Gimli (Middle-earth)

• 1. Introduction

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  Gimli, son of Glóin, is a fictional Dwarf warrior in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and one of the primary characters in that story. At sixty-two years old, he was considered too young to join his father on the quest to reclaim Erebor. Years later, he would stand at the Council of Elrond, travel with the Fellowship of the Ring, and ultimately become the first Dwarf ever to sail into the Undying Lands. What makes Gimli remarkable among Dwarves is not brute strength, though he has plenty of that. Scholars note that he is unique among his kind in being free from their characteristic hunger for gold. How did a Dwarf warrior earn a gift that was refused to one of the mightiest Elves in all of history? And what does a slaying contest, a promise about caves, and a Glasgow accent have to do with any of it?

• 2. Lineage and the Council

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  Gimli was born in the Ered Luin in the Third Age, a remote descendant of Durin the Deathless, who was chief of the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves and ancestor of the Longbeards. He was of the royal line, though not close to succession; specifically, he was the third cousin once removed of Dáin II Ironfoot. His father Glóin had marched with Thorin's company in The Hobbit, giving Gimli a family history already woven into the great struggles of Middle-earth.

  At the Council of Elrond, Gimli and Glóin arrive bearing urgent news: the Dark Lord Sauron is searching for Bilbo. The Council learns that Frodo Baggins now carries the One Ring, and decides it must be destroyed by casting it into Mount Doom. Frodo volunteers, and Gimli is among those chosen to accompany him. From the outset, there is friction between Gimli and the Elf Legolas, a tension rooted in an ancient grudge between their two races that will define much of the journey ahead.

• 3. Moria and Lothlórien

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  When the company is forced into the ancient underground Dwarf-realm known as the Mines of Moria, Gimli is at first enthusiastic, hoping to find Balin there. What awaits is far darker. Moria is overrun with Orcs, Cave Trolls, and a Balrog; Balin and all his folk have been killed. The Fellowship discovers his tomb in the Chamber of Mazarbul, barely fighting their way out as Orcs attack.

  Aragorn then leads the company to Lothlórien, whose Elven inhabitants are hostile to Dwarves. Gimli refuses to be blindfolded as the others request, risking open conflict. Aragorn resolves the standoff by having the entire Fellowship blindfolded. What happens next changes everything. When Gimli meets Galadriel, co-ruler of Lothlórien, her beauty and understanding impress him so deeply that he says seeing her and hearing her words is gift enough. When pressed to name a wish, he says he desires only a single strand of her golden hair, as an heirloom of his house, but that he could not ask for such a thing. Galadriel, moved by what she sees as a bold yet courteous request, gives him not one hair but three. Legolas witnesses this, and the two become firm friends from that moment.

• 4. The Gift Refused and Given

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  Writing in Mallorn, the journal of the Tolkien Society, Lilian Darvell traces the significance of that gift back through centuries of legend and literature. Galadriel had been asked for a hair before, by Fëanor, described in "The History of Galadriel and Celeborn" in Unfinished Tales. She refused him three times. Darvell notes that given Galadriel's ability to see into people's hearts, and the darkness she saw in Fëanor, she must have found something better in Gimli than in "one of the greatest of the Noldor".

  The gift of hair carries its own literary weight. Darvell connects the gesture to Berenice and the Lock by Callimachus and Catullus, and to Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. The Norse legend Njáls saga is perhaps the most pointed parallel: in it, Gunnarr's bowstring breaks in a desperate battle and he asks his wife Hallgerðr for two hairs to replace it. She refuses because he once struck her, and he is killed. The scholar Susan Robbins adds another layer: Galadriel's words to Gimli, "your hands shall flow with gold, yet over you gold shall have no dominion", grant him alone among all Dwarves immunity to what Tolkien called dragon-sickness. Robbins defines this as a bewilderment so consuming it makes one prefer to starve rather than give up gold, the fate that overwhelmed Thorin Oakenshield and the Master of Laketown in The Hobbit. Tolkien traced this affliction to line 3052 of the Old English poem Beowulf: iúmonna gold galdre bewunden, which translates roughly as "the gold of men of long ago enmeshed in enchantment".

• 5. Battles and the Killing Count

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  After Amon Hen divides the Fellowship, Gimli joins Legolas and Aragorn in a desperate run across Rohan to find Merry and Pippin, who have been taken by Orcs. They cover many miles in only a few days. When they encounter Éomer, nephew of King Théoden, and he speaks badly of Galadriel's name, Gimli responds harshly enough that only Aragorn prevents a fight.

  At the Battle of Helm's Deep, Gimli proves his worth in combat and turns the old rivalry with Legolas into a friendly contest. He kills 42 Orcs to Legolas's 41, winning by a single kill. He also saves Éomer's life by killing two Orcs and driving off two more. After the battle, Gimli's lyrical description of the Glittering Caves of Aglarond moves Legolas to promise a visit once the War is over, a promise they keep together. Gimli also sees through Saruman's rhetoric during Gandalf's confrontation with the fallen wizard, calling it out plainly: "This wizard's words stand on their heads."

  He accompanies Aragorn on the Paths of the Dead, fights at Pelargir and the Pelennor Fields, and stands at the Battle of the Morannon in front of the Black Gate. There, he recognizes Pippin Took's feet protruding beneath a fallen troll and saves his life.

• 6. Dwarvish Heroism in Words

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  The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey observes that Tolkien has Gimli "swap grim proverbs" with Elrond at the Council. Shippey reads this alongside King Dáin's stubborn replies to the messenger of Mordor as examples of the same Dwarvish mode: a "delight in the contrast between passionate interior and polite or rational expression", where the restraint of the outer words only signals the intensity of what lies beneath.

  Scholar John Miller extends this reading to Gimli's description of the Glittering Caves. Miller argues that Gimli's account not only praises the caves' beauty but also "emphasizes their stillness, their abstraction from the history marching along outside". He suggests this reflects a pre-modern aesthetic, an appreciation for hand-crafted workmanship that he regards as distinct from and perhaps less mature than that of Elves or Men. The scholars Abigail Ruane and Patrick James read Gimli differently, as an exemplar of "neoliberal institutionalists" within Middle-earth, with Dwarves illustrating how interdependence among nations and networks of trade and alliance can reduce insecurity and build cooperation. Their argument is that the varied relationships among Dwarves, Elves, and Men form the foundation upon which the alliance against Sauron becomes possible.

• 7. Adaptations Across Decades

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  David Buck voiced Gimli in Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated version of The Lord of the Rings, where Gimli is drawn nearly as tall as the other non-Hobbit members of the Fellowship. He does not appear at all in Rankin/Bass's 1980 animated version of The Return of the King. Tomi Salmela-Nikunen portrayed him in the 1993 Finnish miniseries Hobitit.

  In Peter Jackson's film trilogy, the Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies plays Gimli. The question of his accent became a small controversy: Brian Sibley has asserted that Rhys-Davies used a Welsh-derived accent, while The Scottish Press and Journal praised him for a convincing Scottish one, calling the performance "raspy, croaky, bearded and brilliant". Rhys-Davies settled the matter himself on the extended DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring, confirming the accent was deliberately Scottish and that the choice had been his own. He told the New Zealand Herald that "there is a gritty sort of fierce belligerence, and in the end I thought an almost Glasgow Scottish accent would serve the character."

  For the stage, Ross Williams played Gimli in the three-hour Toronto production of The Lord of the Rings, which opened in 2006, while Sévan Stephan took the role throughout the London run of The Lord of the Rings: The Musical. In the classical concert repertoire, composer Craig H. Russell's 1995 work Middle Earth includes as its second movement a piece titled "Gimli, the Dwarf"; Russell describes it as sounding "like a rugged Irish tune", originally composed for string ensemble and later re-orchestrated for symphonic orchestra.

• 8. After the Ring

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  Following the destruction of the One Ring, Gimli leads a group of Dwarves south to Aglarond, becoming the first Lord of the Glittering Caves, the very place he had described so vividly to Legolas. Under his leadership, they carry out what Tolkien calls "great works" in both Rohan and Gondor. Among the most tangible: they replace the ruined gate of Minas Tirith with one fashioned from mithril and steel.

  After Aragorn's death, Gimli, then 262 years old, makes the passage that no Dwarf had ever made before. He sails west with Legolas into the Undying Lands. The name Gimli itself has a longer history than the character: it first appears in Tolkien's very early writing in "The Tale of Tinúviel", found in the second volume of The Book of Lost Tales, where it belongs to an aged Elf imprisoned in the kitchens of Tevildo, Prince of Cats. During the writing of The Lord of the Rings, as recounted in The Return of the Shadow, the character who would become Gimli was first named Frar, then Burin, and was initially written as the son of Balin.