Moria

The oldest of the place's names is the one its makers used themselves: Khazad-dûm, a word of Khuzdul, the private tongue of the Dwarves. Its first element is the name the Dwarves gave their own kindred, and the compound designates the great mansion or delving of that people rather than any feature of the mountains above it. That such a name should be widely known at all is unusual, since the Dwarves guarded their language closely, teaching it to no one outside their race and reserving their inward names for their own use; the names by which they were known to others were taken from the tongues of Men. Khazad-dûm belongs to a small set of Dwarvish words that passed into common knowledge, a measure of how far the fame of the place reached beyond those who dwelt in it.

Moria, by contrast, is an Elvish name and was not given kindly. It means the black chasm or black pit, and it reflects the Elves' distaste for such deep delving; they built and dwelt above ground, and a mountain hollowed out held no attraction for them. The name is spoken in three parts, since in the Elvish tongues adjacent vowels are sounded separately and never run together as a diphthong. Alongside it the Common Speech had its own designation, preserved in the archaic English form Dwarrowdelf, which likewise names the place as a dwarf-delving. By the later Third Age the usual phrase in the North-west was simply the Mines of Moria, a wording that reduced a kingdom to its workings.

A third name records an earlier stage of Elvish usage. In the account of the Rings of Power the Elves are said to have called the city Hadhodrond, and only afterwards Moria — the first element being a Sindarin adaptation of the Dwarves' own word for their race, so that the name is in effect a rendering of Khazad-dûm into Elvish speech. This form belongs to the period when the Noldor of Ost-in-Edhil in Eregion lay close by and dealt with the Dwarves as neighbours, which explains both the accuracy of the borrowing and its later disuse.

Moria lies within the Misty Mountains rather than upon them. Its halls were driven into the rock beneath the three peaks that stand above the eastern vale — Caradhras the red, Celebdil the white and Fanuidhol the grey — and spread outward and downward from there through many numbered levels. What was made is not a single working but a system large enough to be called a city: halls of state, roads, stairs and dwellings alongside the mines proper, with the deeper galleries running far below the level at which either gate stands. Its most consequential feature is that it pierces the range from side to side, so that the mountains may be crossed beneath instead of over, which is why the place matters to travellers who have no business with Dwarves at all.

The two ends of that passage open on very different country. On the west the gate stands where the old Elven-road out of Hollin came to its end, in a bare stony place beside a stream that once fell in steps down the slope; the water was later dammed, so that a still, foul lake now presses against the cliff, and the doors themselves show nothing in the rock face until their device is drawn out by the right light. Eastward the Great Gates give onto Dimrill Dale, a green valley cupped beneath the three peaks, where a spring rises to become the Silverlode and a dark tarn lies in which stars can be seen at midday. From the dale the land falls south and east toward Lothlórien, while high above it the Redhorn Pass offers the road over the mountains that Moria's road replaces.

Inside, the place is layered rather than laid out flat. Broad pillared halls stand near the eastern gates, some lit by shafts cut through to the mountainside, and passages branch and climb between levels without any obvious order to a stranger. Beneath everything runs a chasm whose bottom is not known, crossed by one narrow span set there as a defence on the inner approach. The lowest workings were pushed far below the mountain roots in pursuit of mithril, which was got nowhere else; deeper still, according to Gandalf, lie gnawed ways older than any Dwarf-delving, inhabited by things Sauron knows nothing of. He also describes a stair rising unbroken from that lowest place to a tower on the summit of Celebdil, so that the realm's reach ran from under the mountain to its open sky.

The beginning of the realm belongs to a time before reckoned years. Durin, eldest of the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves and called the Deathless, woke alone in the north and wandered southward down the range until he came to the vale on its eastern side. There he looked into the still water of the lake and saw reflected above his own image a circle of stars, though the sun was up, and took the sight as a token; in that place he began the delving that his people afterwards remembered in song. His long life and the return of his likeness in later generations gave the kingdom a continuity that no other Dwarf-house could claim, so that its history is told as the history of a single line as much as of a single place.

The realm grew greatest in the ages after the wars of the Elder Days. When Beleriand was broken and the western Dwarf-cities of Nogrod and Belegost were ruined, many of their people came east over the mountains to the halls of Durin's folk, and the wealth and skill gathered there were increased beyond anything before. In the Second Age the Noldor who had not departed founded Eregion in the land west of the gate, and from that city a road ran to the western doors; the two peoples worked and traded together more closely than Elves and Dwarves ever did elsewhere, drawn in part by the mithril that was found nowhere but under those mountains. The friendship ended with Sauron's assault on Eregion, when the city was destroyed and its people scattered, and the Dwarves who came out of their gate to strike at his rear were driven back within; afterwards the doors were shut, and the Dwarves had little to do with the world outside.

Behind those shut doors the kingdom endured for most of two ages more, and its lords held one of the Seven Rings, which the Dwarves themselves maintained had been given to Durin III by the smiths of Eregion and not by Sauron. Prosperity continued into the Third Age, but the mithril was pursued further and further beneath the mountain roots, and in the year 1980 the Dwarves delved into something that had lain hidden since the wars of the First Age. What they roused slew Durin VI and, in the next year, Náin I, and the survivors abandoned the halls; the same alarm drove many of the Silvan Elves out of the woods to the south. The thing was thereafter called Durin's Bane, and the name of the realm became a byword for dread rather than for wealth. Durin's folk moved north and at length to the Lonely Mountain, and the emptied halls were slowly occupied by Orcs, whom Sauron deliberately gathered there from about 2480 to bar the passes of the range.

One attempt at return brought on a war. In 2790 Thrór, old and homeless, went back to the eastern gate with a single companion and was killed there by the Orc-chieftain Azog, who cut his name into the dead king's head and sent the body out in contempt. The Dwarves of every house answered, and for six years they hunted the Orcs from stronghold to stronghold through the mountains, until in 2799 the last battle was fought in the vale before the gate. It was won at ruinous cost, and Azog was killed by Dáin son of Náin, then a young Dwarf; but Dáin, having looked in through the doorway, told the others that the ancient terror was still within and that the halls were not for their kindred. The victors burned their dead and departed, and no claim was pressed on the realm for nearly two centuries.

The second attempt was a colony rather than a campaign. In 2989 Balin, one of the Dwarves who had gone with Thorin to the Lonely Mountain, led a company back against the counsel of his king and established himself in the halls near the eastern gates, taking the title of lord of the place; for a few years the settlers held their ground, worked the upper levels and recovered some of what had been lost. A record kept by several hands, later found by travellers in a side-chamber, sets out the course of the venture: the taking of the eastern gate and its later loss, the killing of Balin by an arrow beside the lake in 2994, and the closing of the last defended room while drums sounded in the deep. Nothing more was heard of the colony, and its fate was unknown outside until the book itself was read.

The last recorded passage came in January 3019, when the Fellowship of the Ring, turned back from the pass above by weather, entered at the western doors and crossed the mountains underground in the space of three days. They were pursued in the deep halls by Orcs and by the creature that had driven the Dwarves out, and at the narrow span above the chasm Gandalf held it and fell with it into the dark; the struggle ended days later on the peak above, and the wizard who returned from it was not quite the one who had gone down. In the year of the War of the Ring the realm still lay in the enemy's hands, and it was not recovered within the span of the tale as told. The Dwarves nevertheless held to their belief that Durin would come again, and the line of his heirs is set down as far as a seventh of the name; Gimli's people, meanwhile, took a different road, settling the caves behind the walls of the Hornburg in the south.

The people of the place were Durin's Folk, known also as the Longbeards, the kindred descended from the eldest of the seven fathers of the Dwarves, and Khazad-dûm was their chief mansion and the seat of their kings. Rule was hereditary and ran in the direct line from father to son, and the succession has a peculiarity found nowhere else among the Dwarf-houses: five times after the founder an heir was born so closely resembling him that he was given his name, and his people held that this was the same person returned to them rather than a namesake honoured. The kings of the realm are accordingly numbered rather than individually distinguished, and the record preserves little of most of them beyond the fact of their reigning. The sixth of the name was the last to rule in the halls themselves, and after him only one further king, his son, held the title while any of the folk remained within.

The kingship survived the loss of the kingdom. The heir of the last king led the survivors away and the style of King of Durin's Folk passed down the same line in exile, carried through the northern wanderings and afterwards borne by lords who ruled elsewhere; no later Dwarf claimed to reign in the halls, and the leader of the short-lived settlement centuries afterwards took a lesser title. What held the place in the meantime was not a realm at all. The Orcs whom Sauron gathered there were governed by chieftains rather than by any settled authority: one such chief was the slayer of Thrór at the eastern gate, and after he was killed before the same gate his son led the northern Orcs in his stead. Their occupation is described in terms of numbers and command, never of law or lineage.

Toward their neighbours the Dwarves of the realm kept two very different postures. Westward, in the Second Age, they dealt with the Elven smiths of Eregion on terms of open friendship, a thing rare enough that it is noted as exceptional wherever it is mentioned. Eastward, across the mountains, the Elves of the golden wood retained a long memory of what the delving had loosed, and when the surviving travellers came down from the gate their lord received them with reproach for having stirred the old evil again, though the Lady of that land spoke against him and gave the Dwarf among them a courteous welcome. Contact with Men is attested more obliquely: the book kept by the later settlers was written in two kinds of runes, those of the mines and those of Dale, which marks how long Durin's folk had by then lived among the northern Men before attempting their return.

Long before any character sets foot in it, the place is present in the storytelling as a name that closes conversations. In the earlier tale of Bilbo's journey it is mentioned only in passing, as the spot where an old Dwarf-king met his end, and the reader is given no more than the shadow of a grievance. In the council at Rivendell a Dwarf of the northern company reports that kinsmen who went back there years earlier have sent no word and answered no message, so that an unresolved question travels south with the Ring. When the road is debated on the journey, the wizard argues for the way beneath while the Ranger, who has been there before, says plainly that his memory of it is evil; the argument is settled not by persuasion but by a blizzard on the pass and wolves at their backs.

Once the company is inside, the narrative works largely by what cannot be seen. The entry itself turns on a small matter of reading: the inscription on the doors names its own password, and the wizard's long searching for a spell fails because he has taken an ordinary word as a command rather than as the thing to be spoken. Behind them a creature in the lake drags at the Ring-bearer and then seals the entrance, so that the choice of road becomes irreversible at the moment it is taken. Within, the Dwarf of the company alone responds with pleasure, naming halls and reciting the making of the realm while his companions count the hours in darkness; the contrast between his reverence and their dread carries much of the two chapters. The record found beside a tomb and read aloud gives both characters and reader the answer that was set as a question at the council.

Structurally the crossing is where the company is broken and reassembled. It loses its guide at the span over the chasm and comes out into daylight leaderless and weeping, with the Ranger taking command in the open valley; nothing afterwards is arranged as it was before. Two things carried out of the dark shape the rest of the tale: the Ring-bearer's survival of a spear-thrust, explained only later when the mail shirt beneath his clothing is uncovered, and the soft-footed follower first noticed in the lower passages, whose pursuit begins there and does not end. The immediate move from ruined stone into the living wood beyond the eastern gate is plainly meant to be felt as a change of element. What the place stands for in the book is workmanship outliving its makers, and the risk of digging past what one can answer for.

Khazad-dûm has no place in the earliest strata of the legendarium. In the tales written long before The Lord of the Rings the Dwarves belong to Nogrod and Belegost, cities west of the mountains, and the great eastern mansion enters the older matter only after the later book had made it central. The philological writings of Tolkien's last decades then fitted it into the Elvish tongues with some care: in the essay on the names the Eldar gave to other peoples, the Sindarin form Hadhodrond is derived from the adapted stem used for the Dwarf-race, with a Quenya counterpart, Casarrondo, built in the same way, so that both are literal renderings of the Dwarves' own compound rather than independent coinages. A separate late essay on the dealings of Dwarves and Men sets out a long-standing association between the Longbeards of Khazad-dûm and the Men of the upper vales of Anduin, a relationship barely visible in the published narrative and never worked into it.

The drafting of the Moria episode itself can be followed in some detail. At the stage when the company was first assembled, the Dwarf chosen to go south with it was not Gimli but Burin son of Balin, a figure who vanished from the story when the roles were reassigned. The western doors exist in several drawn versions, the device and the wording of the inscription altering from one attempt to the next before the familiar arrangement was reached. Having brought the company through the mountains and out again, Tolkien broke off to set down a synopsis of everything still to come, preserved under the title of the story foreseen from Moria; much of what it projects was afterwards abandoned, but it shows how far the underground crossing had already fixed the shape of the remainder.

The underground crossing has been carried over into every long-form adaptation that reaches the second book, though the treatments differ sharply in scale. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 retains the sequence but compresses it heavily: the western doors, the tomb chamber and the fall at the bridge follow one another almost without interval, so that the days of groping through the dark that the novel describes are lost, and Gandalf, voiced by William Squire, absorbs much of the explanation the book distributes among several speakers. The rotoscoped technique used throughout the film is applied to the pursuing Orc-host, which gives the flight through the halls a different texture from the passages around it. The BBC Radio dramatisation of 1981 is the more faithful of the two: working in twenty-six half-hour parts, it gives the passage room to unfold at something close to the pace of the chapters, with Michael Hordern as Gandalf and Ian Holm as Frodo, and it conveys the place entirely through echo, drumbeat and the naming of halls. Its departures are almost all of abridgement rather than invention.

Peter Jackson's trilogy (2001–2003) makes the mines the longest sustained sequence of its first film and changes the episode at several points. The decision to take the road beneath the mountains is handed to Frodo rather than settled by argument between Gandalf and Aragorn; the stone dropped into a well, a moment of idle curiosity in a guardroom in the novel, becomes a skeleton toppled by Pippin within the tomb chamber, so that the alarm is raised at the worst possible moment; and the Orc-chieftain whose spear-thrust Frodo survives is replaced by a cave-troll. A collapsing stair on the way to the bridge has no counterpart in the text at all, and the three days of the book's timetable are reduced to what plays as a single continuous flight. Ian McKellen plays Gandalf and John Rhys-Davies Gimli.