Lost Tale of a Lost Dwarven Tribe and Thranduil?

[Břicho]

I think that Tolkien was probably thinking of Thingol and that story when he wrote it, never realizing that nearly seventy years later, we'd be puzzling about it on a website, never realizing that the Silmarillion and the HObbit would both be published and be part of the same "history."

Inside the world of Middle-earth itself I would explain it in one of two ways: 1. There IS a "lost"(or never-written) story regarding Thranduil and some non-Durin-type Dwarves.

2. The original "writer" of the Hobbit(Bilbo--or as I call him, Ol' Bilb-- himself) was thinking af Thingol and got his stories muddled up(he may have heard the story of Thingol and the Dwarves from Thranduil and just gotten confused) because at the time of writing he wasn't such a scholar of the First Age as he later became.

I suppose I like the first explanation better--that at some point Thranduil did have some conflict with non-Long-beard Dwarves of the Grey Mountains, and this tiny reference is all we hear about it: it could have been one of the many minor things that happened in the Third Age(or even the Second, I suppose) that aren't included in the "translator's" abridged offering of the Tale of Years.