a tough, thrawn race for the most part, secretive, laborious, retentive of the memory of injuries (and of benefits), lovers of stone, of gems, of things that take shape under the hands of the craftsmen rather than things that live by their own life. But they are not evil by nature, and few ever served the Enemy of free will, whatever the tales of Men alleged. For Men of old lusted after their wealth and the work of their hands, and there has been enmity between the races.[T 1]
Dwarves were long-lived, with a lifespan of some 250 years.[T 1] They breed slowly, for no more than a third of them are female, not all marry, and they have children only late in life. Tolkien names only one female, Dís, Thorin's sister.[T 2] They are still considered children in their 20s, as Thorin was at age 24;[T 3] and as "striplings" in their 30s. Despite his young age, Dáin Ironfoot was 32 when he killed Azog, the orc chieftain of Moria.[T 1] They had children starting in their 90s.[T 1]
Durin's Folk, showing the Dwarvish tendency to have few children (and fewer daughters)[T 1][a]
The Dwarves are described as "the most redoubtable warriors of all the Speaking Peoples"[T 4] – a warlike race who fought fiercely against their enemies, including other Dwarves.[T 5] Highly skilled in the making of weapons and armour, their main weapon was the battle axe, but they also used bows, swords, shields and mattocks, and wore armour.[T 6]
Sauron gave seven Rings of Power to Dwarf lords. The Rings caused them to be wrathful and greedy for gold, but they were not brought under Sauron's domination,[T 7] nor did they gain longer life.[T 1] Eventually all seven Rings were destroyed or reclaimed by Sauron.[T 7] One of the rings was given to Durin III, and passed down to Thrór, who gave it to his son Thráin II, father of Thorin Oakenshield. Sauron captured Thráin and took the ring from him in the dungeons of Dol Guldur.[T 1]
The Dwarves are portrayed in The Silmarillion as an ancient people who awake during the Years of the Trees, after the Elves at the start of the First Age, but before Men when the Sun and Moon are created. The ValaAulë, impatient for the arising of the Children of Ilúvatar, creates the seven Fathers of the Dwarves in secret, intending them to be his children to whom he could teach his crafts. He teaches them Khuzdul, a language he had devised for them. Ilúvatar, creator of Arda, is aware of the Dwarves' creation and sanctifies them. Because they had been made by a Vala, Dwarves lacked souls until granted them by Ilúvatar.[3] Aulë sealed the seven Fathers of the Dwarves in stone chambers in far-flung regions of Middle-earth to await their awakening.[1][T 8]
Each of the Seven Fathers founds one of the seven Dwarf clans. Durin I is the eldest, and the first of his kind to awake in Middle-earth. He awakens in Mount Gundabad, in the northern Misty Mountains, and founds the clan of Longbeards (Durin's Folk); they found the city of Khazad-dûm below the Misty Mountains, and later realms in the Grey Mountains and Erebor (the Lonely Mountain). Two others lie in sleep in the north of the Ered Luin or Blue Mountains, and they found the lines of the Broadbeams and the Firebeards. The remaining four clans, the Ironfists, Stiffbeards, Blacklocks, and Stonefoots come from the East.[T 4] After the end of the First Age, the Dwarves spoken of are almost exclusively of Durin's line.[T 9]
As creations of Aulë, they are attracted to the substances of Arda. They mine and work precious metals throughout the mountains of Middle-earth. They are unrivalled in smithing, crafting, metalworking, and masonry, even among the Elves. The Dwarf-smith Telchar is the greatest in renown.[T 12] They build immense halls under mountains for their cities. They build many famed halls including the Menegroth, Khazad-dûm, and Erebor.[T 5] Among the many treasures they forge are the named weaponsNarsil, the sword of Elendil, the Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin and the necklace Nauglamír, the most prized treasure in Nargothrond and the most famed Dwarven work of the Elder Days.[T 13] In The Hobbit, Thorin gives Bilbo a Mithril coat of linked rings of mail.[T 14]
Tolkien invented parts of Middle-earth to resolve the linguistic puzzle he had accidentally created by using different European languages for those of peoples in his legendarium.[5][T 15]
In Grey-elvish or Sindarin the Dwarves are called Naugrim ("Stunted People"), Gonnhirrim ("Stone-lords"), and Dornhoth ("Thrawn Folk"), and Hadhodrim. In Quenya they are the Casári. The Dwarves call themselves Khazâd in their own language, Khuzdul.[T 16]Khuzdul is created for them by Aulë, rather than being descended from an Elvish language, as most of the languages of Men are. They write it using Cirthrunes, a writing system originally created by Elves in Beleriand to write Sindarin, and later more fully developed by Daeron, an Elf of Doriath. The Cirth runes are adapted by Dwarves for writing Khuzdul.[6] The Dwarves keep their language secret and do not normally teach it to others, so they learn both Quenya and Sindarin to communicate with the Elves, especially the Noldor and Sindar. By the Third Age the Dwarves are estranged from the Elves and no longer routinely learn their language. Instead, they mostly use the Westron or Common Speech, a Mannish tongue, in communicating with other races.[T 5][T 17]
Each Dwarf has two personal names, a secret or "inner" name in Khuzdul, which is used only among other Dwarves and is never revealed to outsiders, and a public "outer" name for use with other races, taken from the language of the people amongst whom the Dwarf lives. For example, the Dwarves of Moria and the Lonely Mountain use outer names taken from the language of the Men of the north where they lived.[T 16]
In reality, Tolkien took the names of 12 of the 13 dwarves – excluding Balin – that he used in The Hobbit from the Old Norse Völuspá, long before the idea of Khuzdul arose.[1][7] When he came to write The Lord of the Rings, in order to explain why the Dwarves had Norse names, he created an elaborate fiction that many of the languages used in the book were "translated" into real-life languages for the benefit of the reader, roughly retaining the relationships of the languages among themselves. Thus, Westron was translated into English, the related but more archaic language of the Rohirrim was translated into Anglo-Saxon (Old English), and the even more distantly related language of Dale was translated into Norse. It is possible that the problem of explaining the Dwarves' Norse names was the origin of the entire structure of the Mannish languages in Middle-earth along with the fiction of "translation".[8]
Calendar
Tolkien's only mention of the Dwarves' calendar is in The Hobbit, regarding the "dwarves' New Year" or Durin's Day, which occurs on the day of the last new moon of autumn.[T 18] However, in his first drafts of the book, Durin's Day was the first new moon of autumn. After he had finished writing the book, Tolkien went back and changed all occurrences of the date to the last new moon, more in keeping with the real-world Celtic calendar, but overlooked one mention in Chapter IV, which still named the date as the first new moon.[T 19] Tolkien never noticed this inconsistency, and it was not corrected until the 1995 edition of the book.[9] The astronomer Bradley E. Schaefer has analysed the astronomical determinants of Durin's Day. He concluded that – as with many real-world lunar calendars – the date of Durin's Day is observational, dependent on the first visible crescent moon.[10]
In Tolkien's The Book of Lost Tales, the very few Dwarves who appear are portrayed as evil beings, employers of Orc mercenaries and in conflict with the Elves—who are the imagined "authors" of the myths, and are therefore biased against Dwarves.[1][T 20][T 21] Tolkien was inspired by the dwarves of Norse myths[11][12] and of later Germanic folklore (such as that of the Brothers Grimm), from whom his Dwarves take their characteristic affinity with mining, metalworking, and crafting.[13][14]
Jewish history
In The Hobbit, Dwarves are portrayed as occasionally comedic and bumbling, but largely as honourable, serious-minded, and proud. Tolkien was influenced by his own selective reading of medieval texts regarding Jewish people and their history.[15] The dwarves' characteristics of being dispossessed of their homeland in Erebor, and living among other groups but retaining their own culture, are derived from the medieval image of Jews,[15] while, according to the Tolkien scholar John D. Rateliff, their warlike nature stems from accounts in the Hebrew Bible.[15] Medieval views of Jews also saw them as having a propensity for making well-crafted and beautiful things,[15] a trait shared with Norse dwarves.[12][16] The Dwarf calendar invented for The Hobbit reflects the Jewish calendar's Rosh Hashanah in beginning in late autumn.[15][17]
Tolkien's use of Jewish history for his Dwarves[15]
In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien continued the themes of The Hobbit. When giving Dwarves their own language, Khuzdul, Tolkien decided to create an analogue of a Semitic language influenced by Hebrewphonology. Like medieval Jewish groups, the Dwarves used their own language only among themselves, and adopted the languages of those they live amongst for the most part, for example taking public names from the cultures they lived within, whilst keeping their "true-names" and true language a secret.[15] Tolkien further underlined the diaspora of the Dwarves with the lost stronghold of the Mines of Moria. Tolkien elaborated on Jewish influence on his Dwarves 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..."[T 22] In the last interview before his death, Tolkien said "The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn't you say, that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic."[18] This raises the question, examined by Rebecca Brackmann in Mythlore, of whether there was an element of antisemitism, however deeply buried, in Tolkien's account of the Dwarves, inherited from English attitudes of his time. Brackman notes that Tolkien himself attempted to work through the issue in his Middle-earth writings.[19]
The original editor of The Hobbit "corrected" Tolkien's plural "dwarves" to "dwarfs", as did the editor of the Puffin paperback edition.[T 23] According to Tolkien, the "real 'historical' plural" of "dwarf" is "dwarrows" or "dwerrows".[21] He described the word "dwarves" as "a piece of private bad grammar".[T 24] In Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explained that if people still spoke of "dwarves" regularly, English might have retained a special plural for the word "dwarf", as with the irregular plural of "goose", "geese".[T 16] Despite his fondness for it,[T 16] the form "dwarrow" only appears in his writing as "Dwarrowdelf" ("Dwarf-digging"), a name for Moria. He used "Dwarves", instead, corresponding to his "Elves" as a plural for "Elf". Tolkien used "dwarvish"[T 25] and "dwarf(-)" (e.g. "Dwarf-lords", "Old Dwarf Road") as adjectives for the people he created.[T 16]
In Iron Crown Enterprises' Middle-earth Role Playing (1986), Dwarf player-characters receive statistical bonuses to Strength and Constitution, and subtractions from Presence, Agility and Intelligence. Seven "Dwarven Kindreds", named after each of the founding fathers—Durin, Bávor, Dwálin, Thrár, Druin, Thelór and Bárin—are given in The Lords of Middle-earth—Volume III (1989).[28]
In the real-time strategy game The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II, and its expansion, both based on the Jackson films, Dwarves are heavily influenced by classical military practice, and use throwing axes, war hammers, spears, and circular or Roman-style shields. One dwarf unit is the "Phalanx", similar to its Greek counterpart.[30]
^Tolkien 1937, ch. 4 "Over Hill and Under Hill": "They had thought of coming to the secret door in the Lonely Mountain, perhaps that very next first moon of Autumn 'and perhaps it will be Durin's Day' they had said."
^Reinders, Eric (2024). Reading Tolkien in Chinese: Religion, Fantasy, and Translation. Perspectives on Fantasy series. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. p. 98. ISBN9781350374645.
^Noel, Ruth S. (1980). The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-earth. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin. Part 1, ch. 5, "The Languages of Rhovanion", pp. 30–34. ISBN978-0395291306.
^ abLebovic, Matt (11 December 2013). "Are Tolkien's dwarves an allegory for the Jews?". The Times of Israel. Archived from the original on 13 December 2013. Retrieved 13 March 2023. Tolkien spoke about the Jewish-dwarvish connection during a BBC interview. 'I didn't intend it, but when you've got these people on your hands, you've got to make them different, haven't you?' said Tolkien during the 1971 interview. 'The dwarves of course are quite obviously, wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic, obviously, constructed to be Semitic.'
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