Iron Hills

The name is purely descriptive and comes down to us only in English form. It marks the range by the metal associated with it, not by any founder, people or event, and the sources never explain who first applied it. Under the framing set out in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, names current in the Common Speech are rendered into English equivalents, so the form the reader sees stands for a Westron original. The Hobbit already uses the name for the country of Dáin's kin, the place Thorin looks to when he sends word for aid from the Mountain. The appendices use it the same way when they record where Grór took his followers. In both works it works as a settled geographical term, not a coinage of the story.1

No other name for the Iron Hills is recorded in the published works. The narrative gives neither an Elvish form nor a Dwarvish one. The gap fits what the appendices say about the Dwarves themselves: they guarded their own tongue closely from outsiders, and in dealings with other peoples they used the languages and even the personal names of the Men they lived among. A Khuzdul name for their eastern seat, if one existed, would therefore have stayed within the folk and out of the record. The byname of Dáin Ironfoot shares the same element, but the texts never draw any link between his epithet and the name of his homeland, and none should be assumed.2

The name should be kept apart from a similar one of the Elder Days. The Silmarillion describes the Iron Mountains, in Sindarin Ered Engrin, as a vast range in the far north of the world that belonged to the defences of Morgoth's realm. That range has nothing to do with the Dwarf-hills east of Erebor. The two share only the image of iron in their names, and they belong to different ages and different landscapes. Readers moving between the legendarium's layers should not merge the Third Age Iron Hills with the First Age Iron Mountains.3

The Iron Hills lie in the north-eastern reaches of Rhovanion, east of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain. They mark roughly the eastern limit of the northern lands that the tales describe in any detail. Beyond them the country opens towards the wider East, which the narratives leave largely unmapped. For Durin's Folk the range was a second, more easterly home. The older Dwarf-dwellings in the Grey Mountains lay to the north-west, and when those were abandoned the migrating houses split, one part returning to the Mountain and another turning east to these hills. The two settlements therefore stood as neighbours in the same corner of the North. The Iron Hills were the more remote of the pair, but still near enough to be counted part of one Dwarvish world.1

The sources call them hills, not mountains, and nothing in the texts suggests peaks comparable to the Misty Mountains or the Grey Mountains. What sets the range apart is what lies within it. It was a country of ore, and its wealth fed the smithies of Erebor through trade, which gave the Dwarves of the east a lasting economic tie to the Mountain. Their nearness to Erebor also shapes the course of The Hobbit. Word sent from the Mountain by raven reaches the hills, and an armed host from there arrives within days. The close timing implies a march of moderate length across open country and not a journey through the wild. The maps of The Lord of the Rings show a river flowing south out of the hills. They place the range as a source of waters as well as metal for the lands between the Mountain and the Sea of Rhûn.2

The position of the hills also gave them strategic weight. After the dragon's coming had emptied the region around Erebor and left it waste, the Dwarves of the Iron Hills were the one organised power left in the far North-east. Their seat stood beside the routes by which forces from the East might move northward. Seen from the west, the hills were therefore less a remote mining country than an outpost on the edge of the known world. They were a border that could be held only while their people remained strong.3

The Iron Hills entered the history of Durin's Folk late in the Third Age, as a result of the troubles that ended the Dwarvish settlement in the Grey Mountains. The line of the kings had moved north from Erebor to those mountains in the twenty-third century, drawn by their reported wealth. There they were harried by the dragons of the northern waste, and in 2589 King Dáin I and his younger son Frór were killed at the door of his hall by a great cold-drake. In the following year, 2590, the house divided. Thrór, the heir, went back to Erebor and re-established the kingship there. His brother Grór led a large following east and founded a new lordship in the Iron Hills. From then on, Durin's Folk in the North held two seats, one ruled by the king and one by a cadet branch of the same house.1

The appendices say little about the inner life of the new settlement in its first two centuries. They treat it mainly as a partner of the restored realm under the Mountain. The flow of metal between the two seats, noted above, was part of a wider prosperity in which the Men of the region also shared. When Smaug descended on Erebor in 2770 and drove out its people, the Iron Hills were not attacked. From that time on, Grór's house was the one secure Dwarvish lordship of Durin's line in the North-east. The exiled king and his heirs, by contrast, wandered southwards and westwards without a fixed home.2

The Iron Hills played a decisive part in the War of the Dwarves and the Orcs. The war began in 2793, after Thrór was murdered in Moria by the Orc-chieftain Azog. The houses of the Dwarves gathered to avenge him, and in 2799 the conflict ended before the East-gate of Moria in the battle of Azanulbizar, which the Elves called Nanduhirion. Náin, son of Grór, came from the Iron Hills with fresh warriors when the fighting was already far advanced. His arrival turned the day. Náin himself was killed by Azog, but his young son Dáin killed the Orc-chieftain in return, and the Orcs were routed. The victory cost the Dwarves dearly. Dáin then refused to enter Moria, since he had seen what still dwelt beneath it, and he took his people back to the Iron Hills.3

The genealogy of Durin's Folk in the appendices records Grór's death in 2805, a few years after the battle. With his father already dead at Azanulbizar, Dáin, now called Ironfoot, became the lord of the Iron Hills. Under him the hills remained a place of strength while Erebor lay in the dragon's keeping. This background matters for the events of 2941. After Smaug's death, Thorin Oakenshield held the Mountain against the Men of the Lake and the Elves of Mirkwood, and he sent to his cousin for help. Dáin brought an armed host from the Iron Hills. That host became one of the forces in the Battle of Five Armies, where Dwarves, Men and Elves at last fought together against the Goblins and Wargs.4

Thorin died of wounds taken in that battle, and Dáin, as the nearest heir of Durin's line, became King under the Mountain. From then on, the history of the Iron Hills merges with that of the restored Erebor. The two seats were now under one king, and the eastern lordship became a province of the kingdom in the North, no longer a separate realm. The appendices link this change to Gandalf's own reasoning about the North-east. He had judged that the Dwarves of the Iron Hills alone were too weak to stop an advance from the East, but that with Erebor restored and Dale rebuilt, the North could be held.5

That judgement was tested in the War of the Ring. In 3019 an Easterling host attacked Dale, and Dáin fell before the Gate of Erebor while defending the body of King Brand. The Dwarves and Men withstood the siege in the Mountain until news came of the victory in the South. Dáin's son Thorin III Stonehelm succeeded him. The record does not separate the later fate of the Iron Hills from that of the reunited kingdom, and it gives no account of the hills in the Fourth Age. Their story as it survives ends with the house that had come out of them ruling from Erebor.6

The people of the Iron Hills were Dwarves of Durin's Folk. They descended from the followers who came east with Grór when the northern houses split, and the appendices recognise no other people as dwelling in the hills themselves. Their rulers are styled lords, not kings. The kingship of Durin's line stayed with the elder branch, and the eastern seat was held by the younger. The succession recorded in the genealogy runs through three generations, from Grór to his son Náin and then to Náin's son Dáin, and it passes from father to son until the last of these lords took the crown of the whole folk. Because the two branches shared one ancestry, the lords of the hills stood close enough to the royal line that their house could supply an heir when the elder branch failed.1

The Hobbit is the only source that shows these Dwarves as a people and not only as a line of names. When Dáin's host comes to the Mountain, the narrative describes a hardy and well-armed folk, strong even by the measure of their race. They were clad in long mail and carried mattocks, short broad swords and round shields. Their legs were protected by a flexible mesh of metal whose making was a skill held by Dáin's people alone. The same account shows them as a disciplined force under their lord's command. They treat with Men through heralds and refuse to let the host of the Lake-men and Elves bar their way to their kin.2

The main narrative never returns to them, and they survive only in the background record of the appendices.

Relations with the neighbouring peoples depended on the restored Erebor. The appendices link the renewed Dwarvish strength in the North with the rise of the Northmen who lived between the River Running and the Redwater. Those Men grew powerful enough to drive back enemies coming from the East, so the Dwarves of the hills had allied Men beside them on the plains to their south and west. No dealings with Elves are recorded for the eastern seat. Its chief outward relation was always the kinship bond with the Mountain, which in time brought the lordship under the crown of Erebor.3

In The Hobbit the Iron Hills are never shown directly. No scene is set there, no traveller of the tale passes through them, and the reader learns of them only through what comes out of them. They first gain narrative weight near the end, when Thorin, holding the recovered Mountain, uses the ravens of Erebor to send for his kin. From that point the hills work as an unseen reserve behind the besieged company. They are a source of force whose approach can be reported but not watched, and news of it moves the plot forward.1

The expected relief changes the standoff before the Mountain. Thorin's stubbornness grows firmer because he trusts that help is on the road, and his readiness to wait for his cousin shuts off any negotiation with the Lake-men and the Elvenking. Bilbo, knowing that the reinforcements are close and that open fighting will follow once they arrive, decides to act on his own and takes the Arkenstone to the besiegers by night. When the host finally comes, its arrival nearly causes the very battle Bilbo tried to prevent. Only the sudden attack of Goblins and Wargs turns the quarrelling sides into allies. The hills thus bring on the crisis and, indirectly, its resolution.2

Within the book the hills stand for what lies beyond the adventure. Thorin's small company is not the whole of its people, and kinship obligation reaches across the wild to a folk the reader has not met. The Lord of the Rings keeps them in the same offstage position. The main narrative never returns to them, and they survive only in the background record of the appendices. As a result they remain a place defined by their relation to Erebor, known to the reader through its lords and its warriors, never through its halls.3

The Iron Hills appear on screen chiefly in Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy, and there mostly through their lord and his army. Dáin Ironfoot is played by Billy Connolly, largely through performance capture, in the final film, The Battle of the Five Armies (2014). As in the novel, the hills are never visited. They stay an offstage country whose relief force is summoned by Thorin from the occupied Mountain. The trilogy brings them in much earlier than the book does. In the first film (2012), the company discusses the realm of Thorin's cousin at Bag End, and it becomes clear that the Dwarves there have declined to join the quest. That refusal has no counterpart in the novel, which mentions the hills only when the need for help arises at the end. The same film's prologue also retells the battle before the gates of Moria in a form that pushes the Iron Hills aside. There Thorin is the central figure, and Azog is maimed but survives, where in Tolkien's account Náin's late-arriving force decides the day and young Dáin kills the Orc-chieftain.1

The change at Azanulbizar shapes the rest of the adaptation. With Azog still alive, he leads the enemy host in the closing battle, and Thorin, not a lord of the Iron Hills, settles the feud with him. The part the eastern Dwarves play in the final conflict also differs from the book. In the film, Dáin's host comes to actual blows with the Elves before the Orcs appear. In the novel, the arrival of the enemy prevents open fighting between the Dwarves and the other two armies. The older adaptations give the hills little or no independent presence, and the dramatisations of The Lord of the Rings leave them in the same background position as the appendices do.2