[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Maybe the Dwarves supplied the Shire with everyday metal items like candlesticks, cutlery, and farm tools. Sure, hobbits probably could have fashioned things like that themselves. However, anything metal made by Dwarves was likely of superior quality, and their products could have been preferred, by the richer families especially , as status symbols.

'The hobbit that I have in mind has ornaments of gold, and eats with silver tools, and drinks out of shapely crystal.'

'Ah! I see your drift at last,' said Balin. 'He's a thief, then? That is why you recommended him?'

At that I fear I lost my temper and my caution. This Dwarvish conceit that no one can have or make anything 'of value' save themselves, and that all fine things in other hands must have been got, if not stolen, from the Dwarves at some time, was more than I could stand at that moment.

Earlier Thorin had sneered that "those villagers" "drink out of clay, and they cannot tell a gem from a glass bead." All of which suggests that Thorin's community, at least, had no experience of selling fine articles of craft to hobbits.