Tags

Dwarven Culture, dwarves, Headcanon accepted, Reblog for awesome, words matter

absynthe–minded:

tygermama:

changeinenthalpy:

thoughttrainderailed:

jimtheviking:

Oh my…

Okay, so my friend Chloe just pointed this out, and it’s amazingly accurate:

“Because of the scarcity of Dwarf-women, their secrecy and similarity in
appearance to males, and their lack of mention, many Men failed to
recognize their existence.”

Okay, so?

Well, Tolkien was a philologist, and a Norsist, and that means he knew Völuspá well enough to pull the names of every dwarf from Dvergatal and he had a pretty firm grasp Old Norse grammar.

In fact, he grasped it well enough that he knew if you dropped an n from a name ending in –inn, it changes from the masculine
definite enclitic

to the feminine.

Well, what the hell does any of this mean?

Well, I give you the names of the Dwarves from the Hobbit, as they appear in Dvergatal (stanzas 14-16) and in the order they appear:

Dvalins,* Dáinn,
Bívurr, Bávurr, Bömburr, Nóri,
Óinn,
Þorinn, Þráinn, Fíli, Kíli, 
Glóinn, Dóri, Óri

Now, in the Hobbit, they’re named as follows:

Dwalin, Dáin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, Óin, Thorin, Thráin, Fíli, Kíli, Glóin, Dori, Ori.

Now, you notice something with the way those names got changed? That’s right, he changed the masculine -inn definite suffix to -in, which is feminine.**

That means that, at least grammatically, Dwalin, Dáin, Thorin, Thráin, and Glóin are female Dwarves.

Since we know Tolkien was meticulous about his grammar, this was done most likely as an in-joke (lol we’re so learnèd about Norse grammar that my comment on Dwarf women being indistinguishable from men is hilarious because of this grammatical funniness)

But there’s a not-inconceivable chance that the Dwarves were using the masculine pronouns in Westron because that’s what the Men who met them used, despite the fact that a third of the company was female, and
hey, it’s kinda neat to think he wrote a bunch of Dwarf-ladies going on an adventure.

*–ins is the masculine Genitive definite article suffix in Old Norse

**He also dropped the double-r suffix, but -r as the root is still, in general, a masculine grammatical feature

@linddzz @salmiakkivodka

given Tolkien’s general approach to women he’s unlikely to have intended this but I don’t care I’m going to accept it as canon anyway

isn’t there stuff in the appendixes about the Hobbit language having ’-a’ as a masculine name ending and ’-o’ as feminine but then he changed all the Hobbit names anyway?

Bilb-O

‘O’ and ‘e’ are feminine suffixes in hobbit-dialect Westron, which is not English.

Tolkien translated/Anglicized the names of all the hobbits into names that both sounded appropriate for their gender and reflected the aesthetic impression a native Westron speaker would get when meeting hobbits and hearing their language. It’s not about how The Hobbits Are Actually Girls (though that would be cool) it’s about how “Bilbo Baggins” gives a certain feeling when you as an English speaker encounter it – you get an idea of a character, perhaps, and it sounds just a little ridiculous – but you wouldn’t get that feeling from “Bilba Labingi”, the original hobbit-dialect Westron name.

(As to “Tolkien’s general approach to women”, yes, the man was sexist, I’m not going to deny that, but he was also meticulous and perfectionist when it came to language and there is no way this was accidental. No way at all. Not when he wrote an entire fake-academic-journal fanfic essay about why the Sindarin word ros had two translations, justifying it with in-universe linguistic drift.)

That being said, yeah, quite a lot of those dwarves were ladies. Headcanon accepted.

Headcanon so accepted.

Tags

dwarves, Headcanon accepted, other people's fic, reblog, this this this

words-writ-in-starlight:

princehal9000:

ok but what if

the tolkien dwarves invented the printing press

give me that fic

I never thought about it, but, I mean…of course it’s the dwarves.  

The elves would never think of it, fading out of Middle Earth with their perfect memories entirely intact, bearing the lore of ages in their own lifetimes.  Elrond would never think to write down the story of his life, for all that it stretches back to the Silmarils’ crafting.  When they do write things down, they believe in taking the time to inscribe the words with their own hand–no one knows the hard truths of permanence and impermanence like the Firstborn, and if you are going to take the time to make something ephemeral into something lasting, you do it right.  And besides, Quenya and Sindarin and forgotten Noldorin, all are made with elaborate curling letters, intended more to be written with a brush tip or a calligrapher’s pen than printed for clarity.  A printing press would never capture the fluidity quite right.

The race of men…well, they’re still trying to recover.  The great kingdoms of the human race–hard Gondor and broken Arnor, wild Rohan and poor shattered Harad to the South–took the brunt of the Ring War hardest of all.  Even the strongest of them is left in fragments.  New rulers, damaged walls, burned cities.  Not many have time, in those first years–and it does take years–to worry about the lore that might have been lost or muddled by water and fire and falling stone, not when there are still leaderless orcs roving and people starving as they try to stretch the harvests.  By the time they do, they’re trying to piece together what they used to have.  No one thinks twice about trying to piece it together the way it was, and the way it was, was handwritten.  Someday the race of men will be great innovators, reaching toward the stars with sure hands and bright eyes.  Now, though, the race of men is enduring, is rebuilding and making alliances, trying to prevent the losses of the war from reappearing ten, twenty, a hundred years down the line.  They are doing well, at enduring–pragmatists, grim and tough and determined–but they hardly have the time for mechanical marvels that don’t aid building, speed farmwork, or otherwise smooth the path.

The hobbits persist in being stubbornly hobbitish.  Oral history is what they do, and their memories for family ties and dramatic gossip could give the oldest Eldest a run for their money.  Who’s going to bother to write down the story of the time Athella Proudfoot–no, not that one, the other one, Odo’s great-great-great aunt–drank half the tavern under the table, got up on the bar, did a jig in nothing but her bloomers, and then settled in to drink the place dry?  (And still looked fresh as a daisy, if quite a bit less sober, the next morning.)  No one, because anyone you ask knows the story of everyone who ever did anything worth knowing the story of.  What do the hobbits care for legends and lore?  They know who they are and where they come from, songs and stories and all, and there’s a certain level of strength in that.  Strength enough to walk into Mordor, strength enough to reclaim the Shire.  

The dwarves…the dwarves are a people who once had libraries, sweeping and beautifully full of knowledge.  The libraries in Khazad-dum have rotted, by now, ransacked by orcs and goblins or burned entire by Durin’s Bane.  Books and scrolls, illuminated with precious metals and expensive inks by the finest scholars, are worth nothing to a dragon, nothing but fuel for amusement, things to send sparking.  The library where Dis learned to read, where Thorin and Thrain before him learned statecraft, are nothing but ash.  The Iron Hills, Ered Luin, those places were filled by a people seeking refuge.  Few dwarrows snatched tomes as they fled Erebor.  Fewer still kept them at the ruin of Azanulbizar.  The dwarves escaped their ancestral homes with the clothes on their backs and scraps of bread baked on stones, with the pyres of the burned dwarves still smoldering behind them.

It’s a survivor of that flight who scratches down the first idle plans.  She remembers seeing Dain Ironfoot, barely more than a child–but then he seemed such a grown-up to her, at the time, when she was still a beardless babe only just walking–bloodied and limping on a crutch as he stood up to claim the leadership his father had left in his wake.  Dain and Thorin, young dwarrows still, but already old with the weight of the world.  She remembers that better than the dragon, better than the battle.  Her mother died in Ered Luin, but not before writing a poem for the burned ones, a poem for the two dwarves who had surrendered their own youth for the sake of their people.  She can’t stand the idea of her mother’s poem being lost, the way so many things were lost in flight after flight.

That dwarrowdam dies, an old dwarf in her bed with her loved ones around her, and it’s her best friend’s daughter who comes across the plans, many years later.  Yes, she thinks, looking at the levers, at the vague notes about possible lettering methods, yes, that could work.  

It doesn’t work, at first.  It doesn’t work a lot, really, but the dwarves are a stoneheaded bunch and not in a rush to be put off by a few petty failings.  Or by a total collapse of the base mechanics, the first time she tries to pull the lever.  The dwarrowdam unearths herself from a pile of metal and gears and wood, with the help of a few other folks who heard the complicated crash and weary cursing, and starts again. 

It takes most of two years and a lot of brainstorming–first with her friends, then with her guild, then with any poor fool careless enough to wander into her workshop–but the scribe-machine works.  She shrieks and bursts into tears when the first page comes out crisp and clean and beautiful, and sprints into the great hall waving it triumphantly over her head.

The paper says, in kuzdh runes, plain and clear, We are Mahal’s children, and we are yet unbroken.

Tags

awwww, dwarves, other people's art, reblog, right in the feels

This gallery contains 6 photos.

stutterhug: Your Father’s Raiment ♥ ((Patreon)) I needed this today.

Tags

dwarves, photography, reblog, smithcraft, sparks from the anvil of weyland

morgynleri-mirrors:

@lferion

Tags

dwarven headcanon, dwarves, reblog

fishonthetree:

I made myself sad with an idea – when Aule made the dwarfs, and Eru found out, he wanted to destroy them first, and the original dwarf prototypes huddled together in fear and pleading for mercy. What if dwarfs have an unconscious recolletction of that, deep in their bones and souls, and they are so stubborn in their ways and unbending because they have the utmost need to be just as mahal made them else he’ll be displeased and will want to throw them away again. 

Dwarves out of the Mountains

Tags

dwarves, interesting juxtapositions, reblog, relevant to my interests, story ideas

jonothetonedeafsidekick:

melredcap:

drferox:

A long-term friend of mine had been lamenting that while there seems to be a lot of push to diversify elves and ‘get them out of the forest’ but everybody seems content to leave the dwarves in their mountains. In my campaign world I do have dwarves still in the mountains, but I have a particular reason.

Dwarves, as a fantasy or rpg race typically have the following traits:

• Short, stocky or round with a low center of gravity
• Facial hair and plenty of it, sometimes on females as well
• The Axe. If there’s no axe, there will be a hammer
• Smiths, craftsmen and great builders
• Beer, mead, ale… it’s all good as long as it’s not wine
• Underground. Not just a little hole, but deep underground.

That’s a phenotype you can pick up and move anywhere, provided you can grow something you can then ferment and make into booze. So let’s see how they might fit in different environments.

• Desert. If you’re going to live in the desert you have to worry about water and maintaining your body temperature, as it can get both unreasonably hot and cold in the desert, often switching from one extreme to another from day to night. Lots of animals have figured out that the temperature is much more stable underground and burrow, and the trees that survive find the water table. There are two very good reasons to build your home underground, and from there you expand your home into a city with networks etc. You can ferment the cacti. Darkvision would be handy as you’re not going to come up in the day if you can avoid it. I imagine they’d build large ventilation columns, a bit like termite mounds, reaching above the dunes, the only evidence of the city below.
• Sea edge. I’m thinking cliffs, harsh and windswept towering above the churning waters. The windchill can be lethal, and the saltwater of the ocean is all but undrinkable without specialized processing. (Maybe they have that technology, maybe salt is a major export. Everybody needs salt before refrigeration.) Not much lives on sea cliffs aside from some agile birds that nest there, far out of reach of predators. Building your fortress into the side of the sea cliffs is a very defensible position, and there’s a huge amount of energy to be potentially harnessed in the wind and waves. Branching out into ships is difficult from cliffs, it may be easier to use underwater channels, if such a clever dwarf could devise a vessel to travel entirely beneath the waves. The lower tunnels of an sea cliff fortress are prone to flooding, so these dwarves are likely to be better at balancing and swimming than their inland brethren.
• Ice. Where do you expect to find a phenotype that has a reduced body surface area to volume ratio (approaching spherical), comfortable insulating body fat and extra hair? Somewhere very cold. You can dig down into solid ice, which will be relatively more comfortable out of the wind chill, but if you build up with the excavated ice it will likely end up with snow accumulating on at least one side, eventually looking like a hill. Fireballs obviously strongly discouraged, and layered furs prefered over open flame for heat to preserve structural integrity.
• Old forest. Nobody ever said anything about getting the dwarves out of the forest. I don’t mean your standard, idyllic, meadow filled forest. I mean the dark, overgrown, ancient, creaking forest with trees so old, massive and twisted that you can’t be certain they don’t have faces. The sort of forest where you can barely see the sky, and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck for no clear reason, but you can’t help but trust your instinct that something, somewhere is patiently waiting to eat you. Here it’s probably much safer underground, where you can at least establish a defensible position. I imagine large halls, edged with the passive roots of the still living trees, and probably a significant mushroom proportion in the diet. Elves above may not even know they’re there.

Really they can make themselves at home anywhere you need a defensible position. Break some stereotypes, throw some dwarves around.

(But you cannot toss them)

…Desert dwarves fermenting cacti for booze. So you’re saying… dwarves with tequila? XD

@determamfidd

Khazad November – Gloin

Tags

dwarves, gloin, khazadnovember, myfic, other people's pictures, temper

Title: Zadkhu Mabarzul u Mamaglul

Fandom: The Hobbit

Rating: G

Length: 315

Content notes: N/A

Author notes: Thanks go to Zana & Morgynleri for encouragement & sanity-checking. Title means ‘Line of Temper’ (literally ‘line of that which has been heated and cooled’).

Summary:  Gloin has a temper

Gloin had a temper as fiery as his beard was magnificent. Everyone knew that. Most of the time his wrath was swift to kindle and almost as swift to go out, a flash of shouting and unconsidered words, and then abashed apologies if he’d gone over a line, a nod or forehead touch if that was more fitting, or no acknowledgement at all if none seemed warranted. Rarely was his ire slow to burn out, but when that happened, he would bear the grudge long and long, not poking or fanning the flames except when confronted with or reminded of the source, but not quenching them either. Those coals slumbered with heat in their core: the loss of Erebor, the insults Men and Elves paid his race and their kings and their families, accountants who falsified their accounts, cheaters at dice.

When Gimli sent word of the restoration of the King to the throne of Gondor, and oh, incidentally, he’d pledged his troth to the heir to the Woodland Realm,  Gloin was by turns incandescent with rage, shouting and stomping and only not throwing or breaking things because of his own healing injuries from the battles in the North, burning cold and long with rekindled insult — goblin mutant indeed! — and a fleeting, sneaking crogglement tinged with happiness for Gimli. Eventually he settled a bit, love for and trust in his son cooling the rage by degrees, warming the icy contempt from killing to merely bitter, giving him space to think and not just feel.

What finally settled the matter was realizing that Thranduil would be even more upset than Gloin was, with likely fewer reasonable outlets for his feelings. Gimli was a noble certainly, of the line of Durin direct, but Legolas was a prince. Done well for himself on that score, his boy had. Very well indeed. Even if his prince was an Elf.

Khazad November – Grór, Frór, and Náin

Tags

dwarves, fan flashworks, grey mountains, khazadnovember, My fic, thrór, villain

Title: Ir-Rûkhuz (The Villain)

Fandom: The Hobbit

Rating: G

Length: 500

Content notes: N/A

Author notes: Thanks go to Zana & Morgynleri for encouragement & sanity-checking. Somewhat inspired by MadameFaust’s implication in her stories of a serious rift between the brothers. Khazad November piece for day 18: Grór, Frór, and Náin. Posted to Fan Flashworks for the challenge ‘Villain’

Summary: Grór and Thrór do not see eye to eye

Fic on Dreamwidth here.

The Origin of the “Crystal Mountain” in Egypt

Tags

dwarves, geology is amazing, links and referencences, posting to find again later, Rocks And Stones

This is fascinating, and very relevant to Dwarven Interests I should think. Posting in part so I can find it again

The Origin of the “Crystal Mountain” in Egypt

Khazad November – Bifur

Tags

bifur, dwarves, keep looking up, khazadnovember, stars

Title: O’zig Gimil

Fandom: The Hobbit

Rating: G

Length: 200

Content notes: N/A

Author notes: Thanks go to Zana & Morgynleri for encouragement & sanity-checking. Part of Iron & Light. Title is intended to mean ‘Art of Gazing at Stars’, Thatrûna is Varda.

Summary:  Bifur looks at stars

Bifur liked looking up at the stars. They were calming, predictable, yet endlessly variable. Most of them wheeled in stately procession over the course of the year, fixed in relation to each other, but others  moved — Earendil, bright and clear in the morning or evening; the fainter one that stayed even closer to the rising or setting sun, making it hard to see. There was the one that sparkled red and could be found in wider parts of the sky, and one or two others as well.  The moon of course in all his seasons, and the bright scatter of falling stars (they’re weren’t stars proper at all, but something else, some were metal, some stone, some nothing he could describe in stone sense or that other sense of life and energy he had no name for, but they went across the sky with luminous streaming tails), were different every night.

The stars were always there, good nights and bad, cloudy or clear (just because he couldn’t see them didn’t mean they were not there). Even under stone he knew they spun serene in the hands of Thatrûna, and that was a thing to hold to, in an uncertain world.