A Moment For Dwarf Feelings

[grav_ity]

I'm about 2.5K into the next part of ELF FEELINGS, so obviously it was time to take a moment and tell you some of my thoughts about dwarves.

(I am failing really hard in my TOLKIEN thing. This should go with THE RETURN JOURNEY or maybe when I get to the appendices at the end of LotR, but WHATEVER. So much for being linear!)

So!

Thranduil is kind of a jerk in the movies, and I’m totally fine with that. I know his backstory and I can understand it.

I’m kind of curious about Dain, though. In the movie, he refuses to help (even though the geography of that meeting makes, like, ZERO sense), and since Thorin is something of a grudge holder, I’m wondering how that’ll play out.

Because Dain is kind of awesome!

At Azanulbizar, he kills Azog, in revenge for killing Nain, his father! And earns the name “Ironfoot”! For…kicking something. I FORGET THE DETAILS.

Anyway, he gets better. He looks through the front gate at Moria and SEES THE GODDAMN BALROG, and then he’s all “Um, guys? Let’s just call this one and go home.” And everyone listens to him! Because he’s epic, even though he’s just 32 and it’s his first campaign.

Oh, and then in the LOTR, he faces down a Ringwraith (possibly the Witch-King himself) MORE THAN ONE TIME, and refuses to give up any information on Biblo, instead dispatching Gloin and Gimli to Elrond, because DAIN IS A TALKER.

In the HOBBIT, the most characterization we get of him is that he “dealt his treasure well”, and is a good king, but at the end of LotR, he stands with Brand (Bard’s grandson, and King of Dale), and is cut down defending his body at the age of 252.

Gandalf recounts this to Gimli (in the appendices), and the pair of them can’t even really bring themselves to be sad, because Dain was SO AWESOME and SO OLD and his death was SO PERFECTLY EPIC, just as he was in life.

And then his grandson was the final reincarnation of Durin, and led the dwarves (finally) back to Moria. This is what dwarves do when they are not overshadowed by rings. Rings can’t turn them, which I think is excellent, but it did serve to make Sauron hella pissed at them, and that’s what really brought down Thorin et al. Malice and magnified greed.

So I’m kind of curious to see what Billy Connolly and the writing team do.

Comments

[grav-ity.livejournal.com]

That's what I meant. It doesn't corrupt them, but it does make them more dwarvish (for better or worse), and it also pisses Sauron off (though that is only theoretical, in the appendices).

ALSO, Balin (line of Durin), goes after Thror's ring (which he must have been exposed to), and Dain is reluctant to let him go ("Council of Elrond"). I doubt Dain had much contact with the ring, or even the idea of it, since he didn't grow up Under the Mountain.

Just saying. Dain is the Line of Durin as it was MEANT to be. In the long, long game, he is going to be the one that everyone remembers (he, his son, his grandson), and Thorin will be a footnote.

[eldanna.livejournal.com]

Tis true. It did occur to me, somewhere along when reading the Hobbit, why the main characters (okay, the main dwarf characters obviously) all die. I remember getting to the end the second or third time (the first time I read it was a write-off, as I only read it to get to Fellowship of the Ring) and going 'wait, what? Why did you write an entire book about people who die?' And why do they 'die in a footnote?' basically, because the Battle of the Five Armies is like this huge thing that happens but isn't described really. And I was very confused. And then I read like everything else Tolkien wrote and went, huh, Dain, you totally got the short end of the stick in literature, but I like you.

And it's funny that you make that point about Dain not having contact with the ring, because yeah, he was away in the Iron Hills so probably didn't, and therefore couldn't be corrupted, and I always got the sense that the dwarves of the Iron Hills were more…dwarvish? Like that the Iron Hills wasn't this massive, massive enormous building project, but more…normal? If that makes sense? Like more Ered Luin was, for the dwarves that lived there before the Erebor survivors arrived.

So, in other words, we're thinking alike, as always.

And it totally pissed Sauron off. After all, the dwarves were Aule's creation, and that alone, the fact that they existed, must have angered Sauron, knowing he could never achieve something like that great, so he had to settled for Rings That Could Be Destroyed. And didn't work as well as he wanted them to.