Dale

The name Dale is an ordinary English word for a valley, and in Tolkien's usage it describes the setting before it names the settlement. The town stood in the broad vale that opens southward from the Lonely Mountain, where the river leaving the Front Gate of Erebor curves out between the Mountain's long arms. When the dwarves recount the former glory of the region, they speak of the valley and the town together, and the text slides easily between the two. As a result the word marks a landscape and a community at once. The alias 'the Dale', with the article, preserves the older descriptive sense, much as an English speaker might refer to a particular valley by its common noun alone.1

The name also supplies the usual designations for the town's people and rulers. The inhabitants are called the Men of Dale, and the title borne by Girion is Lord of Dale, not king. That title marks a local lordship attached to the valley rather than a realm named after a dynasty. The narrative likewise uses the adjectival form in phrases for goods and craftsmanship from the town. Throughout, Dale is never replaced by an honorific or poetic name. The plain topographical word serves as the settlement's only regular designation.2

In the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien presents Dale's names as part of his fiction of translation. The speech of the Men of Dale and the Long Lake belonged to the family of northern Mannish tongues akin to the language of the Rohirrim. In rendering it into English, Tolkien gave the personal names of this region a Scandinavian cast, just as he used Old English forms for Rohan. He adds that the dwarves took their outward names from the northern Men among whom they lived. This accounts for the Norse character of the dwarf-names in The Hobbit. Within this scheme the plain English Dale stands in for a word of the northern Mannish speech whose original form is never given.3

Dale lay at the northern end of the lands east of Mirkwood, in the valley directly south of the Lonely Mountain. The river that issued from the Front Gate of Erebor flowed down into this valley and swung round in a wide bend before turning south towards the Long Lake, and the town was built within that curve of water. Great spurs ran out southward from the Mountain on either side, so that the valley was enclosed on east and west by high ridges and opened only to the south. On the height of one of the southern spurs stood an old watch-post later known as Ravenhill, from which the Gate, the river and the valley floor could all be overlooked. The town therefore occupied a sheltered but exposed position: guarded by the Mountain's arms, yet lying openly beneath the Gate.1

In the days of the dwarf-kingdom under the Mountain, Dale was a prosperous town of Men that lived in close exchange with its neighbours. The dwarves supplied worked metal and received food and goods in return, and Thorin recalls that the craftsmen of Dale made toys so ingenious that their market was famous across the North. After the dragon came, the town was ruined and its people slain or scattered. When Thorin's company approached, the valley lay within the Desolation of the Dragon, a stretch of barren and scorched country where little grew, and the hobbit saw only the grey remnants of walls and towers in the river's bend.2

After the dragon's fall, Dale was restored and became once more the seat of a lordship of Men. By the time of the War of the Ring, Glóin reports at Rivendell that Bard's grandson Brand ruled there and that his realm had grown to reach far to the south and east of Esgaroth, so that the town stood at the head of a considerable northern kingdom. Its position beside Erebor remained the defining fact of its geography: in the war the Men of Dale and the dwarves of the Mountain were attacked together, and when the Men were overcome in the field they took refuge within the Mountain itself.3

No date is recorded for the founding of Dale. The annals of the Third Age take up the region's history with the dwarves. In the year 1999 Thráin I came to Erebor and established the first kingdom under the Mountain, and his heir Thorin I later led the greater part of the people away to the Grey Mountains. The kingdom was restored in 2590, when Thrór returned to Erebor. Under his rule the Mountain became wealthy again, and the Men of the valley below shared in that wealth. In the tradition of Durin's Folk this is remembered as the high point of friendship between the dwarves and their Mannish neighbours. Dale was then a lordship of Men whose fortunes were bound closely to those of the Mountain.1

The rich hoard of Erebor drew the dragon Smaug, who came down upon the Mountain in 2770. The Tale of Years records the destruction of Dale in the same entry as the dragon's descent. In Thorin's later account, the Men of the town took up arms against the dragon, and many of them died in the attempt. The survivors were scattered, and for the next century and a half no lordship of Men stood in the valley. Girion was Lord of Dale in these years. His wife and child escaped by fleeing down the river, and through them his line continued among the people of the Long Lake.2

The valley became important again in 2941, when Thorin Oakenshield's company entered the Mountain and roused the dragon. Smaug attacked Esgaroth and was shot down by Bard, a descendant of Girion. Soon afterwards the Lake-men and the Elves of Mirkwood marched north to press their claims on the treasure and came into the valley before the Gate. The dispute over the hoard ended when goblins and wargs arrived from the north. The resulting Battle of Five Armies was fought between the Mountain's spurs, and Thorin fell there. Dáin of the Iron Hills then took up the kingship under the Mountain. With the dragon gone and the northern goblins broken, the valley could be settled once more.3

Bard received a share of the treasure and used it to restore the town of his ancestors. People gathered to him from the Lake and from lands farther off, and the barren valley was brought back under cultivation. The Tale of Years dates the rebuilding of Dale, and Bard's assumption of the kingship, to 2944. Dale was now a kingdom rather than a lordship, and it lived in renewed friendship with Dáin's realm in the Mountain. When Balin visited Bilbo some years after the quest, he reported that the region had grown peaceful and prosperous under both rulers. The succession passed in 2977 to Bard's son Bain and in 3007 to Bain's son Brand.4

In the War of the Ring, Dale was the object of an assault from the east. Easterling armies allied with Sauron crossed the Carnen and advanced on the valley. On 17 March 3019 they defeated the Men of Dale and the dwarves together in the Battle of Dale, in which both King Brand and King Dáin were killed. The survivors held out under siege until news came of Sauron's overthrow in the south. On 27 March Brand's son Bard II and Dáin's son Thorin III Stonehelm led their forces out and drove the enemy from Dale. Both kings then sent envoys to the crowning of King Elessar. Afterwards their realms remained in lasting friendship with Gondor, under the crown and protection of the King of the West.5

The people of Dale were Men, and before the dragon came they were governed by lords rather than kings. Their prosperity rested on the Mountain, whose dwarves were both neighbours and suppliers of worked goods. Thorin's account of the lost treasure shows how close these dealings could be. He says that Girion paid for a coat of dwarf-made mail for his eldest son with a necklace of five hundred emeralds, which then passed into the hoard. The lordship of Dale thus relied on what Erebor could make, and when the Mountain fell the town fell with it.1

Bard's standing among the survivors rested on his descent from Girion. After Smaug's death the townsfolk of Esgaroth hailed him as their king, although the Master kept his office for the time being. When Bard came before the Gate, he pressed his claim not only as the dragon's slayer but also as the heir of a lord whose town Smaug had plundered. He argued that part of the hoard had once been Dale's own wealth. After the battle, the division of the treasure shaped Bard's relations with each of his neighbours. Dáin honoured the share Thorin had promised, and Bard gave the emeralds of Girion to the Elvenking. He also sent gold to the Master for the relief of the Lake-people. The Master later made off with that gold and died deserted in the Waste, and a wiser man succeeded him in Lake-town.2

At the Gate, Dale's memory becomes an argument: the Lake-men come not merely as allies in need but as heirs pressing a debt.

Under Bard's descendants the town stayed bound to its neighbours by trade as well as by alliance. Some of the toys handed out at Bilbo's farewell party had been ordered a year in advance from the Mountain and from Dale, so goods from the valley reached as far as the Shire. By the time of the Council of Elrond, those ties had also made Dale a target. Glóin reported that a messenger from Mordor had come to King Brand as well, that Brand was afraid, and that war was gathering on the eastern borders of his realm. The dwarves feared that he might give way, a fear his later stand in defence of the valley did not bear out.3

In The Hobbit, Dale is a memory long before it is a destination. At Bag End the dwarves sing of the dragon's coming, and their song recalls bells sounding in the valley while the Men below looked up in terror. Thorin's account that evening sets the lost town beside the lost kingdom as part of one injury. When the company finally comes up the river towards the Mountain, the empty ruin is the first visible sign of what Smaug has done. It prepares both Bilbo and the reader for the silence of the Gate. The town is described less than it is felt, a place defined by absence.1

Dale's second role is to give the Men of the story a claim of their own. Bard understands the thrush that brings him word of the dragon's weak spot because he comes of the old stock of Dale, among whom the speech of such birds had once been known. Through this detail the rescue of Lake-town depends on a surviving thread of the ruined town's past. At the Gate, Dale's memory becomes an argument: the Lake-men come not merely as allies in need but as heirs pressing a debt. Thorin's refusal therefore sets the dwarves' right to the hoard against an older partnership that the dragon had broken.2

The rebuilding of Dale belongs to the book's closing mood of restoration rather than conquest. Wealth that had lain useless under a dragon is turned back into fields, trade and a living town. When Bilbo remarks that the old prophecies have come true after a fashion, Gandalf reminds him that the outcome was not his luck alone, and Dale's recovery stands among the signs of that larger pattern. In The Lord of the Rings the town stays offstage and is known only through report. Its fate becomes a measure of how far the Shadow reaches into the North, while its war is told only briefly in the appendices, as a counterpart to the struggle in the south.3

Dale reaches the screen only in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, which turns a town the novel knows chiefly through memory and report into a place the viewer sees at two stages. The first film opens with a prologue that shows the town in its prosperity under the kingdom of Thrór and then its ruin when the dragon descends. Where the book says only that the Men of Dale took up arms and many of them died, the film has Girion defend the town himself, shooting at the dragon with a great mounted dwarvish bow. That weapon has no counterpart in Tolkien's text. The films also make the dragon's weak spot the lasting damage from this defence, whereas the book knows nothing of it; there Bard learns of the bare patch from the thrush, which had it from Bilbo. The trilogy keeps Bard, played by Luke Evans, as Girion's descendant, but it ends without showing the town rebuilt.1

The largest departure concerns the final battle. In the novel the Battle of Five Armies is fought in the valley and on the Mountain's southern spurs, with the ruined town standing to one side of the action. The third film moves much of the fighting into the streets of Dale itself, so that the ruin becomes a battleground rather than a remnant. Jackson's earlier Lord of the Rings trilogy does not depict Dale at all, and the Battle of Dale in the War of the Ring, which the book reports only in its appendices, is likewise omitted from those films.2