I think you're just trying too hard with the answers. With my clues, you only need to look at the possible meanings of the words in the sentence. I do like to play around with puns and double meanings, so it's a good idea to know all of the dictionary definitions for each word in the clue. Another good idea to trawl a thesaurus for each word's synonyms. Also I can't recommend highly enough Saucepan Man's list of crossword conventions on page 1 of this thread. Useful things to know are the abbreviations of American states, the system of Roman numerals, the definite and indefinite articles in, say, French, Spanish, German and Latin, and the meaning of the Latin-derived notations (e.g., n.b, i.e., c.f., etc.). The meaning is more often hidden with obscure language than in a series of arcane connections between concepts or objects in Middle-earth, although the more you know about that the better. I would probably have described the seven fathers of the Dwarves as 'Somnolent patriarchs unknown to Snow White'.
The real art of these is to offer a description of the answer that is accurate, reasonable, logical and yet completely misleading. An example would be to describe 'Anduin' as 'large flower found in the Brown Lands' (to pick an example at random), expecting the reader to rack their brains about the flora of Middle-earth when they should be thinking about things which flow. Even when a clue is given, the elegant thing is to make that just as cryptic as the original question, as with my comment in an earlier post:
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Neither of you has the answer, but Mithalwen is on the right track. This is an obscure one, but you'll find that the answer's quite close to home.
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