Dwarves

Origins

The Dwarves are unique among the speaking peoples of Middle-earth in that they were not conceived in the Music of the Ainur nor made by Ilúvatar directly. Aulë, the Smith of the Valar, grew impatient for the coming of the Children of Ilúvatar and, in secret beneath the mountains, shaped seven fathers of a new people. When Ilúvatar confronted him, Aulë humbly offered to destroy his work, and it was this humility that saved it: Ilúvatar accepted the Dwarves as his adopted children and gave them true and independent life. But he would not permit them to precede the Firstborn, and so the Seven Fathers were laid to sleep in separate places under the mountains until after the Elves had awakened.

The eldest of the Seven Fathers was Durin, who woke alone under Mount Gundabad in the north and wandered south to the eastern side of the Misty Mountains, where he looked into the lake later called Mirrormere and founded Khazad-dûm. The other fathers awoke in pairs elsewhere, some in the Blue Mountains in the west and others far in the east, and from them came the seven houses of the Dwarves.

What sets them apart

Dwarves are short and broad, tough beyond the measure of Elves or Men, and enormously resistant to hardship, fire, and the domination of other wills. They live long by the reckoning of Men, commonly two hundred and fifty years, but they are mortal and their people believe that after death they rest in halls set apart by Aulë, awaiting the remaking of the world. A Dwarf reaches full strength slowly and keeps it late, and their women, who are few and rarely seen abroad, are so alike their menfolk in look and bearing that other peoples long supposed there were none.

Their gift is craft. No people of Middle-earth save the Noldor rivalled them in smithcraft and stonework, and in the working of iron, steel and mithril they were unmatched. Their weakness is the other side of the same coin: a love of gold and of made things that can turn to a possessive greed, which Sauron's Rings inflamed and which the Dwarves themselves call the dragon-sickness. They are also proud and unforgiving, quick to remember an injury and slow to release it, and much of their sorrow came from feuds pursued long after their cause was cold.

Language and secrecy

Aulë taught the Dwarves a language of their own, Khuzdul, and they guarded it jealously. They would not teach it to other peoples, kept their true names secret even on their tombs, and in dealings with Elves and Men used the tongues of their neighbours, taking outer names in those languages. In the Third Age most Dwarves of the West spoke Westron among strangers, and the names by which we know them, Thorin, Balin, Gimli and the rest, are outer names of exactly this kind. The Elves called them Naugrim, and by many other names; the Dwarves called themselves Khazâd.

The seven houses

Only one house is named in the published histories: the Longbeards, Durin's Folk, the eldest and most renowned, whose mansions were Khazad-dûm and later Erebor. The Dwarves of the Blue Mountains, who built Nogrod and Belegost and dealt most with the Elves of Beleriand, are known by their cities rather than by house names, and by long convention they are identified with the Firebeards and Broadbeams. The four remaining houses, the Ironfists, Stiffbeards, Blacklocks and Stonefoots, dwelt far to the east and play no part in the recorded wars of the West. A separate and diminished folk, the Petty-dwarves, were exiles from the great houses who came into Beleriand before any others.

The First Age

The Dwarves of the Blue Mountains crossed into Beleriand while Thingol was still building his realm, and it was they who delved the Thousand Caves of Menegroth for him, taking payment in pearls and the friendship of Melian. They forged the first weapons of the Sindar against the Orcs, and later the smiths of Nogrod and Belegost armed the returning Noldor. The greatest smith of the age, Telchar of Nogrod, made the knife Angrist, the Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin and the sword Narsil.

In war the Dwarves proved their worth at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, where Azaghâl of Belegost and his mail-clad folk alone stood against Glaurung, and the dying lord wounded the dragon so sorely that it fled the field. Yet the age ended in bitterness. The Dwarves of Nogrod, hired to set the Silmaril in the Nauglamír, slew Thingol in his own halls and sacked Doriath, and were themselves destroyed by Beren and the Green-elves at Sarn Athrad. Belegost had no part in the deed, but the enmity between Dwarves and Elves that grew from it was never fully healed.

The Second Age

When Beleriand was drowned, Nogrod and Belegost were ruined and many of their people went east to swell the population of Khazad-dûm, which entered its greatest days. The Noldorin smiths of Eregion, led by Celebrimbor, settled near the West-gate, and the friendship between the two peoples was the closest ever known between Elves and Dwarves. The Dwarf Narvi made the Doors of Durin, and Celebrimbor wrote the inscription upon them.

Out of this friendship came the Seven Rings. Dwarvish tradition holds that the ring of Durin's house was given directly by Celebrimbor to Durin III, not by Sauron, but all seven were made under Sauron's guidance. He found that Dwarves could not be turned into wraiths or bent to his will as Men could, for they were made too hardy and too stubborn. What the Rings did was to kindle greed and gather gold, and each of the seven hoards founded on a Ring was in the end plundered by dragons. When Sauron destroyed Eregion in S.A. 1697 the Dwarves shut the gates of Moria, and from then on their halls were a closed world. Nevertheless, Dwarves of Durin's line marched with the Last Alliance at the end of the age.

The Third Age

For two thousand years Khazad-dûm endured while kingdoms of Men rose and fell, until the Dwarves, digging deep for mithril, released the Balrog later called Durin's Bane. It slew Durin VI in T.A. 1980 and his son Náin I the next year, and the Longbeards fled. Thráin I founded the Kingdom under the Mountain at Erebor in 1999, where he found the Arkenstone; his son Thorin I took much of the people north to the Grey Mountains, until the dragons drove them out again. Thrór returned to Erebor in 2590 while his brother Grór settled the Iron Hills.

The coming of Smaug in 2770 scattered the Longbeards once more. Thrór, grown restless, wandered to Moria and was murdered there by the Orc Azog, which ignited the War of the Dwarves and Orcs. For six years the seven houses hunted the Orcs through every den of the Misty Mountains, and the war ended in the terrible Battle of Azanulbizar before the East-gate of Moria in 2799, where a third of the Dwarves who fought were slain and young Dáin Ironfoot killed Azog. The victors could not reclaim Moria, for Dáin had seen the Balrog waiting within.

Thráin II settled in the Blue Mountains but was lured away by his Ring, captured, and died in the dungeons of Dol Guldur, where Gandalf took from him the map and key of Erebor. With these, in 2941, Thorin Oakenshield, the hobbit Bilbo and twelve companions set out on the quest that ended in Smaug's death, the Battle of Five Armies, and the restoration of the Kingdom under the Mountain under Dáin. In 2989 Balin tried to refound Moria and perished there with all his colony.

In the War of the Ring Gimli son of Glóin walked with the Fellowship, while Dáin died at the gates of Erebor defending the body of King Brand of Dale against Sauron's Easterlings. His son Thorin Stonehelm broke the siege after news came of Sauron's fall.

Relations with other peoples

With the Elves the Dwarves had a history of great works made together and great wrongs done on both sides: Menegroth and the Nauglamír, Eregion and the Doors of Durin, the imprisonment of Thorin's company by Thranduil. Gimli's friendship with Legolas and his devotion to Galadriel were the more remarkable for standing against that whole history. With Men the Dwarves generally dealt better, trading their smith-work for food and enjoying a warm alliance with Dale, and they fought beside Men against the Orcs, whom they hated above all other creatures. The Orcs returned the hatred, and the Dwarves' hardiness made them among the few foes that Orcs would not willingly face in the dark.

Fate

After the War of the Ring Gimli led a company of Durin's folk to the Glittering Caves of Aglarond, and Dwarves of Erebor forged new gates of mithril and steel for Minas Tirith. The lineage of Durin was expected to end with a seventh Durin. The Dwarves are a slowly dwindling people, and their own belief is that they will live to help Aulë remake Arda after the last battle.

Dwarves stand between four and five feet tall, deep-chested and heavy-boned, with a strength out of proportion to their height. Both males and females wear beards, which they take great pride in, and their hair and beards are commonly long and often braided or tucked into their belts. They are hardy against cold, heat and fatigue, recover quickly from wounds, and are little affected by evil sorceries that would master Men. Their eyesight in darkness is good and their sense for stone and the depth beneath the earth is uncanny, so that a Dwarf can judge the age and hand of any masonry. They mature slowly, being considered young until past forty, and are old at two hundred and fifty. Dwarf-women are perhaps a third of the race; they look so like the men that outsiders rarely distinguish them, and many Dwarves never marry at all, preferring their crafts, which is one reason the race increases slowly.

Dwarvish society is built around the kin-group, the house, and its king; among the Longbeards the King of Durin's Folk held a near-sacred place as heir of Durin. Their halls were delved rather than built, vast pillared chambers cut into living rock and lit by shafts and by lamps of crystal, with mines beneath. Craft was the centre of life: metalwork, jewel-cutting, stone-carving, and the making of arms and armour of surpassing quality, from the Dragon-helm of Telchar to the mithril coat that saved Frodo. They loved gold and precious things not merely for their worth but for the pleasure of the making, and the exchange of gifts and payment was governed by a strong sense of honour and debt.

They kept their language, Khuzdul, and their true names secret, spoke to outsiders in the tongues of Men, and recorded their deeds in runes of their own devising, the Cirth adapted from Daeron's alphabet. Their music was deep and slow, sung to harps and viols; the song of the misty mountains cold that Thorin's company sang at Bag End is the best-known example. Their war-cry, the Khuzdul call to the axes of the Dwarves, was one of the few phrases of their tongue heard by strangers. Burial was in stone, and the tombs of their kings lay deep in their mansions; on the field of Azanulbizar, lacking time to build tombs, they burned their dead rather than leave them to the Orcs, a grief remembered for generations.

Their relations were governed by long memory: the Dwarves kept a written reckoning of injuries and honours across centuries, and both the War of the Dwarves and Orcs and the enduring coldness toward the Elves of Mirkwood sprang from this.

Aulë could not wait for the Children of Ilúvatar. Desiring pupils to teach and craftsmen to share his love of making, and having only a dim understanding of what the Children would be, he shaped seven beings in a hidden hall beneath the mountains of Middle-earth while Melkor still held sway over the world. He made them strong and stubborn so that they might endure Melkor's dominion, and he began to teach them speech. But Ilúvatar saw and spoke to him, asking why he had done a thing beyond his authority, for Aulë could give his creatures no life of their own; they could move only by his will. Aulë wept and confessed his impatience, and lifted his hammer to destroy them. The Dwarves shrank from the blow, and Ilúvatar, moved by Aulë's humility, revealed that he had already accepted them and given them independent being. He would not let them wake before the Firstborn, so the Seven Fathers were laid in sleep under stone. Yavanna, learning of it, feared for her trees and won from Manwë the promise of the Ents; and hence the old enmity between the Dwarves, who fell trees, and the Shepherds of the Trees. When at last the fathers woke, long after the Elves, Durin was the first, and the others rose in their pairs across the mountains of the world.

By the end of the Third Age the Dwarves were fewer than in their great days but far from spent. Erebor and the Iron Hills stood; Gimli's new colony flourished in the Glittering Caves behind Helm's Deep, and the Dwarves rebuilt the gates of Minas Tirith. In the Fourth Age they aided the King of the Reunited Kingdom and the Lord of Ithilien. Gimli alone of his race is recorded to have sailed West, with Legolas, after the death of King Elessar. Dwarvish lore names a seventh and last Durin among the heirs of Thorin Stonehelm, but no chronicle of the West records the final end of the race; the Dwarves believed they would endure to see the world remade.