Dwarves in Middle-earth

• 1. Introduction

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  Tolkien's Dwarves in Middle-earth are called "the most redoubtable warriors of all the Speaking Peoples." Yet the same people are famous for a different kind of strength: their secrecy. They guard their real names, speak their language only among themselves, and nurse grudges across centuries. Tolkien described them, in his own words, as "retentive of the memory of injuries." How did a race drawn from Norse mythology end up carrying so many echoes of Jewish history? And why did Tolkien give their language a grammar structured to echo Hebrew?

• 2. Old Norse Foundations

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  The Dvergatal is the list of Dwarf-names embedded in the Old Norse Völuspá. Tolkien drew twelve of the thirteen Dwarf names in The Hobbit from it; Balin was the sole exception. He was working from those names long before he devised Khuzdul, the Dwarves' fictional language. When he came to write The Lord of the Rings, he faced a real problem. Norse names needed a fictional explanation. His answer was a layered translation convention: Westron became English, the Rohirric tongue became Old English, and the language of Dale became Norse. It has been suggested that this need to account for those names may have generated the entire fictional structure of Mannish languages in Middle-earth.

  One name in the Dvergatal caught his attention: Þráinn, meaning "obstinate person." He used it for Thráin, a name he gave to two of Thorin Oakenshield's ancestors. He had already used "thrawn" as his adjective for Dwarf character. The shared root between "thrawn" and Þráinn looks like a private joke. The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia calls it a philological pun.

  The medievalist Charles Moseley described the result as "Old Norse" in its names, its feuds, and its revenges. The Germanic debt runs deeper than names. The Dwarves' affinity with mining, metalworking, and crafting comes from Norse myth and the folklore later collected by the Brothers Grimm. In Tolkien's earliest writing, The Book of Lost Tales, the few Dwarves who appear are explicitly villainous. They employ Orc mercenaries and fight against the Elves. Tolkien later softened this picture, though the martial element never left. Men, he wrote, had lusted after Dwarf wealth, and "there has been enmity between the races" ever since.

  The original editor of The Hobbit changed Tolkien's plural "dwarves" to "dwarfs." A later paperback editor did the same. Tolkien defended "dwarves," calling it "a piece of private bad grammar" he preferred over the alternatives. He considered "dwarrows" or "dwerrows" to be the truly historical plural. The word "dwarrow" appears only once in his published fiction: in "Dwarrowdelf," a name for Moria meaning "Dwarf-digging."

• 3. A People in Exile

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  The Dwarves of The Hobbit are portrayed as honourable, serious-minded, and proud. That portrait came partly from Tolkien's selective reading of medieval texts about Jewish history. Five distinct parallels connect the two peoples.

  Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, and the Mines of Moria are both homelands the Dwarves are driven from. They live among other peoples while keeping their own culture intact. That matches the medieval image of Jewish diaspora. The scholar John D. Rateliff traces the Dwarves' warlike nature to accounts in the Hebrew Bible. Medieval observers also credited Jews with a propensity for making well-crafted and beautiful objects, a quality equally associated with Norse dwarves.

  Durin's Day, the Dwarves' New Year, falls on the last new moon of autumn. That timing echoes Rosh Hashanah, which arrives in September or October. Linguistic practice follows a parallel course. Like medieval Jewish communities, the Dwarves use their own tongue only among themselves and adopt the languages of those around them for external dealings.

  Tolkien confirmed the connection in a letter: "I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue." In his last interview before his death, he was more direct. "The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn't you say, that in many ways they remind you of the Jews?" he said. "Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic."

  Rebecca Brackmann, writing in Mythlore, raised the question of whether antisemitism, however unintentional, shaped Tolkien's Dwarves. He inherited certain attitudes of his era, and Brackmann notes he worked through the tension in his Middle-earth writings. One reading of the Gimli-Legolas friendship in The Lord of the Rings sees it as Tolkien's deliberate reply to mutual prejudice. One scholar described that prejudice as "Gentile anti-Semitism and Jewish exclusiveness."

• 4. Semitic by Design

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  Helge Fauskanger, a philologist who has analyzed Tolkien's invented languages, found in Khuzdul the same structural features that define Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic. Khuzdul was created by Aulë, the Vala of craft, not descended from any Elvish tongue. That independence gives it a character entirely unlike other languages of Middle-earth. The most fundamental feature is the root system. Meaning is carried not by pronounceable words but by consonant clusters; vowels are inserted to form different parts of speech. Fauskanger's example is R-Kh-S, associated with the concept of "orc." Insert vowels one way and you get "Rukhs" for a single orc; another arrangement gives "Rakhâs" for the plural, following the Semitic pattern of internal vowel change.

  "Baruk Khazâd!" translates as "Axes of the Dwarves!" and illustrates Khuzdul's construct state, in which one noun placed before another takes on a possessive meaning. "Baruk" functions as the construct noun before "Khazâd." A second feature, the nominal sentence, leaves the verb "to be" implicit. "Khazâd ai-mênu" means "The Dwarves are upon you," though no word for "are" is spoken.

  Dwarves of Moria and Erebor each carried two names. The outer name came from the language of the Men of the north. The inner name, in Khuzdul, was kept secret and shared only among Dwarves. The outer name is the only one outsiders ever hear.

  The Cirth runes used for writing Khuzdul were originally created by Elves in Beleriand. The Elf Daeron of Doriath developed them further; the Dwarves then adapted them for their own language. By the Third Age, the Dwarves had largely stopped learning Elvish languages at all. For dealings with the wider world, they relied on Westron, the Common Speech.

  In Sindarin, the Elvish names for the Dwarves were less than flattering: Naugrim, meaning "Stunted People," Dornhoth, meaning "Thrawn Folk," and Gonnhirrim, meaning "Stone-lords." The Dwarves' own name for themselves was simply Khazâd.

• 5. Made by a God

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  Aulë, the smith among the Valar, created the Dwarves without the knowledge or consent of Ilúvatar, the supreme creator of Arda. He was impatient for the arising of the Children of Ilúvatar and wanted beings he could teach his crafts. He fashioned seven of them and sealed each in a stone chamber in a far-flung region of Middle-earth, there to await the right time to awaken.

  Ilúvatar was aware of the Dwarves from the start. Because they had been made by a Vala rather than by Ilúvatar himself, they lacked souls. Ilúvatar granted those souls and sanctified the seven. Each became one of the Seven Fathers, founding one of the seven Dwarf clans.

  Durin I was the eldest. He awoke in Mount Gundabad, in the northern Misty Mountains, and led his line to build the great underground city of Khazad-dûm. His people, the Longbeards or Durin's Folk, later founded realms in the Grey Mountains and at Erebor, the Lonely Mountain. Two other Fathers awoke in the north of the Ered Luin, the Blue Mountains, and founded the Broadbeams and Firebeards. The remaining four clans, the Ironfists, Stiffbeards, Blacklocks, and Stonefoots, came from the East. After the First Age, the history Tolkien told is almost entirely the history of Durin's Folk.

  A smaller people also appear in The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin: the Petty-dwarves. One scholar compared the last known Petty-dwarf to the figure of Mime from the Nibelungenlied.

• 6. The Work of Their Hands

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  Khazad-dûm, Menegroth, and Erebor are among the immense halls the Dwarves built under mountains. Their skill in smithing, metalworking, and masonry surpasses even the Elves. The Dwarf-smith Telchar holds the greatest renown of any craftsman in the legendarium.

  Named artefacts attributed to Dwarf hands include Narsil, the sword of Elendil, and the Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin. The Nauglamír was the most prized treasure in Nargothrond; Tolkien called it the most celebrated Dwarf work of the Elder Days. In The Hobbit, Thorin gives Bilbo a coat of linked mithril rings.

  Tolkien distinguished Dwarf taste from Elvish taste. Where Elves valued things that lived by their own life, Dwarves loved "things that take shape under the hands of the craftsmen." The same hands that forged Narsil wielded battle axes in war.

• 7. A Long and Warlike Life

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  Dáin Ironfoot was 32 years old when he killed Azog, the orc chieftain of Moria. By Dwarf reckoning, 32 was still a stripling's age. Dwarves are considered children in their 20s; Thorin Oakenshield was 24 and still counted as one by his people's measure. They begin having children only in their 90s and typically live around 250 years.

  No more than a third of Dwarves are female, and not all of them marry. Those who do have children only late in life. Tolkien named only one Dwarf woman in all his writing: Dís, the sister of Thorin Oakenshield.

  As fighters, Dwarves used the battle axe as their primary weapon. They also carried bows, swords, shields, and mattocks, and wore armour. They fought fiercely, at times even against other Dwarves.

  Sauron gave seven Rings of Power to Dwarf lords. The Rings made them wrathful and greedy for gold but could not bring them under his domination. Nor did the Rings lengthen their lives. All seven were eventually destroyed or reclaimed by Sauron. One ring went first to Durin III, then passed to Thrór, and then to Thrór's son Thráin II, the father of Thorin Oakenshield. Sauron captured Thráin II in the dungeons of Dol Guldur and took the ring from him there.

• 8. Screen and Table

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  In the Rankin-Bass animated film of The Hobbit, released in 1977, Hans Conried voiced Thorin Oakenshield. Don Messick voiced Balin, John Stephenson voiced Dori, and Jack DeLeon voiced Dwalin, Fíli, Kíli, Óin, Glóin, Ori, Nori, Bifur, and Bofur. Paul Frees voiced Bombur.

  Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated Lord of the Rings cast David Buck as Gimli. Peter Jackson's live-action trilogy gave the role to John Rhys-Davies, who gave the character a Welsh-derived accent. Jackson used Gimli for occasional comic relief, playing his height and his rivalry with Legolas for laughs.

  In Jackson's three-film Hobbit adaptation, Richard Armitage played Thorin. Ken Stott took on Balin, Graham McTavish played Dwalin, and Aidan Turner played Kíli. Jackson added a storyline not found in the original novel: the Elf Tauriel, a character invented for the films, falls in love with Kíli.

  In Iron Crown Enterprises' Middle-earth Role Playing, published in 1986, Dwarf characters received bonuses to Strength and Constitution but penalties to Presence, Agility, and Intelligence. The 1989 supplement The Lords of Middle-earth, Volume III named seven Dwarven Kindreds after their founding fathers: Durin, Bávor, Dwálin, Thrár, Druin, Thelór, and Bárin. Decipher Inc.'s Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game, published in 2001, required Dwarf characters to carry craft skills as a core part of their identity. In The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II, one Dwarf unit was named the Phalanx. The name borrowed directly from its Greek military counterpart.

  In early drafts of The Hobbit, Tolkien placed Durin's Day on the first new moon of autumn. After finishing the book he went back and revised the date throughout, but missed one occurrence in Chapter IV. The inconsistency persisted in print until the 1995 edition caught it. The astronomer Bradley E. Schaefer later analyzed Durin's Day and concluded its date is observational, dependent on the first visible crescent moon rather than a fixed rule.