Thorin Oakenshield

Thorin belonged to Durin's Folk, the eldest of the seven kindreds of Dwarves, known also as the Longbeards, who traced their descent from Durin the Deathless and held their ancient seat in Khazad-dûm before the Balrog drove them out. He was born in the year 2746 of the Third Age, the son of Thráin II and grandson of Thrór, and so stood third in a direct line of kings whose realm at that time was the wealthy Dwarf-kingdom beneath the Lonely Mountain in the north. The numeral attached to his name distinguishes him from an earlier Thorin, son of Thráin I, who had ruled the Longbeards generations before and led them from Erebor to the Grey Mountains; such repetition of names within the royal house was ordinary practice among the Dwarves. His father and grandfather held the style King under the Mountain, and it passed in due course to Thorin himself, though for the greater part of his life it described a claim rather than a possession.

The name Thorin, like those of all his kin recorded in the histories, is not a Dwarvish name at all. Tolkien explains that the Dwarves kept their own tongue as a private thing and never disclosed their true names in it to outsiders, not even by carving them upon their tombs; the names by which they were known abroad were taken from the languages of Men of the North, among whom they long dwelt and traded. Thorin's by-name, Oakenshield, follows the same convention: it renders into the speech of Men a title he won in battle after his own shield failed him and he took up a branch of oak in its place. It clung to him ever after and became, in effect, part of his name, so that he was seldom spoken of without it.

In temperament he was of a piece with the harder qualities his people were said to possess: proud, formal in his courtesies, tenacious in both loyalty and grievance, and slow to forget an injury done to his house. The long exile that followed the loss of Erebor shaped him considerably, for the heir of a mountain-hall spent much of his adult life in the Blue Mountains keeping himself by smith-work and by such trade as the wandering Dwarves could find, labouring in iron rather than in the gold his grandfather had commanded. At Bag End he is the one dwarf who offers Bilbo Baggins no word of service, arriving last and too haughty for the courtesy every other member of the company gives; the full recital of his descent from Thráin and Thrór he keeps for his return to Lake-town, where it is less a boast than a statement of legal standing: the titles were, at that moment, nearly the whole of his inheritance.

The decisive turn of Thorin's early life came in 2770, when the dragon Smaug came down upon the Lonely Mountain, destroyed the town of Dale below it and took the halls of Erebor for his own. Thorin was then twenty-four, still young by the reckoning of his people, and he was outside the Mountain when the attack fell; he escaped with his grandfather Thrór and his father Thráin by a small hidden door, and with them went into a poverty that none of the line had known. The years that followed were spent in wandering and in labour among Men in the lands to the south, where the exiles took what work they could get. In 2790 Thrór, grown restless and half-wandering in mind, gave the last of the Seven Rings into Thráin's keeping and went north to Moria with a single old companion; there he was killed by the Orc Azog, who cut off his head and branded his own name upon it. The insult was answered by a general muster of all the kindreds of the Dwarves, and the War of the Dwarves and Orcs was fought from 2793 to 2799.

The war ended in 2799 in the valley of Azanulbizar before the East-gate of Moria, in a battle of great slaughter fought in snow and among stones. Thorin, then in his early fifties, fought in the forefront; it was there that the shield-loss and the branch of oak occurred which gave him the by-name he kept for life. His younger brother Frerin was killed in that battle, as was Fundin, father of Balin and Dwalin, and his father Thráin was wounded and lost an eye. Azog himself was slain at the gate by Dáin Ironfoot, a young kinsman from the Iron Hills, who avenged his own father Náin; but Dáin, looking through the doorway, warned that the shadow within was no business for Dwarves, and the victors did not enter. The survivors dispersed, and Thráin and Thorin wandered again until 2802, when they came west and made a settlement in the Blue Mountains, working iron and living by trade with the Men of Eriador.

In 2841 Thráin, gnawed by the desire to see Erebor again and troubled by his ring, left the Blue Mountains with a small following. He was hunted and separated from his companions, and in 2845 he was taken into the dungeons of Dol Guldur, where the ring was stripped from him. Five years later Gandalf, searching that stronghold in disguise, found him dying and received from him a map of the Mountain and a key to its side-door, though Thráin could no longer say clearly to whom they belonged. From 2850 Thorin was therefore king of Durin's Folk in exile, without knowing what had become of his father. He brooded on Erebor for many years and considered an assault in open force, until a chance meeting with Gandalf on the road near Bree in March of 2941 turned the plan another way: the wizard offered the map and key, and pressed on him the idea of a small and secret company rather than an army.

The company of thirteen gathered at Bag End in the spring of that year, and Thorin set out eastward with Gandalf and the hobbit whom the wizard had chosen against the Dwarves' judgement. On the road the party was captured by three trolls and freed by Gandalf's trickery, and from the trolls' hoard Thorin took the Elvish sword afterwards named Orcrist, which Elrond identified at Rivendell when he also read the moon-letters concealed on the map. Crossing the Misty Mountains, the travellers were seized by Orcs and brought before the Great Goblin, and it was Thorin's drawn blade, remembered from old wars, that provoked the attack from which they escaped underground. Later, in Mirkwood, Thorin was taken alone by the Wood-elves at one of their vanishing feasts and brought before Thranduil, whom he refused to answer concerning his errand; he was held in the deepest cell until Bilbo contrived the escape by barrel. At Lake-town he was received openly, declared himself King under the Mountain returned, and was given supplies and ponies for the last stage of the road.

The side-door was found and opened at the turn of autumn, on the day the Dwarves called Durin's Day, and Bilbo went down alone into the dragon's hall. Smaug, roused by the theft of a cup and by the hobbit's riddling talk, flew out and destroyed Lake-town, where he was shot down by Bard the Bowman. Thorin, learning that the dragon was dead, took possession of the halls and the treasure and set the company to fortifying the gate. Bard came with the survivors of the lake and with Thranduil's army, asking a share for the ruined town and compensation for old wrongs, and Thorin refused all terms while an armed force stood before his door, sending a raven instead to summon Dáin from the Iron Hills. Above everything he wanted the Arkenstone, the great jewel of his house, and did not know that Bilbo had already taken it; when the hobbit gave it to the besiegers as a bargaining piece, Thorin came near to throwing him from the wall and drove him from the company.

Thorin's place in the wider history of the Third Age is political rather than heroic in any supernatural sense: he is the last direct heir in the senior line of Durin to press a claim on Erebor, and the point at which a dynastic grievance of the Dwarves happened to coincide with a wider strategy. By his own reckoning the errand was a private matter of inheritance and vengeance for his house. Gandalf's reasons were otherwise, and were set out only afterwards: he had long weighed the danger that Smaug, still living in the north, might be turned to Sauron's use, and judged that the Mountain and Dale were better held by their old peoples. Thorin was thus the instrument of a design he did not himself frame, and the marriage of the two purposes was never entirely comfortable, since the wizard imposed a hobbit on a company that had not asked for one.

Nothing preternatural is attributed to him. His capacities are those the narrative demonstrates: a formidable fighter, both in the pitched slaughter before Moria and in the sortie from the gate at the end; a competent smith, since the exiled royal house kept itself in the Blue Mountains by forge-work and trade; and an authority firm enough to hold twelve kinsmen to a plan through captivity and hunger. He was also a musician, and carried a golden harp on the road. Two advantages he possessed were inherited rather than personal: the ancient understanding between the ravens of the Mountain and the house of Durin, which allowed Roäc son of Carc to bring him accurate news of Smaug's death and of the movements of armies; and Orcrist, an Elvish blade of Gondolin taken from a troll-hoard, which the goblins recognised by a name of their own and feared for its history, not for anything Thorin brought to it.

The limits are drawn as plainly as the abilities. He could not read the moon-letters on his own map and needed Elrond to find them; the side-door could not be forced, only opened by chance of season and daylight; and against the dragon he had no answer whatever, which is why a burglar was required at all and why the killing, when it came, was done by a bowman of Lake-town at a distance from him. The last of the Seven Rings of the Dwarves passed from his grandfather to his father and was lost before it could reach him, so that he ruled without the wealth-gathering aid his forebears had used. His clearest failure was one of judgement: possession of the hoard worked on him as it had worked on Thrór, narrowing him to a single object until his counsel became unreasonable even to his own people, and the deadlock at the gate was broken by the arrival of a common enemy rather than by anything he chose.

Gandalf's later account of how the expedition was assembled offers the least flattering and most detailed portrait of Thorin as a man to deal with. By that telling the wizard did not so much persuade him as manage him: Thorin wanted open war and the settling of an old score, thought little of the hobbit forced upon him, and had to be pressed hard before he would accept a plan built on stealth. Gandalf judged him proud, difficult and slow to take advice, and admitted privately to doubts about whether he would have honoured the terms he agreed to had events gone otherwise. The assessment is not hostile; it simply treats him as an ally whose usefulness had to be weighed against his temper.

Thorin has been realised on screen twice, in each case as the central Dwarf of an adaptation of The Hobbit. In the Rankin/Bass animated television film of 1977 he was voiced by the American actor Hans Conried, and drawn as an elderly, heavily bearded figure sharply distinguished from his companions, most of whom are given little to do and few lines. The compression of the novel into roughly ninety minutes bears hard on his part: the dynastic history behind the journey — the flight from Erebor, the war with the Orcs, the years of exile — survives only as brief narration, and several episodes in which he figures, including the stay with Beorn, are dropped altogether. What the film does retain is the shape of his ending, the quarrel over the treasure, the refusal to treat with the men of the lake, and the reconciliation with Bilbo, though the Battle of Five Armies itself is dispatched at speed.

In Peter Jackson's trilogy Thorin was played by Richard Armitage and became one of the largest roles in the three films, portrayed as considerably younger and less grotesque in bearing than the dwarves around him. The most consequential departure is the survival of Azog, who in the book was killed before the gates of Moria a century and a half earlier: here he lives on as a personal pursuer, driving much of the invented action across the first two films. In consequence Thorin's death is transferred from the confusion of the battle, where he was overwhelmed near the bodyguard of Bolg, to a single combat with Azog fought apart from the main engagement, and Fíli and Kíli are killed separately rather than falling over their uncle's body. His growing obsession with the hoard, treated in the novel as a change of temper, is expanded into an extended affliction with a name; and material from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, including the affairs of Dol Guldur, is woven around him.