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Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
the LR which brought Dwarves (or at least Durin's Folk) solidly into the 'mostly good' column in later Silmarillion texts.
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Is there such a column? It always seemed to me Tolkien painted all his "races" with a certain moral ambiguity, although each deals with this differently. Even the elves - if they seem "mostly good" in LoTR, they have a dark enough past and give the appearance of a people who have learned from their history, with the combination of wisdom and restraint, a sort of refinement, which is different from the - youth? vigor? - of groups that have never questioned themselves. Dwarves are more straightforward, perhaps; more prone to justify past errors rather than mourn them - but now I'm getting dangerously close to drawing 7th age comparisons, so I'll be quiet.
To tie it back to heroism, I've always seen something heroic about this touch of tragedy - for instance, among the Dúnedain and the elves - of having risen above a darker past, though unable to undo it/recover what was destroyed, and that is something which I haven't seen portrayed in dwarves (although I haven't read all there is to read, so I might indeed have missed it).
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Originally Posted by WCH
(There is a hint iof evidence, IMO, that during the writing of The Hobbit and the earliest stages of writing the LR, Tolkien envisioned the Misty Mountains as identical to the Ered Luin; there was a subsequent displacemant of the Third Age geography to the eastward.)
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This might amount to a hijack (spin off thread?) but that's interesting - I had wondered if that was possible, myself. What evidence are you thinking of?