Fattest of the Dwarves

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh

I never picked up any class distinctions between the dwarves in The Hobbit other than Thorin's status as the leader, and as John Rateliff mentions in The History of the Hobbit, here 'attendants' is more likely to mean courtiers or an honour guard - hardly traditionally working-class occupations. Of course, even using terms like 'working class' suggests an anachronistic social structure: Thorin and his companions form something more like a comitatus, which would normally suggest a similar status for all, much as Thorin's company appears on the page.

All I meant to suggest was that if Bifur, Bofur and Bombur were Thorin's courtiers or honour guard, and given that they were "descended from the Dwarves of Moria but were not of Durin's line", so presumably not members of the nobility, I was prone to speculate that their presence in the company possibly had a more direct purpose, ie a specific personal duty to Thorin in their capacity as "attendants". I do not mean to say that their status within the company was any less, or indeed that the other Dwarves had any less duty to Thorin either, just that there might be a difference in meaning between the presence of Thorin's close relatives in the company and these attendants. Given how little we know of Dwarven social structure, though, that is of course pure speculation on my part, and is perhaps a touch of over-analysis symptomatic of trying too hard to read the more serious accounts of things in the Appendices and the revision in relation to the humorous derring-do of the published version of The Hobbit.