Balin

Balin is the name under which this dwarf appears in every surviving record, and by the account given of dwarvish custom it is not, strictly speaking, his own. The Dwarves took their outward names from the tongues of the Men among whom they lived — for Durin's Folk of the North, the speech of the upper vales of Anduin and of Dale — while their inner names in their own language they kept wholly private, never disclosing them to outsiders. Balin therefore belongs to the same northern naming stock as the names of his fellow travellers, and it pairs closely in shape and stress with Dwalin, which was his brother's name. No meaning is glossed for it anywhere in the published writings, and unlike the Elvish names of the same books it is not offered for translation. A further style, Lord of Moria, was attached to him only in later years, and the circumstances of that title belong to another part of his story.

He is most often named Balin son of Fundin, and the patronymic fixes his place in the genealogies of his people with some precision. Fundin was the son of Farin, and Farin the son of Borin, a younger brother of Dáin the First; through that branch Balin stood within the wider kindred of Durin's house but well aside from the succession, a collateral kinsman of Thorin Oakenshield rather than an heir to anything he held. Dwalin was his brother, and Óin and Glóin, sons of Fundin's brother Gróin, were his first cousins. He was born in the year 2763 of the Third Age, while the Kingdom under the Mountain still stood in the reign of Thrór, so that his earliest years fell in the last of Erebor's undisturbed prosperity.

The people to whom he belonged were the Longbeards, reckoned the chief of the seven kindreds of Dwarves and descended from Durin the Deathless, eldest of the Seven Fathers whom Aulë wrought in secret beneath the mountains and then laid to sleep until the Children of Ilúvatar should awaken. In the tradition preserved among his own folk, Durin came alone to the mountain that would be called Khazad-dûm and founded there the greatest of dwarf-realms, and it is from that ancient seat, long lost by Balin's day and never forgotten, that his line took both its pride and its sense of dispossession. Balin was thus born an exile's heir twice over: to Moria in the deep past, and to Erebor within his own lifetime.

Balin was a child of seven when the security of his birth-years ended. In 2770 the dragon Smaug came out of the North upon the Lonely Mountain, burned Dale, and drove the folk of the Mountain into flight; those who escaped scattered southward and lived for a long while in poverty and wandering, until in 2802 Thráin the Second settled the greater part of them in the Blue Mountains west of the Lune. Between those two dates fell the long feud that the Dwarves waged against the Orcs of the Misty Mountains after Thrór was killed in Moria, a war of six years that ended in 2799 in the valley before the East-gate. Balin's own part in that fighting is nowhere recorded, but his father Fundin was among the slain there, so that he came out of the war fatherless and into the westward exile of his people. What he did during the four decades that followed is not related, save that he was reckoned among the household of Thráin.

In 2841 Thráin grew restless in the Blue Mountains and set out eastward with the thought of returning to Erebor, taking with him only a small company; Balin and his brother Dwalin were of that number. The journey went badly from the first, for the travellers were shadowed and harried by servants of the Enemy, and in 2845, at the eaves of Mirkwood, Thráin was seized in the night and carried to Dol Guldur, where the last of the Seven Rings was taken from him. His companions hunted for him for a long time without success and at length gave up and returned. That failure left Thorin as the head of Durin's line without any certainty of his father's fate, and Balin among those who had been closest to the loss.

In 2941 Balin joined the expedition that Thorin led to the Lonely Mountain, and he was the second of the thirteen to reach Bag End, arriving with a white beard already long and being, after Thorin himself, the eldest of the party. He served as the company's look-out, a duty he discharged unevenly: it was on his watch that the fire of the three trolls was sighted in the woods east of the Last Bridge, and later, after the escape from the goblin-tunnels, he failed to see Bilbo return invisible past his post, a small triumph the hobbit remembered with satisfaction. He shared the imprisonment in the halls of the Elvenking and the passage down the river in the barrels, and at the Mountain he was the only one of the Dwarves who would go even a short way with Bilbo into the tunnel that led down to Smaug's lair, waiting in the dark for him to come back. He fought in the Battle of Five Armies and was among those who survived it and mourned Thorin.

For nearly fifty years afterwards he lived in the restored Kingdom under the Mountain under Dáin the Second, and something of his temper in those years can be judged from a small journey: in 2949 he came west with Gandalf to visit Bilbo in the Shire, the only one of the company recorded as having done so. But the memory of Khazad-dûm worked on him as it had on his forebears, and in 2989 he left Erebor against the counsel of Dáin and led a company of Dwarves into Moria to refound the old realm. The first years went well enough. His people took the twenty-first hall at the northern end and cleared the eastern gate, they found silver and true-silver in workable quantity, and among the recovered treasures was the axe that had belonged to Durin himself. Balin established his seat in a chamber near the great gate that his folk called Mazarbul, the room of records, and there he was styled Lord of Moria.

Within Thorin's company Balin held no office of command and no reputation for any particular craft. What gave him weight was seniority and temperament: he was the oldest of the travellers after Thorin himself, and by some distance the readiest of them to treat the hobbit as a companion rather than an encumbrance. It was he who first allowed Bilbo the standing of a professional after the business with the trolls, and he who kept up the acquaintance long after the others had let it fall. Nothing in the narrative turns on any skill peculiar to him; he plays the viol at Bag End with his brother, keeps watch, and carries his share, and his function in the tale is one of steadiness and courtesy rather than of prowess.

The powers proper to his kind are of a plain sort, and the writings claim no more for them. Dwarves are described as hardy beyond the measure of Men, enduring of toil, hunger and cold, stubborn in resistance, secretive in their crafts of stone and metal, and long-lived without being deathless: some two hundred and fifty years is given as their usual span, and Balin died a little short of it. No art of enchantment is ascribed to him anywhere. His title in Moria rested on nothing but the assent of the folk who followed him and the emptiness of the halls he entered; it carried no recognition elsewhere, brought no reinforcement, and was assumed in defiance of the judgement of the King under the Mountain. The colony's last dispatches show what those limits amounted to in practice: the western door was shut against them by the thing in the water outside it, their losses could not be replaced, and no messenger got through.

The steadiest attachment recorded of Balin is to his brother Dwalin, and the two are named in company at almost every point where either is mentioned at all. They went east together in Thráin's ill-fated party, they arrived at Bag End one after the other, and they sat together over their instruments when the company took its ease. Dwalin, the younger of them, survived the parting: he remained at the Lonely Mountain when Balin turned west, outlived him by decades, and passed into the Fourth Age still living, so that the elder brother's disappearance was a wound the younger carried for the rest of a very long life. Their first cousins Óin and Glóin stood in a similar double relation, one following Balin into the dark and one staying behind to be the only member of the old thirteen able to say, years afterwards, that nothing whatever was known.

Toward Thorin, Balin was loyal without being complicit. He kept his place among the exiled household through the years of poverty, joined the march to the Mountain, and stood at the Gate through the quarrel over the hoard; but the hardening of his leader's temper in those days is registered in the narrative largely through the discomfort of the older dwarves around him, and Balin's own dealings with Bilbo grew warmer in exact proportion as Thorin's cooled. That courtesy outlasted the quest itself and was reciprocated: when Bilbo, long settled at Rivendell, had the chance to question a dwarf newly come from Erebor, it was after Balin that he asked first, and the answer he received was silence.

The venture into Moria drew its strength from the same circle. Óin and Ori, both of Thorin's original thirteen, followed him there, which makes the colony less a new enterprise than the last continuation of the old fellowship under a different leader; Óin was lost to the creature outside the western door, and Ori's was among the hands that wrote the final entries. Against this stands Dáin, whose opposition Balin overrode — the one instance in which he set his judgement against a king's. He had no adversary in any personal sense: the orcs who killed him are unnamed, and the power beneath the mountain never met him. It was left to Gimli, son of his cousin and too young to have gone to Erebor with the others, to arrive expecting an elder kinsman on a throne and to find a stone lid instead.

When Tolkien began the sequel to The Hobbit, Balin was for a time still a living presence in the story rather than a memory within it. In the drafts of the Council of Elrond chapter preserved in The Return of the Shadow, the dwarf who came north to Rivendell with news out of the east, and who afterwards went with the Company, was Burin son of Balin, while Balin himself was alive at the Lonely Mountain and had sent him. The errand of the dwarves to Elrond's house had already taken roughly the shape it would keep, but the family attached to it had not: Glóin and Gimli assumed those two parts only in later working, and Burin, for whom the finished genealogies of Durin's line leave no place at all, vanished without trace. The conception that fixed Balin's end — the venture into Moria, the short-lived colony, the tomb — belongs to the same stretch of revision, and once it was settled the character was moved out of the present action of the tale and into its background.

The Moria chapters were themselves reworked more than once before the discovery in the burial chamber took its final form, and Christopher Tolkien sets out the successive versions of the tomb inscription and of the surviving record beside the text as published. Connected with these drafts are the facsimile leaves of the Book of Mazarbul that his father prepared, three pages written in runes and in Elvish letters and then burnt, torn and stained by hand to represent what the Company recovered. They were meant to be reproduced in the published work and were left out of it, and their wording does not agree at every point with the account of the colony's last months as it stands in the finished narrative, so that the document and the report of the document diverge in dates and particulars.

Balin is played by Ken Stott in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, and the part is substantially enlarged. Where the novel gives him seniority and courtesy but little narrative weight, the films make him Thorin's oldest counsellor and the company's chronicler, and hand him most of the expository burden: it is Balin who relates the history of Erebor's loss and of the battle fought before the East-gate of Moria, and who reports the earlier attempts to reclaim the mountain. That retold history departs from the appendices at a decisive point, since in the films Azog is maimed by Thorin at that battle and survives to pursue the company as its chief antagonist, whereas Tolkien has him killed there by Dáin Ironfoot. Balin is also placed at the centre of the trilogy's added political material — he is repeatedly the voice of doubt as Thorin's temper hardens over the hoard — and he survives the final battle, so that the films close on him rather than on any hint of his later end. His book role as the one dwarf willing to go part of the way down the secret tunnel with the hobbit is not reproduced.

In every adaptation of The Lord of the Rings he is a discovery rather than a character, and no performer is credited for him. Jackson's earlier trilogy keeps him as the tomb in the Chamber of Mazarbul, with Gimli's grief supplying what the book supplies at greater length, and the recovered record reduced to a few read passages; Bakshi's unfinished animated film treats the same burial chamber more briefly within a compressed Moria sequence. The BBC Radio dramatisation, having the room of a twenty-six-part serial, follows the novel most closely here and lets the account of the colony's end be read out at length. He falls outside the Rankin/Bass Return of the King entirely, since that film begins after Moria; in the same studio's Hobbit the thirteen dwarves are so heavily condensed that little beyond Thorin is individuated, and Balin has no distinct role.