Erebor

The mountain's Westron-language name in the tales is a plain description of what a traveller sees: a single high peak standing apart from any range, rising alone out of the plains east of Mirkwood, with the river Running flowing out from its feet. Thorin's company and the men of the surrounding lands accordingly speak of it as the Lonely Mountain, and Bilbo's narrative uses that name throughout. The word carries no lore beyond its literal sense; the mountain earns it by geography rather than by history, since nothing of comparable height lies near it, and the long ridges of its spurs run out into open country on every side. On the map that accompanies Bilbo's account the peak is drawn by itself, with the desolate ground about it marked as the dragon's waste, and the secret entrance set into its western arm.

Erebor is the Sindarin form, and it is this name that the later chronicles prefer. It is built from the Elvish element for a solitary or isolated thing joined to the common stem for mountain, so that the Sindarin and the Westron names say the same thing in different tongues; the Elvish name is thus a translation rather than an older, independent title. The Tale of Years and the account of Durin's Folk both use Erebor for the site from the moment Thráin I came there and established a kingdom in Third Age 1999, which suggests the name was in Elvish use before the Dwarves settled beneath it. Its stress falls on the first syllable, according to the pronunciation rules Tolkien set out for readers.

Dwarvish usage names the place by what was made there rather than by its outward shape. The kings of Durin's line who ruled beneath the rock were styled Kings under the Mountain, and their realm the Kingdom under the Mountain, a title carried in exile long after the hall itself was lost and used again in the songs and claims that attended Thorin's journey. Whatever the Dwarves called the mountain in Khuzdul is not recorded; their own tongue was kept close, and the Dwarves of the north are shown using the common speech, and Elvish and Mannish place-names, when they deal with others. The name Erebor accordingly reaches the reader through Elvish and Mannish mouths, and the Dwarvish contribution to its naming is the royal style attached to the hall within, not a name for the peak above.

The mountain stands at the eastern verge of the wide country between the forest and the Iron Hills, and its position governs much of what happens around it. South of it lie the Long Lake and the town of Esgaroth, built out over the water on wooden piles, and into that lake the Forest River comes down from the eastern skirts of Mirkwood, so that the two waters meet below the mountain and run on together to the south-east across the plains. Travel between Erebor and the peopled lands therefore went most easily by river, downstream to the lake-town and upstream again by boat and raft. Eastward, across open ground, lay the Iron Hills, where a separate settlement of Durin's Folk was near enough to bring an armed host to the mountain at need. Northward the land rises toward the Grey Mountains and the withered heath beyond them, out of which the great worms of the north had come.

Erebor is not a simple cone but a mass of rock with long arms reaching out from it, and the valleys enclosed between those arms are what made the site habitable. Two southern spurs shelter the vale where Dale was built, a town of Men set at the mountain's feet beside the river, with a road running up from it to the Front Gate. The Gate itself is an arch of stone in the mountain's southern face, from beneath which the water pours out into the valley, and it served as both the royal entrance and the outflow of the underground streams. At the end of one southern spur rises a lesser height crowned by an old Dwarvish guard-post, a bare stone chamber with a wide prospect over the valley and the approaches, long inhabited by the ravens whose kind kept council with the Kings under the Mountain. On the far side, a narrow upper glen and a small level shelf beneath a wall of cliff gave access to the concealed door, reached only by a difficult path along the ridge.

What most distinguished the surrounding country in the later Third Age was its ruin. The land for a wide compass about the mountain had once been green and settled, with grass, trees and cultivated valleys supporting the market town below; after the dragon came it was burnt bare, a waste of black stone, ash and blasted stumps where nothing grew and few birds flew. Within the rock the Dwarves had cut halls and stairs downward through many levels, connected to the Gate by a passage that followed the water, with storerooms, forges and treasure-chambers deep below the summit; this delving, rather than the peak above, was the kingdom proper. When the dragon was destroyed the valley began to recover, Dale was raised again beside the river and the fields about it returned to use.

The kingdom beneath the mountain was founded in Third Age 1999, when Thráin I, son of Náin, came north out of exile and began to delve there. The Dwarves who followed him were of Durin's Folk, driven from their older home in the west by the terror that had risen in the mines of Khazad-dûm, and Erebor was the first realm they raised for themselves after that loss. In the early workings Thráin found the great white jewel that the Dwarves named the Heart of the Mountain, which became the chief treasure and the hereditary symbol of the house; from him the kings of that line took the style of King under the Mountain. The realm was small at first, and its founder ruled it for little more than two centuries.

In 2210 Thorin I, son of the founder, abandoned the mountain and went north to the Grey Mountains, where the greater part of his people had by then gathered, and for nearly four centuries Erebor stood aside from the main course of Dwarvish affairs. The northern settlements grew rich but lay near the withered heath, and in time the great worms grew numerous there, fell upon the Dwarves and stripped away what they had built. Dáin I was killed at his own doors by a cold-drake in 2589, together with one of his sons, and the survivors scattered. In the following year Thrór, the eldest son, led those who would follow him back to Erebor and took up the old kingdom again, while his brother Grór went east and established a separate lordship in the Iron Hills.

Under Thrór the restored kingdom grew wealthier than it had ever been. Men gathered to the valley below and the town at the mountain's feet became a prosperous market, its lords friendly with the Dwarves, its smiths and merchants profiting by the trade in wrought metalwork that came out of the halls; the Dwarves for their part had corn, wine and fruit from the south by the river road. The fame of that wealth carried far, and it drew a great winged fire-drake from the north. In 2770 Smaug fell upon the mountain, burned the town in the vale, killed those of Durin's Folk who did not escape, and settled upon the accumulated hoard. Thrór, his son Thráin II and his grandson Thorin got away by a concealed passage; the survivors went into exile southward and then west, and the mountain lay under the dragon.

The exile proved long and costly. Thrór, wandering and half-broken, went at last to the old halls in the west and was killed there by an Orc in 2790, and the war of vengeance that followed cost Durin's Folk heavily before it ended in 2799. Thráin II led his people at length to the mountains west of the Lune, where they lived by their craft; but he did not give up the claim, and in 2841 he set out east again with a small following. Four years later he was taken and imprisoned in the fortress in southern Mirkwood, and the map and key of the hidden door were taken from him. In 2850 Gandalf found him dying there and received the two objects, which he kept until, in 2941, they served Thorin Oakenshield's expedition. That venture ended in the dragon's death at the lake-town, shot down by Bard as he came to burn it, and then in the battle before the Gate in which Thorin was killed and the besieging Orc host destroyed.

Dáin II Ironfoot of the Iron Hills, who had brought the relieving force from the east, became King under the Mountain in that same year, and many of Durin's Folk came to him there. The town in the valley was rebuilt under Bard, who ruled it as a kingdom again, and a share of the recovered treasure went to it by the settlement made after the fighting; the wasted land recovered, and the two peoples prospered together on the old terms of trade. That restored kingdom lasted more than two centuries under Dáin. Its standing was still such in 3017 and 3018 that Sauron sent messengers to it, seeking news of the hobbits and the lost Ring and offering the return of the old rings of the Dwarf-lords in exchange for help; Dáin refused, and sent Glóin south to Rivendell for counsel.

The northern war came in the following spring. An army out of the east attacked the valley on 17 March 3019; King Brand fell in the field before his own gates, and Dáin, then very old, was killed beside his body. The Dwarves and the surviving Men withdrew into the mountain and were shut in there, the Gate held against the besiegers, until word of Sauron's overthrow reached the north; on 27 March they broke out and drove the enemy from the valley. Thorin III Stonehelm, Dáin's son, held the kingdom afterwards, and Bard's son ruled the town below. Both realms endured into the Fourth Age in alliance with the reunited kingdom of the south, so that Erebor, unlike the older home of Durin's Folk, was not lost a second time.

The folk of the mountain were Longbeards, the eldest of the seven Dwarf-kindreds and the house of Durin, and after their northern settlements failed Erebor stood as their principal dwelling and the seat of their king, while the rest of the kindred lived scattered in the Iron Hills, in the mountains beyond the Lune, and here and there among Men. The halls themselves were a Dwarf-dwelling only; the Men who had dealings with the kingdom lived below in the valley or out on the lake, and came up to the Gate to trade. Little is recorded of the women of that people, who were few, rarely left their own halls and were not readily distinguished from the men by strangers. The one named in connection with the mountain is Dís, daughter of Thráin II and sister of Thorin, whose two sons rode with the company of 2941 and fell before the Gate with their uncle.

Authority was hereditary and ran in the direct male line of Durin, passing from father to son with the royal style and the heirlooms of the house, and it was carried unbroken through the years of exile even when there was no hall to rule. The deaths of 2941 ended that particular descent: with Thorin and both his sister-sons dead in one battle, no heir of Thrór's body remained, and the kingship went to the collateral branch that had held the Iron Hills since 2590, descended from Grór, Thrór's younger brother, through his son Náin. Rule thereby moved to a house that had not lived under the mountain for two centuries, and passed from Dáin to his own son in the ordinary way. Not all who dwelt there accepted the settled kingdom as the end of their claims: in 2989 Balin left Erebor with a following to reoccupy the western halls of their people, a venture that ended within five years.

Toward its neighbours the kingdom kept dealings that were close with some peoples and cold with others. With the Men of the valley and the lake the relation was one of exchange and, later, of formal alliance between crowned houses, the lords of Dale and the Kings under the Mountain acting together in the northern war and afterwards standing with the reunited southern kingdom. With the Elves of the forest the terms were poor: an old dispute over payment for gold and silver worked at their king's order left a distrust that showed plainly when Thorin's company came through the wood and were held prisoner there. Kinship with the Dwarves of the Iron Hills remained the kingdom's firmest support, and it was to that quarter it looked in emergency. In the years after the war the restored realm sent its people outward rather than drawing them in: a company under Gimli son of Glóin went south to settle the caverns behind Helm's Deep, and smiths out of Erebor wrought the new gates of the chief city of Gondor.

In Bilbo's account the mountain is present from the first evening as a destination rather than a scene: it is named, sung of and argued over in a hobbit-hole hundreds of leagues away, and every stage of the road afterwards is measured by how much nearer it has brought the company. For most of the book it is a shape on the horizon that grows slowly larger, first glimpsed from the eaves of the forest and then from the lake, and the narrative treats each sight of it as a checkpoint of progress. Arrival, when it comes, proves not to be the end of the difficulty but the start of a new one, because the mountain refuses to open. The long, uneventful days on the ledge above the western valley, with the company idle and the burglar staring at blank stone, are given as much room as any journey chapter, and the door yields only to a piece of exact reading: a particular day of the dwarvish year, a particular slant of setting light, and a keyhole that appears for a moment on the rock face.

What lies within reverses the roles the story has established. Underground the dwarves are useless and the hobbit is the only one who will go down the passage, and the two visits he makes to the sleeping worm — the theft of a cup, then the wary, flattering conversation in which he gives nothing away and comes out knowing where the armour is thin — are the point at which Bilbo stops being a passenger. The mountain also functions as a moral test that the dragon's death does not end. Once the halls are entered the treasure begins to work on the people who look at it: Thorin will not bargain, the Gate is walled up against the very neighbours whose town the dragon burned, and the burglar's decisive act is not a theft but a giving-away, handing the house's chief heirloom to the besiegers to force a settlement. For several chapters the goal of the quest has become the fortress that must be argued open, and the same stone that kept the dwarves out now keeps them in.

Gandalf's later retelling of how the venture began sets the mountain in a wider frame than the treasure-hunt it appears to be from inside. In that account his interest was never the dwarves' inheritance but the danger of an unguarded north: a living dragon in that quarter could have been turned to terrible use by the Enemy, and the ruined valley left no strong friendly power between the forest and the eastern lands. His chance meeting with Thorin and the pressing of a reluctant hobbit on the company are presented as a small piece of foresight whose value only became clear afterwards, when the north held.

The Rankin/Bass television film of 1977 keeps the mountain as the goal of the journey but gives it little screen time, since the whole novel is compressed into roughly ninety minutes. The company's long wait on the western ledge is reduced to a few moments, the moon-letters and the thrush at the keyhole are retained, and Bilbo's two descents to the hoard survive in shortened form, with Smaug voiced by Richard Boone and Thorin by Hans Conried. What follows the dragon's death — the walling-up of the Gate, the negotiations over the treasure and the battle in the valley — is telescoped into a brief closing stretch, so that the siege that occupies several chapters of the book barely registers. Peter Jackson's three-film version of 2012 to 2014 does the opposite, expanding the mountain into the trilogy's central location. Its prologue shows the sack of the kingdom and has the Elven-king turn away from the burning valley, supplying a single dramatic cause for an estrangement that the book explains as an older quarrel over payment for work done. Smaug, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, is confronted at length inside the halls by the whole company in a pursuit through the forges that ends in an attempt to drown him in molten gold; no such episode exists in the novel, where the dwarves stay outside and the dragon leaves of his own accord. The dragon's assault on the lake-town is moved to the opening of the third film, and the orc-host that besieges the mountain is led by Azog, who in the book had been killed generations earlier and whose place before the Gate belongs to his son. Dáin of the Iron Hills, played by Billy Connolly, arrives as in the book but into a much enlarged battle.

In adaptations of the later story the mountain is reported rather than seen. Jackson's trilogy of 2001 to 2003 keeps Glóin at the council in Rivendell but drops his errand, so that the messengers sent north from Mordor, the offer made to Dáin and the war fought before the Gate in 3019 go unmentioned; the northern kingdom plays no part in the films' account of the war. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 1981, in twenty-six parts, has room for more of that material and preserves the dwarvish embassy to Rivendell, though the fighting in the north remains outside the narrated action there as well.