Them Dwarven folk.

[Lobelia]

I remember when I first read Terry Pratchett's novels and he had female dwarves with beards I thought he was just having fun with the fact that all of Tolkien's Dwarves seem to be male, but imagine my surprise to find a passage somewhere in the HOME books where it was actually stated that female Dwarves were bearded! There is a mention, anyway, that you can't tell the males from the females, who rarely travel and when they do, they look like the males, so people assume they are. Given that all the Dwarves we meet seem to have beards,it's the logical conclusion that the women (including Dis?) DO have beards!

I think, anyway, that it was all a matter of Tolkien's Boys' Club attitudes. He just didn't think. The first time he writes about the ancestors of the Dwarves, they're all male. Another (later?) version has them put to sleep with their mates. Durin is the only one who doesn't have a mate, yet somehow he has a line of descendants who are very proud of the fact. Tolkien's fiction is filled with "the fathers of the fathers of ..." whoever. The only time it seems to occur to him that you do need both genders is in the matter of the Ents. Ah, well. I love him anyway.

And for the record, in my moments of whimsy, i have always speculated as to whether any of Thorin's companions might just have been female ...

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by B88

... I think you should know that The Saucepan Man was only joking.

Whoops!

[Thinlómien]

Then we get to see Gloin's kindness towards Frodo during Elrond's supper. As it says Gloin and Frodo talked the whole time. Gloin had deep respect for Bilbo and of course would like Bilbo's heir.

Hmmm... damn my poor memory and my laziness (I'm too lazy to check), but I think that in LotR it is a few times said (not straightly, of course) that hobbits had the best relationships with the dwarves of all races of Middle-Earth. (Except bree-hobbits and bree-humans, of course.)

I have got the impression that dwarf caravans (merchants) pass through Shire and sell things there. That would make them familiar to hobbits at some degree. (In one of the first chapters of LotR it says that dwarves have talked with hobbits; given them news. It leaves the impression that it wasn't the first time hobbits had talks with dwarves.)

edit: And, dwarves had to have some trade with the hobbits, by the way. Otherwise they couldn't have pipeweed.

edit2: Unless they bought it from Bree...

[zxcvbn]

Originally Posted by Thinlómien

Hmmm... damn my poor memory and my laziness (I'm too lazy to check), but I think that in LotR it is a few times said (not straightly, of course) that hobbits had the best relationships with the dwarves of all races of Middle-Earth. (Except bree-hobbits and bree-humans, of course.)

I have got the impression that dwarf caravans (merchants) pass through Shire and sell things there. That would make them familiar to hobbits at some degree. (In one of the first chapters of LotR it says that dwarves have talked with hobbits; given them news. It leaves the impression that it wasn't the first time hobbits had talks with dwarves.)

edit: And, dwarves had to have some trade with the hobbits, by the way. Otherwise they couldn't have pipeweed.

edit2: Unless they bought it from Bree...

Sadly, you are mistaken, Thinlómien. The Shire-hobbits did not get along well with ANY strangers. Sure, they traded with outsiders, but they considered folk like the Dwarves as queer and outlandish. And the Dwarves did not think very highly of them either.

...And look at the outlandish folk that visit him: dwarves coming at night,...From 'The Shadow of the Past'

"we actually passed through the Shire, though Thorin would not stop long enough for that to be useful. Indeed I think it was annoyance with his haughty disregard of the Hobbits that first put into my head the idea of entangling him with them. As far as he was concerned they were just food-growers who happened to work the fields on either side of the Dwarves' ancestral road to the Mountains."
From 'The Quest of Erebor'

The people that had the best relationship with the Dwarves were obviously the Men of Dale.

Nowhere are there any men so friendly to us as the Men of Dale.
From 'Many Meetings'

[William Cloud Hicklin]

However, in the aborted 1960 rewrite of The Hobbit, Tolkien tells us that Dwarves often did transient or contract- work in the Shire, especially in roadbuilding and the like; and that there was an inn on the East Road which specially catered to Dwarves.*

There is also Gandalf's comment in the Quest of Erebor to the effect of "you may think the Shire-folk simple, because they are generous and do not haggle....," which implies that commerce went on between them.

(Query: who made Bilbo's clock?)

EDIT: * Did it serve rat with ketchup?

[Estelyn Telcontar]

William, I had the same thought some time ago and built the Dwarven origins of the Hobbits' clocks into a (canonical Hobbit) fan fiction I began writing. Alas for its completion, it remains on the back burner in hopes of being continued sometime...

[Thinlómien]

Zxcvbn, that's a very old post of mine so I'm not sure, but I think I meant that Hobits have the best relations to Dwarves (= they had better relations to dwarves than humans - except Breelanders - or to Elves - even though that can be argued as they hardly had any dealings with each other). I agree that from the Dwarves' perspective, they had best relations with the Dalemen. This sounds horribly confusing - do I make sense at all?