Dáin II Ironfoot

Dáin son of Náin belonged to Durin's Folk, the eldest of the seven kindreds of the Dwarves, but he was born far from the ancestral seats of that people, in the Iron Hills east of the Lonely Mountain, in the year 2767 of the Third Age. That eastern country had been settled only two generations before by his grandfather Grór, who led part of Durin's Folk there when dragons multiplied in the north and made the Grey Mountains untenable. Through Grór he stood in the line of Durin on its younger branch: he and Thorin Oakenshield were alike great-grandsons of Dáin I, whose sons Thrór and Grór had gone separate ways, the elder to the kingship and the wanderings that followed it, the younger to a settled realm in the east. Dáin was thus a lord's son in a secure country rather than an exile, and the kinship between the two houses was still reckoned and acknowledged on both sides.

The name Dáin is not Dwarvish in the strict sense. The Dwarves kept their own tongue close, and among other peoples they used names taken from the languages of Men of the North; their true names they withheld from strangers and did not even set upon their tombs. What the records preserve is therefore an outer name, and one already borne within his house: Dáin I, king of Durin's Folk in the Grey Mountains, from whom the ordinal in Dáin II serves to distinguish him. Such reuse of names across generations was ordinary among the Dwarves, and the numerals belong to the ordering of the genealogies rather than to any style he would have claimed for himself. The spelling is to be sounded as a single diphthong on the pattern set out for Westron and northern names in the appendix on pronunciation, so that the first element rhymes with English 'mine'.

His byname, Ironfoot, reaches the reader already rendered into English, as Oakenshield does for Thorin; no occasion for it is recorded, and no gloss is offered, so it stands among those Dwarf-names whose meaning the texts leave unexplained. Beside it he carries the territorial style Lord of the Iron Hills, which names the realm rather than the man and marks him as ruler of a people distinct in habit from the exiles of Erebor: mail-clad, hardened by long settlement on a mountain frontier, and answerable to no king in the west.

The killing of Thrór in Moria in 2790 set off a feud that Durin's Folk spent three years preparing and six years fighting, and Dáin's part in it is recorded only at its close. In 2799 the war came to the valley of Azanulbizar below the East-gate, where the host of the Iron Hills, last of the Dwarf-forces to reach the field, arrived under his father Náin and turned a battle that had been going badly. Dáin was then thirty-two, an age that by the reckoning of his people left him barely out of boyhood. Náin was struck down by the orc-chieftain Azog before the Gate itself; Dáin came against him in his turn, killed him and took his head, and the stroke was remembered afterwards as a great feat, the more so for the youth of the one who dealt it. The head was set upon a stake with the small purse thrust into its mouth that Azog had once flung in mockery at Thrór's companion.

The victory was dearly bought and settled nothing about Moria. Thráin, now heir of the line, wished to go in and take the halls; Dáin refused him, saying that he had looked into the gateway and seen the shadow of the thing that had driven Durin's Folk out long before, and that the door would not be opened by any strength of theirs, nor in their day. So many had fallen that the dead were burned rather than laid in stone, a thing the customs of the Dwarves did not favour, though to have been among them was afterwards accounted an honour. Náin being dead, Dáin led the survivors of the eastern host home and took up the lordship of the Iron Hills, which he held for the next hundred and forty years without event that the annals mark.

In 2941 Thorin's small company reached Erebor, Smaug was killed over the Long Lake, and ravens carried word east asking Dáin for aid. He marched with more than five hundred of his people, mailed and carrying two-handed mattocks, and came round the eastern spurs of the Mountain to find the Gate walled up and held against a force of Lake-men and Wood-elves demanding a share of the hoard. His arrival brought the quarrel to the edge of open fighting between three peoples who had no other cause of enmity. What stopped it was the news that a host of Orcs and Wargs was already upon them out of the northern mountains, at which the besiegers and the besieged made common cause.

In the battle that followed, the Dwarves of the Iron Hills stood in the forefront and were the most enduring part of the allied line, still unbroken on the mountain spur when the Eagles came and Beorn broke the enemy's guard. Thorin came out from the Gate late in the fighting and was carried from the field mortally hurt; his sister-sons Fíli and Kíli fell defending him, and with the three of them the direct line of Thrór's house ended. Dáin, as the nearest kinsman surviving, was hailed King under the Mountain. He then made good the terms Thorin had died disputing: a fourteenth share of the treasure was paid over to Bard, the emeralds that had belonged to Girion of Dale were restored to him, and the reward pressed on the hobbit was reduced at his own insistence to two small chests, one of silver and one of gold.

His kingship lasted seventy-eight years and was spent wholly at Erebor. Dale was rebuilt under Bard, the valley grew rich again, and the friendship between the two realms held unbroken through Bard's son Bain and his grandson Brand, with the trade of the North running between them. Only one venture out of the Mountain is recorded in that time: in 2989 Balin left with a following, Óin and Ori among them, to reoccupy Moria. Dáin gave leave unwillingly, remembering what he had seen at that gate as a young dwarf. Balin held the place for five years, was killed beside Mirrormere in 2994, and the colony was destroyed; no clear account of its end ever came back to Erebor.

The authority Dáin held was of an ordinary kind: a lordship, a treasury, and a strong arm. No Ring of Power remained to the house of Durin in his lifetime, the last of the seven once given to the Dwarf-lords having been taken from Thráin in the dungeons of Dol Guldur in 2845, when Dáin had already ruled in the east for a generation. By the tradition preserved of those rings they had never conferred much in any case: they could not bend a Dwarf to another's will nor unmake him into a shadow enslaved, and their whole effect was to inflame the desire of gold and the readiness to take offence. The wealth of Erebor under Dáin was accordingly of the plain sort, dug, worked and carried to market.

What the records credit to him as a captain is weight and endurance rather than any subtlety of command: mailed troops who could be set in a place and were still there when the rest of a line had given way. Such a force decides a pitched battle and serves for little else. It could not hold open country against the assault out of the East, and the Mountain that took in the survivors could shelter them but not deliver them; deliverance came from elsewhere and from other hands. Nor had he any standing in the counsels of the Wise. When a question touching the Ring was put to him he could not answer it out of his own knowledge, and referred it westward for judgement.

The place the narrative assigns him is clearest in the reasoning later reported for the whole venture against the dragon. Gandalf's stated concern had been strategic: while Smaug lived he might be turned to Sauron's use, and the north-east lay open, with the old approaches towards Angmar unguarded. What was wanted in that quarter was a Dwarf-realm in strength and a people of Men restored beside it. That is what came into being, and it fell to Dáin rather than to Thorin to maintain it for the rest of his life — a station held rather than a design formed, and its worth, by this reckoning, lay less in what he did with it than in what his sitting there prevented.

His enemies amount very nearly to a single hereditary quarrel. Azog had killed his father; the goblin host that came down on the Mountain a century and a half later was led by Bolg, Azog's son, so that the two battles framing his life were fought against a father and his heir in turn. Nothing in the record suggests he pursued the feud or made anything of the symmetry. The one adversary of another kind reached him at his own Gate in the person of a rider who wanted news and offered payment in Moria and in Rings — an approach against which no axe-stroke served, and which he met by giving nothing and asking elsewhere.

Dáin has been brought to the screen only once. In the last of Peter Jackson's three Hobbit films, The Battle of the Five Armies, he is performed by the Scottish comedian and actor Billy Connolly and realised as a fully digital character built on that performance; the part is small, confined to the arrival of the Iron Hills host and the fighting that follows, and the accent and manner given him are broadly comic in a way the novel does not suggest. The trilogy also alters the ground on which his reputation rests. In the first film, An Unexpected Journey, Azog survives the battle before Moria and continues as the chief antagonist across all three parts, so the single feat for which the book remembers Dáin is transferred away from him before he ever appears, and the pairing of father and son as the enemies of his two great battles disappears with it. Nothing of what follows the battle is dramatised: the settlement of the treasure, the succession to the kingship, and the long friendship with the restored Dale all fall outside the films, which close before any of it.

Elsewhere he is absent, and largely for structural reasons. The Rankin/Bass television Hobbit compresses the novel into a single short film and passes over the Battle of Five Armies without introducing him as a named figure at all. In The Lord of the Rings he never appears in person even in Tolkien's text — he is only reported, first by Glóin at Rivendell and afterwards in the appendices — so the adaptations of that book have no scene to dramatise. Jackson's film trilogy goes further and omits the northern theatre of the war entirely, with the result that neither the siege of Erebor nor the deaths before the Gate reach the audience.