in far separate caverns throughout the northern world, and there they slept until sometime after the awakening of the Elves. Many people have speculated on precisely when the Dwarves would have awoken and ventured forth into the wide world. It is almost certain that since the Elves did not encounter any Dwarves on the Great Journey the Dwarves were still asleep. The Eldar passed through at least two mountain ranges were Dwarves had been left by Aule.
According to “Annals of Aman” (Christopher Tolkien, “Morgoth’s Ring”), the Dwarves first appeared in Beleriand in Valian Year 1250 (about 250 Valian Years before the deaths of the Two Trees, and 200 Valian Years after the Elves awoke at Cuivienen). “Grey Annals” (Tolkien, “The War of the Jewels”) agrees with the older work but adds and revises a few details. Here the Dwarves have more ancient dwellings in the far east than Nogrod and Belegost, the cities they construct in the Ered Luin. And yet, in The Peoples of Middle-earth the essay “of Dwarves and Men” (written about the same time as The Lord of the Rings) suggests the Broadbeams and Firebeards awoke in the northern Ered Luin.
We can reconcile these apparent contradictions by suggesting that the Dwarves, when they awoke, may have wandered the world seeking one another. Durin woke alone at Mount Gundabad according to the essay in Peoples, and the fathers of the Ironfists and Stiffbeards awoke as far east of the Iron Hills as Gundabad was east of the northern Ered Luin, and the fathers of the Blacklocks and Stonefoots awoke at least as far east of the Ironfists and Stiffbeards as they were of Durin. It is difficult to imagine where these Dwarves were placed, but if we use the maps provided in The Shaping of Middle-earth as a guide, one may infer there were two ranges of mountains which Tolkien did not draw on the maps.
The first “missing” range would be the Misty Mountains, located eastward of the Ered Luin and probably extending north from the sea of Helcar. The second “missing” range (unnamed) could be about midway between the Misty Mountains and the Orocarni, the Mountains of the East. These mountains need not be as extensive as the Misty Mountains, which Melkor supposedly raised to bar Orome’s path as he hunted the Dark Lord’s evil creatures in Middle-earth.
Alternatively, the Ironfists and Stiffbeards may simply have been placed in the far northern mountains, and somehow preserved through the War of the Powers which resulted in the destruction of Melkor’s fortress of Utumno. Wherever they awoke, if the Dwarves at first sought for each other, the tradition that they held conclaves at Gundabad begins to make better sense. Durin woke alone and he wandered through the Misty Mountains for a long time, apparently for years. He must eventually have wandered back into the north and there, perhaps, found his people.
Gundabad may therefore be the oldest Dwarf city in Middle-earth, and as the Dwarven populations grew they eventually returned to their homelands to build new cities. Durin would have stayed in the central lands where he awoke, but in time he led some Dwarves south to found the city of Khazad-dum. Hence, we may guess the Dwarves dispersed sometime around Valian Year 1250, and they would have been awake no more than 100-122 Valian Years (the Teleri crossed Ered Luin in VY 1128). These Valian Years were equivalent to approximately 9.58 years of the Sun (Tolkien, “Morgoth’s Ring”, p. 58).
Let us assume, for convenience’ sake, the Dwarves awoke no earlier than VY 1130. The next 120 Valian Years would have been equivalent to 1149.6 years of the Sun. Durin probably lived all through this time, and that is why he was called Durin the Deathless. The average lifespan for a Dwarf, based on the genealogy provided in The Lord of the Rings, appears to have been around 250 years. The Dwarves appeared to marry around their 100th year, so they could have been into their 12th generation by VY 1250. If the other fathers of the Dwarves lived only 250 years (of the Sun), the kings who led the dispersal could have been the 10th of each of their respective lines.
The Dwarves of Belegost and Nogrod therefore lived as close neighbors to the Sindar for nearly 2400 years before the rising of the Sun and Moon (in terms of years of the sun). At the very least, there must have been 23-24 kings in both Belegost and Nogrod during those long years under the stars. During that time the Dwarves established a close friendship with Thingol’s realm (but they did not venture near the Sea nor visit Cirdan’s people in western Beleriand).
The story of the Petty Dwarves, the Noegyth Nibin, requires some consideration, however. They claimed to have been in Beleriand before the Elves came. That would mean the Dwarves must have awakened earlier than 1130. The first Eldar reached Beleriand in Valian Year 1115. The Noegyth Nibin were outcasts from the other seven houses, not really an eighth house but apparently their numbers were sufficient to sustain a community for the equivalent of many generations (the last of their kind died in First Age year of the Sun 500, when Hurin killed Mim).
Since the Elves awoke in Valian Year 1050, there are only 65 Valian Years (a little more than 600 years of the Sun) available for the Dwarves to awaken, converge on Mount Gundabad, and divest themselves of the Noegyth Nibin. Things get a little tight even if we suppose the Dwarves awoke soon after the Elves. Still, we can suppose the Dwarves awoke before the Great Journey and that they began seeking each other before the War of the Powers. That would remove them from harm’s way and places their awakening at the latest in Valian Year 1090 (the year the Valar began their assault on Melkor).
In fact, it may be convenient to suppose the Dwarves awoke during the war. Therefore they would have gone unnoticed by the Valar, who had already discovered the Quendi, and we are provided with a reasonable span of 25 Valian Years (about 239.5 years of the Sun) before the Eldar entered Beleriand. In that time, the first outcasts from the Dwarven community must have been relatively few, probably too few to really establish a community, but they may have lived in Beleriand long enough to welcome other outcasts.
The only real grief which lay between Dwarves and Elves in ancient times was the accidental hunting of the Noegyth Nibin by the Sindar. The Sindar did not recognize the Petty Dwarves as fellow rational Incarnates, and that seems to be due to the Noegyth Nibin’s secretive nature and occasional hostility to strangers. The Elves ceased hunting the Noegyth Nibin once they met the Dwarves of Belegost and Nogrod, but they appear to have divulged their actions to the Dwarves, who conveyed this news to other Dwarves. Tolkien wrote that the Dwarves were offended by the hunting of the Petty Dwarves, and it may be this was the ancient grudge whose embers smoldered in the Third Age (as Tolkien noted in the Appendix to The Lord of the Rings).
Through the many generations the Dwarves of Belegost and Nogrod expanded their contacts with the Elves. They apparently traded with the Elves of Eriador, or at least had some knowledge of them, for they informed the Sindar when the eastern Elves began fleeing to the deeper woods and the hills to escape those of Melkor’s creatures (primarily the Orcs, it seems) which began spreading through Middle-earth.
Tolkien mentions two other facts about these early Dwarves which are seldom discussed. The first is the fact that the early Dwarves, prior to their contact with the Sindar, specialized in working with iron and copper and preferred working in stone rather than wood. But they were not artistic and were quite functional in their architectural design and the making of tools and weapons. Tolkien notes that the Dwarves were deeply influenced by their association with the Elves, acquiring artistic influences from them.
The other fact is that the Dwarves fought among themselves. Although the nature of these feuds or wars is never discussed, it may be that if there was a primeval Dwarven community it dispersed not so much due to population pressure but perhaps in part due to rivalries among the various houses. As the Dwarven population grew food would be more and more difficult to acquire (except through trade with the Elves) unless the Dwarves grew their own, and the essay on “Dwarves and Men” says they preferred not to grow food if they could avoid doing so. And yet as the population increased the Dwarves would also have to develop greater sophistication in governing themselves, and thus rival factions may have developed.
This is, of course, entirely speculative, but it seems evident that Tolkien envisioned some close interaction among the early Dwarves which eventually was replaced by more distant and cool relations. Durin the Deathless appears to have been generally revered by all the Dwarves as the eldest of their race and the longest lived. He would have possessed a considerable presence among their early kings after the other fathers had died off. Durin’s Folk, the Longbeards, were not directly descended from him — not in the first generations. Unlike the other fathers Durin did not have a mate made by Aule. So he had to find a wife from among the children or grand-children of the other fathers. And his people were originally recruited from the other houses as well. The Longbeards would thus have been the most cosmopolitan and mainstream group of Dwarves as variations in customs and preferences began to appear among them.
Durin’s presence among the early Dwarves begs the question of when they actually began founding cities. He is credited with founding Khazad-dum, which bears the distinction (among Dwarf cities) of being the only location named for the entire Dwarven race (“Khazad-dum” = “Dwarf-mansion”). It may be incorrect to suppose that Gundabad served as a home for the Dwarves for very long. Durin may have brought the Dwarven people south to Khazad-dum instead, and though he was called Deathless because he long outlived the other fathers of the Dwarves, the day did come when he died.
Suppose that critical event which led to the dispersion of the Dwarves across Middle-earth were the death of Durin? If he had been the glue holding them together in a united tradition, and if their increasing numbers had gradually strained their ability to support themselves, then Durin’s successor and his fellow kings may have decided that the time was ripe for a change in Dwarven society. Instead of all Dwarves living together the six other houses departed from Khazad-dum and returned to the lands where their forefathers awoke.
Hence, the Broadbeams and Firebeards journeyed westward in the footsteps of the Eldar and they settled in Ered Luin. They built the cities of Belegost and Nogrod and, looking west, wandered down into Beleriand to see what the new neighborhood was like.
For the equivalent of the next 3,000 years (of the Sun) the western Dwarves participated in the history of the Eldar, until the ending of the First Age of the Sun. And then the world changed for everyone.
Next week In the next article we’ll examine the history and cultures of the Dwarves after the rising of the Sun and Moon.
This article was originally published on November 19, 1999.
