The War of the Jewels by J.R.R. Tolkien

Author:J.R.R. Tolkien [Tolkien, J.R.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0100-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Tale of the Nauglafring there were the two peoples, the Dwarves of

Nogrod and the Dwarves of Belegost, and the latter were the

Indrafangs or Longbeards; in the Quenta the same was true (or at

least, no other peoples were mentioned), although the Longbeards

had become the Dwarves of Nogrod (IV.104), and this remained the

case in QS ($124).

In the present text two things are said on the subject. Durin was

'the father of that Dwarf-kin ... whose mansions were at Khazad-

dum' ($3); but (reverting to the Tale of the Nauglafring) the

Longbeards were the Dwarves of Belegost ($7) - and this is said also

both in the Annals of Aman and in the Grey Annals (see p. 108, $22).

I am not altogether certain how to interpret this; but the simplest

solution is to suppose that when my father wrote these texts he had

forgotten Thorin's mention of Durin as the ancestor of the Long-

beards in The Hobbit (or, less probably, that he consciously dis-

regarded it), and the following considerations support it.

At the beginning of the section Durin's Folk in Appendix A (III) to

The Lord of the Rings the reading of the First Edition was: 'Durin is

the name that the Dwarves use for the eldest of the Seven Fathers of

all their race', without mention of the Longbeards. Years later, on

his copy of the second edition of The Hobbit, my father noted: 'Not

so in Silmarillion nor see [sic] LR III p. 352' - this being a reference

to the passage just cited from Appendix A in the First Edition: what

was 'not so' was Thorin's reference to 'one of the two races of

dwarves', become obsolete since the emergence of the conception of

the Seven Fathers. At the same time he wrote on this copy many

tentative phrases to replace Thorin's original words, such as 'the

eldest of the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves', 'the father of the fathers

of the eldest line of the Dwarf-kings, the Longbeards', before

arriving at the final form as subsequently published, 'He was the

father of the fathers of the eldest race of Dwarves, the Longbeards,

and my first ancestor: I am his heir.' It was obviously considera-

tion of Thorin's words in The Hobbit and the need for their

correction that led him to alter the text of Appendix A, which in the

Second Edition (1966) reads: 'Durin is the name that the Dwarves

used for the eldest of the Seven Fathers of their race, and the

ancestor of all the kings of the Longbeards', with the addition of a

footnote reference to the passage in The Hobbit, now published in

its corrected form.

Thus, circuitously, the Longbeards finally entered The Lord of the

Rings, as the Dwarves of Khazad-dum; but the texts of The

Silmarillion and the Annals were never changed, and the Long-

beards remained the Dwarves of Belegost.

$6. The marginal note 'Thus the Lammas' apparently refers speci-

fically to the statement in the text concerning the kinship of

languages of the Easterlings with Dwarf-speech. Cf. V.179 (Lham-

mas $9): 'the languages of Men are derived in part from them' (the

tongues of the Dwarves); this was repeated in the footnote to QS

$123, from which the present paragraph was developed, and which

also has a marginal note 'So, the Lhammas'.

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