Khuzdul

The word Khuzdul belongs to the language it designates: it is the Dwarves' own term for their own speech, an adjectival formation on the same stem that gives Khazâd, the name they used for their people. Read as such, the name says little more than "Dwarvish" — it defines the tongue by its speakers rather than by any quality of the speech itself, and there is no indication that it ever meant "secret" or "hidden", whatever the practice of its keepers may have been. The same element appears in the name of the great mansion under the Misty Mountains, Khazad-dûm, and in the cry that Gimli raises in battle, so that the reader who has met only those two fragments has in fact already met the root. Characteristically, no one in the narrative pronounces the name of the language at all; it reaches the reader from the appendix on tongues and peoples, where the voice of the compiler stands outside the story and supplies the label that the story withholds.

In the older matter the self-designation is traced further back: Khazâd is the name given to the Dwarves at their making by Aulë, so that both the people-name and the language-name derive from their maker rather than from any neighbour. The Elves of Beleriand, encountering them from the outside, coined names of their own for the people: Naugrim, the stunted folk, and Gonnhirrim, masters of stone. These are names for a race, not for a speech, and the Elvish record accordingly speaks of the tongue of the Naugrim rather than of Khuzdul; since the Dwarves acquired Sindarin for their dealings instead of imparting their own language, the Elves had little occasion to name it as a thing in itself.

Among Men and Hobbits the tongue had no proper name either, only the descriptive one, and the same asymmetry governs the naming of persons. The Dwarves of the North bore outer names drawn from the languages of the Men beside whom they lived, while the names given them in their own tongue they did not disclose in another speech, and would not set them even upon a tomb — so the names by which Gimli and his kin are known throughout the tale are precisely not their Khuzdul names. The translator's conventions of the appendix work in the same direction: the people are given the English form Dwarves, and their chief city appears as Dwarrowdelf, an English coinage built on an archaic word for dwarf, rather than in the Dwarvish original. What survives to be named, then, is a language known publicly by a term borrowed from within it, spoken by a people whose public names come from without.

Khuzdul belonged to one people and, so far as the record allows, to all of them: no folk outside the Dwarves is reported to have used it in ordinary life, and the Dwarves themselves used it chiefly among their own kind. The reticence was policy rather than accident. Where the Elves were free with their speech and let it pass into the mouths of Men, the Dwarves gave theirs to no one willingly, and the appendix on tongues treats this as a settled trait of the race rather than the caution of one age or one kingdom. For business with outsiders they took up whatever language lay to hand — the Mannish speech of the country in which they had settled, and the Common Speech for wider dealings — so that a Dwarf among strangers might never be heard in his own tongue at all. The single licensed breach is the war-cry, which the compiler is careful to mark as no secret, a thing shouted on battlefields since the world was young.

The Elder Days show the same asymmetry at its point of closest contact. When the Dwarves of the mountains east of Beleriand came into dealings with the Grey-elves, it was the Dwarves who learned Sindarin, and they learned it readily, being quick with strange speech and content to conduct their trade in it. Their own language they did not offer in exchange. To Elvish ears the tongue sounded cumbrous and harsh, and few of the Eldar ever came to command it, so that the traffic between the two peoples ran wholly in one direction: whatever passed between them passed in an Elvish idiom. Even in the age when Dwarves and Elves were nearest, then, Khuzdul remained inward-facing, and the labour of translation was borne by its speakers alone.

The consequence is visible in the narrative wherever Dwarvish work is described. The western door of Moria, wrought by a Dwarf-smith in partnership with an Elven-smith, carries its inscription in Elvish letters and Elvish words at the very threshold of a Dwarf-realm. Deeper in, the tomb in the Chamber of Mazarbul is said to be cut in the tongues of Men and of Dwarves together, yet the Dwarvish wording is never set down; what reaches the page is the sense of it and nothing more. Against this, Gimli's naming of the lake and the river for his companions stands out as a deliberate small opening, a courtesy rather than a habit. What the tongue served was memory and lore among those already entitled to it — kept unchanged because it was not being worn down by daily use, and guarded less as a means of speech than as an inheritance not to be handed on.

The tongue has no prehistory in the ordinary sense, because it did not grow. Aulë, making the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves in secret beneath the mountains before the Firstborn awoke, devised a speech for them and taught it to them himself, and only afterwards were they laid to sleep to wait out the long years until the Elves should come. The language therefore entered the world finished, the work of one maker and the property of one people, without kinship to the tongues that later unfolded from the awakening of Elves or of Men. That beginning explains much of what follows: a speech handed down complete, to a people slow to change and long of life, had no natural pressure to drift. The subsequent record shows almost no development in it at all — what changes across the ages is not the language but the map of who was left to speak it.

The first movement that can be traced is westward. Exiles from the Dwarf-cities of the east, the folk afterwards called Petty-dwarves, crossed into Beleriand before any of their kindred, and the hill on which the last of them dwelt carried a Dwarvish name of its own beside the Sindarin one the Elves used for it — the earliest instance in the narrative of the tongue holding ground in the west. Later the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost, whose mansions lay in the Blue Mountains, came over into Beleriand and entered into dealings with the Grey-elves, and from that contact their trade, their craft and their outer vocabulary all expanded while their own speech stayed where it was. The end of the First Age reversed the movement: the ruin that broke Beleriand also destroyed the two western cities, and such of their people as survived went east to Khazad-dûm. From that point the tongue's centre lay under the Misty Mountains rather than beside the sea.

Khazad-dûm gave the language its longest secure home, and the Second Age its widest field of contact. The Noldorin realm of Eregion was founded beyond the western gate in the year 750 of that age, and the neighbourhood produced an exchange of skills rather than of speech; when Eregion was ravaged in 1697 the gates were shut, and the closest association the Dwarves ever had with another people ended without their tongue having passed out of their keeping. It is in these centuries that Khuzdul acquired a written form, and it acquired it from outside: the runes devised in Beleriand were taken up by the Dwarves, carried east, and elaborated in Moria into a fuller alphabet suited to their own sounds, which the Dwarves of Erebor afterwards modified again for themselves. For writing with pen or brush rather than chisel they used the Elvish letters instead. A language guarded from strangers was thus recorded, throughout its documented history, in characters borrowed from them.

The Third Age scattered its speakers. In 1980 the delvings of Moria roused the Balrog, Durin VI was slain, and in the following year the Dwarves abandoned the mansion; from 1999 Erebor became the chief seat of Durin's Folk, until Smaug drove them out in 2770. The war they waged against the Orcs from 2793 to 2799 closed in the valley below the eastern gate of Moria, which the annals name in Dwarvish as well as in Westron, so that the record of the campaign preserves a fragment of the language almost by accident. Through all of this the Dwarves lived as guests, traders and smiths among Men — in Dale, in the north, and wherever work could be had — and their working speech was accordingly whatever their neighbours spoke. Dispersal did not erode the old tongue, because it had already ceased to be the language of ordinary business; it simply confirmed the division between the speech used abroad and the speech kept at home.

At the end of the age the language is still where it has always been, in the keeping of its own people and no one else's. The few words that surface during the War of the Ring surface because one Dwarf chose to give them, and nothing in the record suggests any wider opening followed. After the war Gimli led a company of Durin's Folk south to settle the caves behind Helm's Deep, and others of Dáin's people remained in Erebor and in Dale, so that the speakers were more widely spread in the Fourth Age than before but no more numerous in any one place. Durin's Folk held to the belief that their founder would return and Khazad-dûm be reclaimed, and the chronicles let that expectation stand rather than resolve it. The tongue's history accordingly has no closing date: it ends not in extinction but in reticence, still carried, still unchanged, and still unwritten for anyone outside.

What can be said about the sound of Khuzdul rests on a very small body of material: one sentence of connected speech, a few place-names that Gimli gives his companions as they come to the mountains and again above the lake, and the word the Dwarves use for their own kind. The appendix that reports these supplies no grammar with them — no paradigm, no account of how words are built or clauses ordered — so the reader is left with forms and their meanings and nothing in between. Even the war-cry, the only utterance long enough to possess a syntax, is furnished with a rendering rather than an analysis. The name of the people stands twice in it; the English translation needs a verb for which no separate word appears on the Dwarvish side; and the possessive relation between the axes and their owners is carried by nothing more than the placing of two words together. Whether that is how the language ordinarily worked cannot be told from a single line, and the sources do not say.

In transcription the tongue is set down with the same letters used for the other languages of the tale, and the appendix on writing notes one convention that bears on it directly: where Sindarin employs the circumflex in stressed monosyllables to mark vowels drawn out to an unusual length, in Dwarvish the same mark means no more than that the vowel is long. The attested forms use it freely, in the people-name, in the second element of the name for the Mirrormere, in that of the Silverlode. The vowels themselves run heavily to a and u, e and i being much the rarer; the consonantal impression comes from z, k and b, from the aspirate written kh at the beginning of words, and from the clusters that fall where the halves of a compound meet, as in the three mountain-names Gimli recites for the company.

The older matter adds a second kind of evidence, because it gives Dwarvish names beside the Elvish names for the same things and renders both into English. The two mansions in the Blue Mountains are Tumunzahar and Gabilgathol in the speech of those who made them, and the Sindarin forms are translations rather than borrowings, so that a reader laying the pairs side by side can see which part of the Dwarvish answers to "great" and which to "fortress" without any grammatical statement being made anywhere. Personal names show the same material: Azaghâl, lord of Belegost, who dealt the dragon a wound at the Fifth Battle, is built of the same sounds as the names of hills and halls, and nothing in the shape of such a word marks it as belonging to a person rather than a place. Past that point the record closes. Those who heard the language spoken at close quarters left behind a verdict on how it struck the ear and not an account of how it was put together — and it is the verdict that has been preserved.

The letters in which Dwarvish was set down are described in the appendix on writing rather than in the appendix on tongues, and they belong to the second of the two systems there distinguished: not the flowing letters shaped for pen and brush, but the angular runes made in Beleriand for cutting into wood, stone and metal, whose forms were determined by the chisel and the knife. Among the people who devised them these runes remained largely a matter of lore, a scholar's alphabet kept up beside a fuller and easier hand; among the Dwarves they became the ordinary instrument of record. Carried east and worked over in the mansion beneath the Misty Mountains, they were fitted with altered values and additional signs for sounds the older arrangement had not provided, and the resulting alphabet took its name from that city; the northern kingdom later adjusted it again, and it is that later adjustment which appears in the record-book found in the chamber where Balin was buried. In their simpler and earlier form the same runes spread widely in the Second Age and were taken up by Men and even by Orcs, each people altering them according to its skill. The script therefore travelled freely where the language it served did not, and its history is one of dissemination rather than of guarding.

The older matter supplies the motive for that adoption. The runes were the invention of Daeron, the minstrel and loremaster of Thingol's court in Doriath, and the Dwarves who came into Beleriand valued his work more highly than his own people did, taking it over the mountains and making it their own while the Sindar continued to prefer speech to letters. Two things follow for the standing of the tongue. The first is that Dwarvish writing begins as an acquired craft, and that a people famous for withholding its language showed no comparable reluctance about the signs used to record it — the invention of an Elvish singer is what stands, under a Dwarvish name, over the grave of a lord of Moria. The second is that the reputation of the runes among the Dwarves rests on their fitness for inscription: names, memorials, the marking of ownership and of place. Nothing in the record shows Khuzdul written at length in any hand, and the surviving Dwarvish letters are those of a people who cut what they wished to be remembered rather than of one that circulated what it had written.

Nearly the whole Dwarvish vocabulary of the narrative is delivered in one speech. Halted with the Company on the way to the pass, with the three peaks above Moria in view, Gimli names them in his own tongue — Barazinbar, Zirakzigil and Bundushathûr — and adds the clipped forms his people use in ordinary talk, Baraz, Zirak and Shathûr, before going on to the water that rises in the valley beyond the mountains and the lake that lies in it. Every one of these is supplied as a gloss on a name the hearers already possess in Elvish or in the Common Speech, so that the Dwarvish stands beside a translation rather than in place of one. The setting is worth noting: the words come out of a Dwarf's homesickness for a country he can see and cannot enter, and none of his companions has any occasion to use them afterwards.

The rest is scattered and brief. Inside the mountain the name of the chamber where the last defenders fell, and of the record-book found there, is Dwarvish for the keeping of records, and it is Gandalf rather than Gimli who uses it. In the fight in that chamber Gimli shouts the people-name alone; the full two-part cry, with the word for axes before it, comes later at the Hornburg, and the appendix on tongues quotes it there as the one piece of Khuzdul that was never withheld. Standing at the lake after the escape from Moria he speaks its name again, this time to Frodo and with no translation attached. The annals in the appendices carry a few more forms of the same kind — the mansion itself, the lake, the dale below the eastern gate where the war against the Orcs was decided — but these are the compiler's names for places, not speech put in anyone's mouth. The earlier book, for all the Dwarves in it, yields none of this: its thirteen travellers sing, quarrel and bargain entirely in the language of the tale.

In the older matter the pattern is the same but the speaker is missing altogether. What Dwarvish there is arrives as a set of names the chronicler sets beside their Sindarin equivalents — the two mansions in the Blue Mountains, the hill in which the last of the Petty-dwarves made his house, which they called Sharbhund while the Elves knew it by another name, and the lord of Belegost who fought the dragon. Mîm, the one Dwarf given extended speech anywhere in the Elder Days, is never reported saying a word of his own language. The tongue is thus attested in two registers only: names recorded from outside, and a handful of forms volunteered by a single speaker at the very end of the Third Age.

Khuzdul came late to a body of invention that had begun, decades earlier, with Elvish. When the Dwarves first reached print they had no speech of their own at all: their names were taken from the Old Norse poetic tradition, chosen for their ring in a children's book written long before any account of a Dwarvish tongue existed, and nothing in that book implies a language standing behind them. The appendix on translation composed for the later work converts the awkwardness into a principle, explaining the Northern forms as the rendering of a Mannish language by the same convention that turns the Common Speech into English. The device is tidy, and it also fixes the shape of everything that followed: a language introduced into a story whose Dwarves had already been speaking, and travelling, and dying under borrowed names for fifteen years.

For the language itself Tolkien chose a model deliberately unlike those behind his Elvish. Writing to Naomi Mitchison while the first volume was in the press, he set out the bases of his tongues in turn: the high speech of lore built on a Finnish foundation, its Grey-elven counterpart given a character close to Welsh, and the Dwarvish words framed to be Semitic. The choice is audible in the little that survives, where a consonantal skeleton yields both the name of the people and the name of their language by a change of vowels alone — the root-and-pattern principle of Hebrew and Arabic rather than the stem-and-ending habit of the Indo-European family. To the same correspondent he later compared the Dwarves to Jews, a people at once native and foreign in the lands they inhabit, using the language of their neighbours with an accent of their own while keeping a private tongue beside it. That comparison, offered as a remark about the people, describes the linguistic arrangement of the appendix exactly, and it suggests that the secrecy was conceived before the grammar was — which may be why so little of the grammar was ever made.