Noegyth Nibin

Noegyth Nibin is not a name the people chose for themselves but one given to them by the Sindar of Beleriand, and it records how the Grey-elves came to see them once the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains had made the Elves better acquainted with their kind. The first element is the plural of the Sindarin word for a dwarf, the same word the Elves used for the great houses of Nogrod and Belegost. The second marks them as small or lesser, so the whole name is usually rendered as Petty-dwarves. The name therefore places them firmly among the Dwarves while setting them apart as a diminished branch. In the fuller telling of Túrin's story the same idea appears with the elements reversed, as Nibin-noeg, and the dwelling on Amon Rûdh is named after them in that form. What the Petty-dwarves called themselves in their own speech is nowhere recorded.1

Their own tongue was not lost, however. Mîm, the last of their elders known to the tales, gives a dwarvish name for the caves that later became Nargothrond, which shows that the Petty-dwarves kept the speech of their fathers and named the places they had delved in it. His sons, Khîm and Ibun, also bear names that belong to that tongue rather than to Elvish.2

By descent they came from the Dwarves of the east. In a remote age they had been driven out of the great dwarf-cities there. The texts give no reason for their banishment, and the chroniclers do not guess at one. As outcasts they made their way westward and crossed into Beleriand long before Morgoth came back to Middle-earth, which made them earlier arrivals than the Naugrim who later traded with the Sindar. Their long isolation changed them: they shrank in stature and lost much of their old skill at the forge. Because the Grey-elves at first did not recognise them as a speaking people like the other Dwarves, they were treated as quarry. Only afterwards did the Elves learn to tell them apart from the kin of Nogrod and Belegost and give them the name by which they are remembered.3

Once they had settled in Beleriand, the Petty-dwarves did what their kin in the east had always done and began to delve. In the rocky country west of Sirion they found the caves beside the Narog that were later to become Nargothrond, and they started to hollow them out long before Finrod Felagund came over the sea to Middle-earth. Farther north, under the crown of the hill Amon Rûdh, they cut a second dwelling. The work there went slowly and lasted many years, and it was still being extended in the time of Mîm and his sons. These two places are the only works of theirs that the tales remember. Neither grew into a realm like Nogrod or Belegost, and there is no record that the Petty-dwarves ever had kings or a single ruling house.1

The hunting described above ended when the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains crossed into Beleriand and the Sindar became familiar with their kind. After that the Grey-elves left the Petty-dwarves alone, but the years of pursuit were not forgotten on either side. The Petty-dwarves cared for no one but their own people. They feared and hated the Orcs, and they hated the Eldar no less. They reserved their deepest grievance for the Noldorin Exiles, who in their eyes had taken their lands and their homes. The loss they meant was concrete: the caves by the Narog passed to Finrod, who completed them as the stronghold of Nargothrond, so that the delvers who had begun them were cut off from their own work.2

From then on the history of the Petty-dwarves is one of decline. They had never been numerous, and in the centuries of the Noldor's wars in Beleriand they dwindled and died out. By the time the tales take notice of them again, only Mîm and his two sons, Khîm and Ibun, were left, and Mîm was old even by the reckoning of Dwarves. They still lived in the halls under Amon Rûdh, but they no longer worked the forges there, and the tools of their people had been left to rust. The fuller account of Túrin's years as an outlaw portrays the household as withdrawn, suspicious and poor, surviving by gathering food in the wild rather than by craft or trade.3

This last remnant was drawn into the story of Túrin son of Húrin. Túrin's band of outlaws caught Mîm in the wilds, and during the chase one of the outlaws shot an arrow in the dusk that killed Khîm. To buy his own life, Mîm led the band to his hidden dwelling and gave it to them as a ransom, and it was known afterwards by a name that recalls that payment. For a time the outlaws lived there with the dwarf, and the hill became the stronghold from which Túrin and Beleg defended the land around it. Mîm never accepted the Elf Beleg among them. When Mîm was captured by Orcs, he led them up the secret ways into the hill, and the outlaws' refuge was destroyed. In this way the last of the Petty-dwarves helped bring about the ruin of the hall his people had cut.4

The end of the people is bound up with Nargothrond itself. After the city was sacked, the dragon Glaurung lay on its hoard, and when he left it and died, Mîm made his way into the empty halls. There he claimed the treasure as his own, reasoning that his forefathers had first delved the place. When Húrin came to Nargothrond after his release from Angband, he found the old dwarf among the gold and killed him at the doors. Before he died, Mîm laid a curse on the treasure, and that curse followed it into the troubles that later came to Doriath. With his death the Petty-dwarves disappear from the record. Nothing is told of Ibun's fate, and what memory of them remained survived only in the old tales of Doriath and Nargothrond.5

The Petty-dwarves are distinguished from the other Dwarves less by any single custom than by what they had become in their long separation from their kin. They were shorter than the Dwarves of the east, and they carried themselves stooped. They moved quickly and warily, and where the houses of Nogrod and Belegost were known in Beleriand for their smithying, the Petty-dwarves were known for stealth. Their works were hidden works. The dwelling they cut under Amon Rûdh had concealed approaches and inner passages known only to its makers, and the secrecy of these ways mattered to them as much as the halls themselves. Nothing suggests that they traded with Elves or Men, sent goods over the mountains, or took part in the exchanges of craft that bound the Naugrim of the Blue Mountains to Doriath.1

What can be said of their manners comes almost wholly from Mîm, and it must be read with that limitation in mind. He appears guarded and proud, quick to bargain for his own safety and slow to trust. He could nevertheless speak with the outlaws and make himself understood. In time he came to feel something like regard for Túrin, and he told Túrin about the history of his people and about the caves they had once begun by the Narog. His grief for Khîm was deep and lasting. The death of his son weighed on all his later dealings with the outlaws, and the matter of recompense for it was never truly settled. Loyalty among the Petty-dwarves seems to have stopped at the bounds of their own kin, which fits the narrowness of affection that the chroniclers ascribe to the people as a whole.2

To them the Exiles were not deliverers but newcomers who took what others had made, and the tales record this grievance without dismissing it.

Their relation to time is the relation of a people aware that it is ending. They measured their claim to the land by the work of their hands, so that a hall once delved remained, in their reckoning, theirs, whoever later dwelt in it. That sense of ownership outlasted the people's strength to hold anything. The tales present them as a remnant turned inward, one that kept its old speech and its old grievances while losing its numbers and much of its art.3

Within the legendarium the Petty-dwarves matter less as a nation than as a perspective. Most of the Elder Days is told from the side of the Eldar, and the coming of the Noldor to Beleriand usually reads as the arrival of light and valour against the Enemy. The Petty-dwarves show the same event from below. To them the Exiles were not deliverers but newcomers who took what others had made, and the tales record this grievance without dismissing it. Their brief presence reminds the reader that the Elvish kingdoms of Beleriand were raised in a land that already had inhabitants, some of whom had been hunted, displaced and forgotten.1

In the tragedy of Túrin the last Petty-dwarf works as a mirror. Túrin is himself an outcast, driven from his home, proud and quick to feel wronged, and in Mîm he meets someone whose bitterness has hardened over a whole lifetime. Neither figure is simply sympathetic or simply hateful. Mîm is grasping and resentful, yet his losses are real, and the fuller telling lets Túrin feel pity for him. This moral mixture is typical of the Narn. It refuses to divide its characters neatly into the faithful and the treacherous, and the old dwarf's betrayal grows out of injuries that the story has taken care to show.2

The Petty-dwarves also stand for something larger in Tolkien's picture of the Dwarves as a whole. The great houses of the Blue Mountains show the race at its height, skilled and bound to the Elves by trade. Mîm's people show what the same nature becomes when it is cut off, dwindling and turned inward: possessiveness without craft to justify it, and memory without a future. Through Mîm's curse this small people finally reaches beyond its own ending, since the hoard of Nargothrond carries the grudge onward into later sorrows. In that way the story allows even a forgotten remnant a lasting share in the fate of Beleriand.3

The Petty-dwarves as a distinct people are a late addition to the legendarium, though the figure who later became their last elder is very old. In the earliest form of the story, the tale of the Nauglafring in the Lost Tales, Mîm is simply a dwarf. He is not marked as belonging to any lesser or outcast branch. After the dragon's death he is found keeping the hoard. The outlaw company that comes with Úrin kills him, and as he dies he lays a curse on the gold. The core of his ending was therefore fixed from the start: the grasping claim to the treasure, death at the hands of Húrin's following, and the curse that carries the story on. What the early version lacks is everything that later explains him, including his people, their banishment, their grievance against the Elves, and any link between Mîm and Túrin.1

That background came from Tolkien's later work on the Túrin story. There Mîm was moved back into Túrin's lifetime and given a dwelling, sons and a vanished kindred. Tolkien also gave the new people a place in his linguistic writings. The essay Quendi and Eldar, which surveys the names the Elves used for other speaking peoples, records the Sindarin terms for them in both the orders known from the finished tales. It fits them into the wider Elvish vocabulary for Dwarves, which shows that Tolkien treated them as a settled part of his picture of Beleriand and not a device confined to a single episode.2