Durin VI

Durin VI belonged to the Longbeards, the folk descended from the eldest of the seven fathers whom Aulë made, and the name he bore was not his alone. The first Durin, remembered as the Deathless, woke before his kindred, came in time to the valley beneath the eastern mountains, and there founded the mansions that the Dwarves called Khazad-dûm; his life was reckoned so long, and his memory held so high, that his people looked for his return. Five times thereafter, according to the traditions kept by his descendants, an heir was born into the royal house whose likeness to that first king was such that he was given the same name, and the Dwarves themselves held that this was no mere honouring of an ancestor but the Deathless come again. Durin VI stands sixth and last but one in that reckoning, and the belief attached to the name would have attached to him.

His station follows from that descent: he was king of Durin's Folk in the Third Age, ruling the delvings under the Misty Mountains that had been the seat of his line since the Elder Days, at a time when Khazad-dûm was still the wealthiest and most populous of the Dwarf-realms of the West. The genealogical tree preserved among the Longbeards begins its unbroken record with him, so that the names of his own forebears between the first Durin and himself are not set down in the accounts that survive. His son was Náin, called the First of that name in the later reckonings of the house.

The name itself is an outer one. Dwarves kept their true names, given in their own tongue, hidden from other peoples, and did not set them even upon their tombs; for dealings with Elves and Men they used names drawn from the speech of the Men of the North, and it is these that the histories record. Durin VI is therefore known by a form that is Mannish in origin rather than Khuzdul, and no meaning for it is given in the sources; what it carried for his people was dynastic rather than descriptive.

The genealogical table of Durin's Folk sets his birth in the year 1731 of the Third Age and his death in 1980, a span of some two hundred and forty-nine years, which is near the upper reach of an ordinary Dwarvish life; his people were reckoned to live about three times the years of Men. In what year he succeeded to the kingship is not recorded, nor is the name of the king before him, and no act of his reign is set down in the annals that survive. The whole of his recorded history is therefore compressed into its last year: the accounts remember him for what came upon his realm rather than for anything he is said to have done. This silence is not peculiar to him, for the Dwarves kept their own records in their own tongue and shared little of them, and what the histories of Elves and Men preserve of Khazad-dûm in these centuries is chiefly what touched their own affairs.

The realm he held was, at that date, unlike any other in the West. The other ancient mansions of the Dwarves had been ruined or abandoned in the wars of the elder days, but Khazad-dûm had never been taken and never emptied, so that his line still dwelt where the first of the Longbeards had dwelt. Its wealth rested above all on a metal found nowhere else in Middle-earth, which the Elves called mithril: light, unrusting, and harder than tempered steel, and prized so highly that in later ages its worth was reckoned many times that of gold. The vein ran northward under the mountains, and the search for it drew the miners ever further down beneath the roots of Caradhras. That pursuit of the deep seams is what the later tradition blames for the disaster, holding that the Dwarves dug greedily and too far, and so came upon what had lain quiet below them.

What they roused was a survivor of the Elder Days: a Balrog of Morgoth, one of the fiery spirits of his following, which had hidden itself in the depths beneath the mountains when his power was broken at the end of the First Age and had lain there unnoticed through two whole ages of the world. In 1980 it came forth, and Durin VI was killed by it. The Dwarves gave the creature no other name thereafter than Durin's Bane, so that the king's name passed into the naming of the thing that had killed him and was carried by it for more than a thousand years. Of the manner of his death, of where he fell, or of whether he faced the Balrog in arms, the sources say nothing at all.

In the Tale of Years the entry stands beside another for the same year, the gathering of the Ringwraiths to their master in Mordor, and the juxtaposition is characteristic of that annal, which sets the misfortunes of the northern peoples against the quiet recovery of the Enemy in the south without asserting any link between them. The following year, 1981, brought the end of the kingdom itself. His son Náin, who had taken the crown after him, was killed in his turn, and the surviving Dwarves abandoned the mansions and fled. The disturbance spread beyond the mountains: many of the Silvan Elves of Lórien went away southward in the same year, and it was then that Amroth and Nimrodel were lost.

The consequences of those two years defined the fortunes of his descendants. Khazad-dûm stood empty and unlit, and the Elvish name meaning the black pit, Moria, displaced the old one in common speech. His grandson Thráin, first of that name, led the homeless remnant of the folk northward and in 1999 established the kingdom under the Lonely Mountain, where the great jewel called the Arkenstone was found; from that settlement descends the whole later history of the house, including its long exile and its dealings with Men and with the dragon Smaug. Attempts to undo the loss failed. In 2989 Balin went back with a company to reclaim the mines and held them briefly, but he was killed in 2994 and the colony was destroyed. The Balrog kept the deeps until 3019, when Gandalf met it upon the bridge below the First Hall and both fell into the abyss, and it was destroyed at the mountain's peak; only after that could the mansions be entered again, and the tree of Durin's line records that a seventh king of the name led his people back to them in the age that followed.

Kingship among Durin's Folk was headship of one kindred and one mansion, not an overlordship of the Dwarves at large. The seven kindreds kept apart, each under its own line, and although the Longbeards claimed the eldest descent, nothing in the histories gives their king any command over the rest. What such a king disposed of was the wealth of his delvings and the arms of his people, and the Dwarves were reckoned formidable in war out of proportion to their numbers, slow to yield and hard to overcome. Their strength lay in craft, endurance and secrecy rather than in any art that the Elves would have named enchantment. Of Durin VI's exercise of that office nothing survives: no counsel, no campaign, no work of his hands, and no reported word.

One thing of power belonged to his line, though the annals do not attach it to him by name. The chief of the Seven Rings was kept by the kings of Khazad-dûm, and their own tradition held that it had come to Durin III from the Elven-smiths of Eregion rather than from Sauron's hand, whatever Sauron afterwards claimed; it passed from father to son until Thrór gave it to Thráin, from whom it was taken in Dol Guldur. Its effects, as the histories describe them, were narrow. It gave no invisibility and did not wear its keeper into a wraith, for the Dwarves proved unyielding to that kind of mastery; what it did was to swell hoards and to feed anger and a hunger for gold. Whether Durin VI held it in 1980 is nowhere stated, and can only be inferred from the descent.

The limit of that power is the one event his name is fixed to. Aulë had made his people to endure, hard in body and in will, bearing labour and hurt beyond the measure of other speaking peoples, and Khazad-dûm was the strongest seat any of them held. But the thing that rose beneath it belonged to another order altogether: one of the spirits that had followed Melkor from the beginning, of the same kind as the Maiar and clothed in shadow and flame. Against such a being the resources of a Dwarf-king — deep halls, numbers, mail and axe — are not shown to have availed at all. The record grants him no capacity that was tested and none that succeeded, and any account of his powers must rest on the office rather than on the man.

What the record preserves of Durin VI's connections is almost wholly a matter of descent, and even there it is one-sided. The genealogical tree of his house names fathers and sons and nothing else: no wife of his is named, no mother, no brother, no daughter. This is less an accident of transmission than a reflection of how his people lived. Dwarf-women were few, seldom seen abroad and often mistaken for men by strangers; a Dwarf took one wife or none at all, and many of both sexes never married, so that the kindreds increased slowly. A royal line continued through a single acknowledged heir was therefore the ordinary case, and the sparse tree records the whole of a family rather than a fragment of one.

His relation to the wider Dwarvish world was that of a host to refugees several centuries settled. When the western mansions of Beleriand were ruined at the end of the First Age, those of their people who survived went east, and many came to Khazad-dûm and swelled it, so that the folk over whom he ruled was not purely of one origin, however firmly the Longbeard line held the crown. Westward, his door carried the memorial of another alliance: the gate that faced Eregion had been made by a Dwarf-craftsman and an Elven-smith together, each setting his own device and his own hand to it, in a season when the two peoples passed freely between mountain and forge. Eregion had been destroyed long before Durin VI was born, and the friendship reached him only as worked stone standing shut at the western end of his halls.

Beyond that partnership the older reckoning between his people and the Elves was a grievance rather than a bond, dating from the killing of a king and the plundering of a hidden realm in the Elder Days, and the mistrust outlasted every party to the quarrel. The enmity that ended him was inherited in the same way. The being that rose beneath his mansions had served the first Enemy, against whom the Dwarves had been set from their making by the smith who made them; Durin VI met it not as a personal adversary but as the last claimant of a hostility older than his line's tenure of the mountain. Of any relationship he chose for himself — counsellor, ally, friend — nothing whatever is told.