Dwarves

In their own speech the Dwarves are the Khazâd, a name of their own devising which they shared with outsiders only sparingly. Their tongue, Khuzdul, was treated as a private possession rather than a medium of exchange: Dwarves learned the languages of their neighbours quickly and used them freely in trade and council, while committing little of their own to other ears. For dealings with Men and Elves each Dwarf bore an outer name drawn from the tongues of the northern Men among whom his people lived, and the inner name given within the kindred was kept hidden; it was not even cut upon the stone of a tomb. The English plural used throughout Tolkien's writings is itself a deliberate archaism, standing apart from the ordinary modern form and preserving the older stem that survives in such coinages as Dwarrowdelf.

The Elves who first came to know them well were the Sindar of Beleriand, to whom the Dwarves came westward over the mountains of the east in the Elder Days, out of their cities in the range that bounded Beleriand. The Sindar had no memory of such a people from the accounts of the Great Journey, and the names they made for them record two impressions at once: Naugrim, referring to their short and thickset stature, and Gonnhirrim, acknowledging their unrivalled mastery of stone. Nogothrim served as a name for the people as a whole. At the outset the two kindreds dealt with one another in cautious profit rather than affection, exchanging craft and knowledge without much mingling of custom, and something of that reserve persisted long afterwards.

Their beginning lay outside the design that the Valar had been given to expect. Aulë, unwilling to wait through the long years for the coming of the Children, shaped the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves in a hall beneath the mountains of Middle-earth, teaching them a speech he had made. Rebuked by Ilúvatar for making what he could not truly give life to, he offered to destroy the work of his hands, and it was in that moment of submission that his creatures were granted a being of their own; yet Ilúvatar decreed that they must sleep in the dark until the Firstborn had awoken, so that the appointed order should not be overturned. The Dwarves themselves name Aulë Mahal, the Maker, and reckon their kindreds as seven, each descending from one of these fathers, of whom the eldest was Durin, surnamed the Deathless.

The Seven Fathers did not wake in one place, and their descendants never formed a single realm. Durin, the eldest, is said to have woken alone beneath a mountain in the far north that his heirs afterwards held in reverence, and to have wandered south along the range until he came to a deep lake under three peaks, where at noon he saw a crown of stars mirrored in the water; there he began the delvings that grew into Khazad-dûm, greatest and longest-inhabited of all their works. Two other kindreds settled within reach of Beleriand in the eastern range that bounded it, holding the cities of Nogrod and Belegost, and their traffic with the Sindar opened the first sustained dealings between the two races. The remaining four houses dwelt far eastward and enter the western records hardly at all, so that the recorded history of the Dwarves is largely the history of Durin's Folk and of their western kin.

In Beleriand the western cities prospered as hired craftsmen before they were drawn into war. Their masons helped Thingol enlarge the halls of Menegroth, and Nogrod produced smiths of great fame. When the Elves and Men of the north gathered against Morgoth, the Dwarves of Belegost came in mail and hewing-axes that no dragon-fire could easily undo; their lord Azaghâl, mortally trampled by Glaurung, drove a knife into the dragon's belly and forced him from the field, and his people carried the body away from the rout with a slow chant that the enemy did not dare interrupt. A darker thread runs beside this: a scattered folk sprung from Dwarves exiled long before out of the eastern cities had crept into Beleriand ahead of the rest, and, hunted as beasts by Elves who did not recognise them as a people, dwindled to a handful.

The alliance with Doriath ended in bloodshed. Smiths of Nogrod, set to work resetting a Silmaril in the ancient necklace of their own making, claimed the whole treasure as their people's by right of craft and killed Thingol in his own vaults; the survivors returned with an army, sacked Menegroth, and were destroyed on the homeward road at a ford of the Gelion by Beren and the Green-elves. Nogrod never recovered from that loss, and old suspicion between the two kindreds hardened into something more lasting. When the war against Morgoth broke the land and drowned Beleriand, both cities were ruined with the mountains that housed them, and such of their people as survived went eastward, most of them to Khazad-dûm, which was thereafter the chief seat of the race.

The Second Age was the height of Dwarvish power. Khazad-dûm alone yielded mithril, and its wealth drew the Elven-smiths of Eregion into a close and unusual friendship: Narvi made the western door of the mansions and Celebrimbor set the devices upon it, and the two peoples passed freely through the mountains. Seven Rings came into Dwarvish hands, whether given by Sauron or, as Durin's Folk maintained of their own, made over to them by the smiths themselves; they proved poor instruments of domination, for their bearers neither faded nor became wraiths, though the rings sharpened an appetite for gold that ended badly for every hoard they helped to raise. Sauron's war destroyed Eregion, and the Dwarves shut their gates and held their halls apart while the Elves who could escape fled north; four of the rings were later consumed by dragons and three recovered by Sauron.

The long retreat began in the Third Age. Digging for mithril beneath the mountain roots, the miners of Khazad-dûm loosed an ancient terror of Morgoth's making; it killed Durin VI and his son within two years, and the survivors abandoned the mansions, which passed into the keeping of orcs and were afterwards called the Black Pit. Thráin I led part of the exiles to the Lonely Mountain, where he found the Arkenstone and took the title of King under the Mountain; a later king removed the seat to the Grey Mountains, until dragons out of the northern wastes made those halls untenable and killed Dáin I at his own doors. The kingdom was refounded at Erebor and a second settlement made in the Iron Hills, and for two centuries the mountain grew rich again, until Smaug came down upon it, took the hoard, and scattered the household into exile in the west.

Two further catastrophes and one recovery close the record. Thrór, wandering and half-witless in old age, returned alone to the eastern gate of the lost mansions and was killed and branded by an orc-chieftain, which set off a war fought from one mountain range to the next and ended before that gate in a battle so costly that the victors, though they had slain the chieftain, would not enter the halls they had won. His son was taken and died a prisoner in Dol Guldur, the last of the Dwarven rings stripped from him there. Erebor was regained by his grandson in the venture that brought a hobbit north, and held after him by the kings of the Iron Hills line; when the last war came, the mountain and Dale were besieged and their kings fell before the gate, but the siege broke with Sauron's fall. Afterwards a Dwarvish colony went south to the caves behind Helm's Deep under Gimli, who had gates made for Minas Tirith, and Durin's Folk kept the expectation that their founder's name and their oldest realm would both return to them.

The ordinary business of a Dwarvish community was digging and the working of what was dug. They quarried, tunnelled, smelted and forged, and shaped stone with a precision no neighbouring people could match, yet they kept no fields and no herds worth the name, and bought their bread from the farming folk who settled about their gates; the wealth of Dale rested on that arrangement, and its markets carried Dwarvish mail, tools and ingenious toys as well as plainer ironwork. Their temper is described consistently: hard-wearing and obstinate, able to labour past the endurance of Men and to bear hunger and hurt without complaint, close about their own affairs, and equally tenacious in friendship and in enmity, so that neither a kindness nor an injury was easily let go. They were not, for all that, a grim people among themselves; the company that came to Bag End brought instruments with them and made music before they spoke of business.

For writing they adopted the angular letters first devised in Doriath, which suited them because straight strokes can be cut with chisel and graver into stone and metal; the smiths of Khazad-dûm rearranged the set to their own use, later kindreds altered it again, and pen-forms were added for keeping records rather than inscriptions. Their numbers grew slowly and never recovered quickly from a war. Women were fewer than a third of the whole people and seldom travelled; to outsiders they were indistinguishable from the men in voice, dress and beard, which is the origin of the notion current among other races that the Dwarves had no women and were somehow bred out of the rock. Many of both sexes never married at all, some for want of a chosen partner and many of the men because craft absorbed them entirely, and those who did married once only. A Dwarf might live some two hundred and fifty years, long by the reckoning of Men, but a generation lost in battle was long in the replacing.

Their dead they laid in stone, and to burn a body was abhorrent to them; that they did so on the field after the war of the mountain passes, where the slain were past counting and there was neither time to hew tombs nor wood enough for anything but a common fire, was remembered afterwards as a measure of the disaster, though those who had passed through the flames were held in honour and the fact was spoken as a title rather than a shame. What became of them after death set them apart from both the other Speaking Peoples. Elves and Men supposed that a race made out of the substance of the earth returned to it, an opinion the Dwarves themselves rejected; their own teaching was that the Maker had set halls aside for them apart from the houses of Elves and Men, and that they wait there for the end of the world, when they will have a hand in the remaking of Arda. It is a hope of employment rather than of rest, and fits the people who held it.

Of the seven houses only one has its internal ordering preserved in the western records. Durin's Folk were also named the Longbeards, and their kingship passed in a single descent from the eldest of the fathers, father to son wherever the line allowed. Five times after the first a king was given the name Durin, because his people judged, from his likeness and from the length of his years, that their founder had come among them again; the sixth of that name was reigning when the mansions were lost, and the genealogies of the house leave the name open once more at their end. Each of the other kindreds is said to have had a king and a treasury of its own, but their successions were never written down in the West.

Within Durin's Folk the branchings can be followed closely for the last few centuries. One king was killed at his own door together with his second son; the eldest son inherited, while the third took a following east to the Iron Hills and founded a line that ruled there in parallel and in time inherited the crown itself. A collateral branch descended from a younger son two generations earlier produced, through Farin, the brothers Fundin and Gróin, whose sons Balin and Dwalin, Óin and Glóin made up a third of the company that went east to recover the mountain; three others of that company were of Moria stock but outside Durin's line altogether. Balin afterwards led a party back to the abandoned mansions and was styled lord there, a lordship of some five years that ended with his death by the lake and the extinction of the colony.

The two houses that dwelt within reach of Beleriand were distinguished by their crafts as much as by their cities. To the Dwarves of Belegost is credited the first contriving of mail woven of linked rings, which passed from them into general use. Nogrod was the greater name in smithcraft, and its most famous master made both the knife keen enough to cut a Silmaril from the iron crown and the dragon-helm that came at last to the house of Húrin. Apart from all seven stood the remnant of those driven out of the eastern cities in the deeps of time, who kept a name of their own and dwindled generation by generation until they were reduced to a single household; the last of them, with two sons, held a hill in the wilderness south of the Forest of Brethil, and the line ended in the ruin that followed his dealings with outlaws.

In The Hobbit the Dwarves supply both the motive of the plot and the foil against which Bilbo is measured. Thorin's company arrives with a map, a contract and a grievance, and every stage of the journey follows from a claim to property that the hobbit does not feel and never quite learns to feel. The narrator handles their self-importance with dry affection — the piling of hoods on a stranger's pegs, the formal bows, the readiness to sing before they will explain themselves — and then allows that same self-regard to curdle. Once the mountain is won, Thorin's refusal to yield any portion of the hoard turns the book's success into a quarrel among its own allies and brings on the battle it should have prevented; his admission at the end, that ordinary good cheer is worth more than accumulated treasure, is the moral the whole adventure has been testing.

In The Lord of the Rings the race appears chiefly as inheritance and as absence. The Fellowship's long passage under the mountains is a walk through a Dwarvish achievement that has become a tomb, and the only Dwarvish voice to be heard there is a damaged record book that breaks off in the middle of a sentence. Everything living in the people is carried instead by one representative, so that an old estrangement between kindreds is staged as personal awkwardness and then dismantled by small courtesies: a gift asked for and granted in Lórien changes the terms between Gimli and the Elves more decisively than any argument about the past. His account of the caves behind the Deeping-coomb serves a further purpose, giving the Dwarvish sense of beauty its own first-person defence — the claim that his people would tend such places as a gardener tends a wood, taking a handful of stone in a lifetime — against the assumption that they only quarry.

The older material describes them almost entirely from outside, since the histories that survive were kept by Elves, and this outsider's angle is built into the design rather than being an accident of transmission. The chapter that tells of their making does not end with them: Yavanna, hearing what has been shaped in secret, fears for growing things at the hands of a people bred to hew and delve, and the Shepherds of the Trees are set in the world as a counterweight, so that the Dwarves stand from the first in structural opposition to forest and field. Tolkien himself described them as a people at once native and foreign wherever they lived, using the language of the country with an accent of their own and keeping an older speech for themselves, dispossessed of their proper home and eloquent about it — a comparison that explains why the sympathy the narrative extends to them is always mixed with distance.

The earliest surviving treatment presents a people barely recognisable from the later one. In the Lost Tales they are the Nauglath, whose city is Nogrod, while the Longbeards — there called Indrafangs — of Belegost are a separate race beside them rather than one house of a single kindred. Their character is fixed as grasping and treacherous without qualification: Naugladur, lord of Nogrod, has the dragon's hoard wrought for Tinwelint into the necklace of the Dwarves, murders him in his own halls, and leads away a plundering host in which Orcs march willingly alongside Dwarves, until Beren destroys them at a stony ford. No maker is assigned to them at this stage, and nothing connects them with Aulë; the later balance, in which an unlovely temper is set against genuine loyalties and grievances, has not yet been struck.

The Quenta texts of the 1930s make them a race apart, neither of Elves nor of Men nor bred by Morgoth, but they preserve an Elvish judgement that the Dwarves possess skill without art and no indwelling spirit, and that they return at death into the stone from which they were shaped — precisely the opinion that the Dwarves' own teaching was later framed to deny. The scene of Aulë's secret labour beneath the mountains, the rebuke of Ilúvatar and Yavanna's answering plea, which sets the Shepherds of the Trees in the world as a counterweight, belongs to late revision of the Quenta Silmarillion, and the fullest accounts of Khuzdul, of the Sindarin names given to the people, and of the old alliance between the Longbeards and the Men of the northern vales come from essays of that same final period. The drafts for The Lord of the Rings record a smaller change: the Dwarvish delegate at Rivendell was for a while Burin son of Balin, before the part passed to Gimli.

The earliest screen Dwarves are those of the Rankin/Bass television film of 1977, in which Hans Conried voiced Thorin Oakenshield; the compression of the novel into some ninety minutes leaves the remaining twelve of the company with little to distinguish one from another, and the battle before the mountain is reduced to a brief sequence with much of its dynastic background removed. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of the following year introduced Gimli, voiced by David Buck, but because the adaptation halts after Helm's Deep it carries none of the later episodes in which his standing among the Elves is settled, and the Dwarvish history of the appendices is set aside altogether. The BBC Radio dramatisation of 1981 gave the part to Douglas Livingstone and, being the fullest of the older versions, kept more of his exchanges with Legolas and with the Elves of Lórien than either animated film had room for.

John Rhys-Davies played Gimli in Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001–2003, and also supplied the voice of Treebeard; the films move much of the story's lighter register onto the Dwarf, adding jokes at the expense of his stature and a drinking contest that has no counterpart in the book, while shortening his more reflective speeches. The Hobbit films of 2012–2014 individuate the company far more than any earlier version, with Richard Armitage as Thorin, Ken Stott as Balin, Graham McTavish as Dwalin, James Nesbitt as Bofur and Billy Connolly as Dáin Ironfoot, and they enlarge the story with material Tolkien does not supply: the orc-chieftain killed long before at the eastern gate of the lost mansions is kept alive as a pursuing enemy, an invented Elf is given an attachment to one of Thorin's nephews, and the company's attempt on the dragon within the mountain is written for the screen.