Gimli

Gimli belongs to Durin's Folk, the eldest of the seven Dwarf-kindreds, and is the son of Glóin, who was one of the twelve who went east with Thorin Oakenshield to the Lonely Mountain. The genealogies of Durin's line place his birth in the year 2879 of the Third Age, which falls within the long dispersal that followed the coming of Smaug: for much of that period the remnant of the royal house dwelt in exile in the west, in halls in the Blue Mountains, and it is to that diminished and wandering condition of his people, rather than to the wealth of Erebor, that his early years belong. By the reckoning of the Tale of Years he was sixty-two when the company set out in 2941, and it is expressly recorded that he was accounted too young to be taken on that journey; the recovery of the Kingdom under the Mountain was therefore an inheritance he entered rather than a deed he shared.

The name itself is not, properly speaking, a Dwarvish name at all. Tolkien explains in the linguistic appendix that the Dwarves guarded their own tongue as a private possession, disclosing their true names to no one outside their kindred and withholding them even from their tombs, so that in dealings with others they went by outer names drawn from the speech of the Men of the North among whom they lived and traded. Gimli's name accordingly stands in that northern register and carries no Elvish etymology and no meaning recorded within the languages of the tale; his inner name, like those of all his people, is simply not given. The pronunciation follows the general rules set out for such names: the g is hard, as in a word like give, never softened before the following vowel.

In formal speech he identifies himself by patronymic, as Gimli son of Glóin, which is the customary Dwarvish manner of naming, while the narrative of the southward journey more often designates him simply as the Dwarf, a usage that marks him as the single representative of his people in a mixed company. Two by-names attach to him in later tradition. One remembers the strands of hair given him at his parting from Lothlórien and styles him Lockbearer; the other, Elf-friend, records the regard in which the Eldar afterwards held him, a title the more remarkable for the estrangement that had long stood between the two peoples.

For most of Gimli's life the record is silent, and he appears in the chronicles only when the affairs of the north drew him south. In the autumn of 3018 a rider out of Mordor came more than once to Dáin under the Mountain, offering friendship and the return of lost Rings in exchange for tidings of a hobbit and of a certain ring that such a creature had once held; the threat behind the courtesy was plain enough. Unwilling to answer and unable to keep silent for long, the Dwarves sent an embassy to Rivendell both to take counsel of Elrond and to warn Bilbo, and Glóin travelled with his son. They were present at the Council held on 25 October, where Gimli reported the temper of Erebor and heard for the first time the full history of the Ring. When the company of the Ring-bearer was chosen he was named to it as the representative of the Dwarves, and the Nine Walkers left Rivendell on 25 December 3018.

After the storm on Caradhras turned the company back, Gimli alone welcomed the road proposed beneath the mountains, for he hoped to find there the colony that Balin had led into Khazad-dûm some thirty years before. They entered the West-gate on the night of 13 January 3019 and came at length to the Chamber of Mazarbul, where Gimli found the tomb of Balin son of Fundin, his kinsman, and the mutilated book that recorded how that settlement had ended. Two days later Gandalf fell at the bridge of Khazad-dûm, and the survivors came out into the Dimrill Dale in grief. There Gimli asked leave to turn aside to Kheled-zâram, and with Frodo and Sam looked down into the still water and saw the ring of stars that lies in it under any sky, a sight bound up with the awakening of Durin and one of the few things of his people's memory that he shows to outsiders.

At the borders of Lothlórien the old enmity nearly halted the journey: the march-wardens would admit a Dwarf only blindfold, Gimli refused the condition unless it were laid on all, and Aragorn ended the dispute by having the whole company go hooded. The reversal came in Caras Galadhon, where Galadriel spoke to him of the Dwarf-places by their proper names in his own tongue, and Gimli's suspicion gave way to a devotion that governed his conduct for the rest of the war. At the parting on 16 February, when gifts were given, he asked for nothing until pressed, and then requested a single hair of her head; she gave him three, and he said he would set them in imperishable crystal as an heirloom of his house. The company went down Anduin by boat, and on 26 February the Fellowship broke at Parth Galen with the death of Boromir.

With Aragorn and Legolas he then pursued the Orc-band that had carried off Merry and Pippin, running on foot across the plains of Rohan for four days; the Dwarf, ill-made for such travel, fell behind but did not turn back. On the downs they met Éomer's company, and Gimli's anger at a slighting word spoken of the Lady of the Golden Wood nearly brought the meeting to blows. On 1 March they found Gandalf returned in Fangorn, and rode with him to Edoras and thence to the Hornburg, where Gimli fought in the caves behind the Deeping Wall on the night of 3 March, took a wound to the head, and closed his running tally against Legolas at forty-two Orcs to the Elf's forty-one. In that battle he also came to Éomer's aid when the marshal was cut off among enemies. It was there too that he first saw the caverns of Aglarond, and afterwards spoke of them at such length that Legolas agreed to visit them if Gimli would in turn walk with him under the trees of Fangorn.

He kept to Aragorn's road for the rest of the war. On 8 March he passed the Paths of the Dead, the only one of his people to do so, and by his own later account found that darkness harder to endure than any battle; he was with the company that took the Corsair fleet at Pelargir and came up Anduin in time for the Battle of the Pelennor Fields on 15 March. Ten days later he stood before the Black Gate in the small force that drew Sauron's armies out of Mordor, and when the field was won he went searching among the dead and found Pippin alive beneath the body of a troll that had fallen on him. After the crowning of Elessar on 1 May and the long northward journey of that summer, he and Legolas discharged their bargain, going first into the Glittering Caves and afterwards into Fangorn.

Within the Fellowship Gimli holds a representative rather than a directing office. He speaks for Erebor and for Durin's Folk, but no part of the war's strategy turns upon his judgement: counsel is taken by Gandalf and Elrond, and afterwards by Aragorn, and his dissent carries the weight of one voice among nine. What he brings instead is a body of knowledge that no one else in the company possesses. He gives the peaks above the Dimrill Dale their names in the tongue of his own people when the others know only the Elvish forms, he reads the age and making of stonework at sight, and he can speak with authority about the delvings of the Dwarves and the worth of what is taken from them. In a story largely concerned with Elves, Men and hobbits, he is the single channel through which the crafts and the memory of his kindred enter the narrative at all.

His capacities are of an ordinary kind, and the tale is careful about their bounds. He fights on foot with axe and mail, best at close quarters and in confined ground where his stature tells for rather than against him; he endures cold, dark and stone better than his companions, and rock underfoot steadies him where it oppresses others. Against that stand equally plain deficiencies. In the pursuit across Rohan the work is divided by aptitude, and neither the far sight of the Elf nor the tracking of the Ranger is his; open country and long running are not his element. He does not ride well or willingly, and takes the road behind Legolas on a borrowed horse rather than manage one himself. He commands no company, wields no artefact of power, and possesses nothing that could be called an art beyond craftsmanship.

Two episodes set the limit exactly. At Rivendell he brought his axe down upon the Ring where it lay, and the axe was broken while the Ring took no mark; Elrond's reply was that no smithcraft in that house, and no strength of hand, could unmake it. At the West-gate of Moria neither his own lore nor anything remembered in his father's house preserved the word that opened doors made in part by a Dwarf, and the way in was found by Gandalf; his knowledge of Khazad-dûm, held by report rather than by having walked there, gave the company no guidance once inside. What he alters is not the balance of force but the standing of his people: the regard he won among the Eldar, and the friendship that followed from it, are the terms in which his part is finally measured.

Gimli enters the story carrying quarrels he did not begin. His father had once been a prisoner in the halls of the Elvenking of Mirkwood, taken on the eastward road, and at Elrond's council it was that king's son who brought the news of Gollum's escape; Glóin at once recalled his own rougher treatment there, and had to be quieted by Gandalf before the debate could go on. The tie between father and son is shown less as affection than as shared errand: Gimli comes south attached to an embassy, answers for the mind of Erebor, and holds his place in the company as a delegate of a kindred rather than as a man free to choose for himself.

Against that inheritance the two Elvish attachments stand out, and they are of quite different kinds. The friendship with Legolas is built rather than felt at the outset: it grows through habits the two invent for themselves, the counted tally in battle that turns killing into a shared idiom, and the bargain by which each agrees to be led into the thing the other loves and he himself has no taste for. Neither converts the other; they trade visits instead. The regard for Galadriel is not friendship at all but something closer to homage, offered by a subject who has no lord in that country, and it shows itself chiefly in his readiness to take offence on her behalf and to measure other loyalties against her.

Among Men his bonds are personal and unowed. He is no subject of Gondor or of the Mark, and his adherence to Aragorn is a thing chosen and repeatedly renewed, most plainly when he takes a road his own people had never taken. With Éomer the sequence runs from near-violence to comradeship: the two meet again after the Pelennor and reopen their dispute in good humour, neither yielding the point, the quarrel itself become a form of friendship. He has no enemy of his own, and his one direct encounter with an adversary is verbal, at Orthanc, where the wizard's persuasion had no hold on him and he answered bluntly that the fair words meant their opposite.

The name itself is much older than the character. In the earliest layer of Tolkien's mythology, written in the years around 1917, Gimli is not a Dwarf at all but a Gnome — one of the Noldoli — an aged and blind thrall held in the halls of Tevildo, Prince of Cats, in the version of the Beren and Tinúviel story preserved among the Lost Tales. He is a minor figure there, remembered chiefly for a hearing so acute that it compensated for his lost sight, and he has no connexion of any kind with the later Dwarf of Durin's Folk beyond the sound of the name. Nothing of that conception survived into the published legendarium; the name was simply free again when Tolkien came to need one some twenty years afterwards.

In the drafting of The Lord of the Rings the Dwarf-member of the Company was slow to acquire his final identity. The composition of the party shifted repeatedly while the chapters of the Council and the southward journey were being written, and at one stage the Dwarf who came to Rivendell out of the north and was chosen to go with the Ring-bearer bore the name Burin son of Balin. Only later did Tolkien settle on Gimli son of Glóin and attach him to a father already known from the earlier book, which brought with it the embassy from Erebor and the old grievance against the Elves of Mirkwood. Christopher Tolkien's commentary shows the change occurring without any large revision of the Dwarf's function: the office was fixed before the person who filled it, and the name and parentage were fitted to a place in the narrative that already existed.

In Ralph Bakshi's animated film Gimli is voiced by David Buck, who also spoke several other parts in the same production. Because much of the animation was traced from live-action performers, the Dwarf is drawn at a stature closer to that of the Men around him than the text allows, and the difference of height on which several of his scenes depend is largely lost. The film's compression tells against him more than against most of the company: the passage through Lothlórien is abbreviated to the point that the quarrel at the borders and the parting gift disappear, and since the picture breaks off after the fighting at the Hornburg, the whole of his later part — the caverns, the road under the mountains, the settlement in the south — is simply outside its scope. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, which had twenty-six half-hour parts to work in and is generally reckoned the closest of the older versions to the book, casts Douglas Livingstone in the role and keeps both the Lórien episode and the Dwarf's share of the campaign in Gondor.

Peter Jackson's three films cast John Rhys-Davies, an actor of well above the height the part implies, so that the character was produced by scale doubles, oversized sets and forced perspective rather than by casting; the same actor also supplied the voice of Treebeard. The most discussed departure is one of register. Where the novel gives its Dwarf a settled gravity and reserves the humour for his exchanges with Legolas, the films move a large share of his material into comedy, adding invented business such as the drinking contest at Edoras and repeated jokes about his stature, and cutting much of the courtly manner he shows towards Galadriel; her gift to him survives only in the extended version. His enthusiasm for the caverns of Aglarond, and the bargain with Legolas that follows from it, are dropped, and with them the colony he founds there and his lordship of the Glittering Caves, since the films close without the Fourth Age material of the appendices. In the later trilogy drawn from The Hobbit he does not appear; his father is played there by Peter Hambleton as one of Thorin's company.