Thorin in the Blue Mountains

[Kuruharan]

This will be a long bit of background so bear with me...

I was ruminating about the fate of the seven rings and where those rings might have been bestowed. Thinking of the fate of the Broadbeams and Firebeards and their potential merger with the Longbeards, If the peoples had merged, I wondered if two of the rings might have been given to great lords of the Longbeards in addition to the king.

While this might be an idea worthy of its own topic, I discarded it because the Longbeards in the books that referenced the rings never gave any indication that more than one ring was ever given to Durin's Folk. My other thought (more based on the nature of the rings and their maker than anything) is that more than one ring would not co-exist with another well in the same realm.

Thrown back upon the original notion of the rings were given to the leaders of the seven dwarf peoples, it was thus inescapable that all seven peoples survived to some extent as independent entities.

How does all this relate to this topic?

My thought now turns to what Pitchwife said in post #3...

Off the top of my head, maybe there already was a Dwarven King of the Blue Mountains when Thorin came there.

Maybe that was exactly it. Maybe since the Kings of the Broadbeams and Firebeards were already in the remains of the Blue Mountains it would be considered very rude indeed for Thorin to make himself a king there since he might have been there in some sense as a guest. This might also explain why the Longbeards there were in a relatively resource poor area, the surviving Broadbeams and Firebeards were living in the surviving better areas.

I'm not proposing that significant populations of Broadbeams and Firebeards existed, but that their royal lineages did and there were enough remaining members to sustain distinct communities. Tolkien nowhere said all dwarves abandonded the Blue Mountains after the First Age, just "most."

Or maybe there were more survivors than we might think since the remains of the Blue Mountains were in the sleepiest part of Middle-earth where nothing ever happened and there was little reason to describe goings on there again.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

I'm not proposing that significant populations of Broadbeams and Firebeards existed, but that their royal lineages did and there were enough remaining members to sustain distinct communities. Tolkien nowhere said all dwarves abandonded the Blue Mountains after the First Age, just "most."

I'm inclined to think that if there were remnants of the other Dwarven lines in the Ered Luin in the Third Age, they were so small as to be really just settlements, nothing as grand as kingdoms.
Since Thorin's line was of the Longbeards, making him Durin's heir, I doubt Dwarves of other houses would have had much of a problem sharing the mountains with his own relatively small people.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

I'm inclined to think that if there were remnants of the other Dwarven lines in the Ered Luin in the Third Age, they were so small as to be really just settlements, nothing as grand as kingdoms.

Undoubtedly not, but they were still in the mountain range where they awoke which would perhaps provide something of a confidence boost. Perhaps the leaders of the Broadbeams and Firebeards never left...in fact, I would suspect they did not.

Since Thorin's line was of the Longbeards, making him Durin's heir, I doubt Dwarves of other houses would have had much of a problem sharing the mountains with his own relatively small people.

Sharing, they clearly had no problem with that. However, making a new "kingdom" there might have been something they would object to.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Sharing, they clearly had no problem with that. However, making a new "kingdom" there might have been something they would object to.

Since Thorin's settlement was referred to at least twice in ROTK Appendix A as a state of 'exile', maybe that knowledge that Erebor was the true kingdom for him would have kept Thorin from taking a formal kingship until the Lonely Mountain was regained.

Also, in UT The Quest of Erebor, Gandalf reports that he told Thorin:

'Your own ideas are those of a king, Thorin Oakenshield; but your kingdom is gone.'

That too would suggest that whatever Thorin had in the Ered Luin, he did not consider a kingdom.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

The king of Nogrod had been killed by Beren before the First Age ended. In fact, between the Green-Elves and the Ents, the host of Nogrod was "destroyed utterly" which at least suggests that all male Dwarves of fighting age, including the royal family, were wiped out.

[Narnil]

I am pretty sure that somewhere Tolkien said that all land north of the river Lune's first tributary from the Blue Mountains was dwarf land and remained dwarf land throughout much of Middle-Earth's history. I can't find teh quote but I know it was from Dwarfs and Men in vol 12 of HoMe

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

The king of Nogrod had been killed by Beren before the First Age ended. In fact, between the Green-Elves and the Ents, the host of Nogrod was "destroyed utterly" which at least suggests that all male Dwarves of fighting age, including the royal family, were wiped out.

I don't disagree with the statement, but I disagree with the implication.

Fighting age does not equal every age. If the experience of Gimli regarding Thorin's expedition is any guide (and I see no reason why it wouldn't be) the younger male dwarves would not have gone on the expedition to sack Doriath, this would include any younger males of the royal family, which would have been a bit more of a priority to ensure there was at least one survivor. In fact, it should be presumed to have been such a priority that we should assume that an arrangement like this would be made.

That the population of the Firebeards was permanently crippled is not at issue. The point is that this does not equal extinction.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Yes, I see what you're saying.

I think really we have another bit of Tolkien creating a bind for himself that he never cleared up, if he even noticed the problem at all. The Seven Rings appeared, almost ex nihilo, in the Ring-verse. The idea of the "Seven Houses of the Dwarves" came rather later but was, I'm pretty sure, derived from it; it made sense and still does that Sauron gave a ring to each Dwarf-king.

The problem came, as so many did, from trying to ret-con the new material into the existing legendarium, and the incompatibility of having seven dwarf-kingdoms in the Second Age but two major ones from the old legendarium which going by the LR weren't there any more. There isn't any real solution except by artificial rationalization, and unlike Tolkien we don't get to re-write anything.

And then there is something of a how-de-do with the idea that four, count 'em, four of the Dwarf-rings were lost to dragon fire. There are certain geographical problems posed by that.