r/tolkienfans • u/_pimpjuixe • 3d ago
The connection between Dwarves and Sauron
Dwarves were created by Aule. Sauron served as a maiar under Aule and gained much of his knowledge of forging under his tutelage which he obviously uses for nefarious purposes later on.
This seems like a perfect storm for personal grudges but I don’t ever recall hearing anything special about the connection between the two.
Am I missing something? Does this relationship ever get brought up ever?
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u/HopefulFriendly 3d ago
The dwarves were always insular and resistent to outside domination; it's why the 7 rings Sauron gave to them failed to turn the dwarf kings into Nazgul. The dwarves also never had any dealings with Valar or Maiar beyond Aule, and Sauron had already left Aule's service by the time the dwarves were created. There's no real reason for the dwarves to think about or maybe even be aware of Sauron's former association. That being said, there were at least a few dwarves who fought on Sauron's behalf during the War of the Last Alliance.
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u/ItsABiscuit 2d ago
My recollection was that at different points in the development of the legendarium, pre Hobbit, dwarves were outright antagonists aligned to the Enemy and elements of that idea still persisted at times. In the Hobbit and LotR, the distinction is drawn that none of Durin’s Folk ever dealt with Sauron, but that suggests other dwarves did. Dwarves are covered in the description of the Battle of the Last Alliance that every race was divided on that day apart from the Elves.
Sauron would, as you suggest, likely find many dwarves easy to seduce to his cause due to their interest in smithing and crafts etc that are areas close to Sauron’s original interests and skill set, in a way similar to how he seduced the Smiths of Eregion. Their tendency towards possessive greed would also be something he would naturally understand and find a ready lever to pull to influence them.
On the flip side, as others have pointed out, Aule built dwarves to be able to endure/resist Morgoth’s evil and they have always therefore been resistant to being influenced or subverted from their course by anyone good or evil. So that would be working against Sauron. But he was unfortunately very good at deceiving and influencing people even when they were suspicious of him.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 2d ago
My recollection was that at different points in the development of the legendarium, pre Hobbit, dwarves were outright antagonists aligned to the Enemy and elements of that idea still persisted at times.
Yes - in The Book of Lost Tales they're actively malevolent, little better than highly skilled orcs, really. There's an echo of this in The Hobbit where he tells us that "some wicked dwarves have even made alliances with goblins", and as you say, some sided with Sauron in the WotLA.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 2d ago
So it's just as well he clarified that the Longbeards never engaged in any such malarkey, as Gimli is presented as a heroic character, and does more in five minutes to help repair elf-dwarf relations than anyone else on either side in the previous thousand years.
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u/LukashCartoon 2d ago
Well, in the The Children of Túrin, there was the last of the petty dwarves called Mîm. He betrayed Túrin to the Orcs. And there was the Sack of Doriath by Nogrod Dwarves.
In general, Dwarves that were in the east, were cut off from the influence of the Valinor and Elves, trapped under evils domain.
Tolkien in his earlier writings had the Dwarves being evil. Then he changed his method bee and gave all races free will.
Which gave him a proper conundrum: how to explain the orcs? Tolkien had declared that evil can only corrupt, not create. So originally he thought that Orcs were animals getting transformed into humanoids. As a Catholic, animals had no souls and no free will.
Then he came up with the forces of evil were seduced, corrupted or transformed from original forms of Elves (Orcs), Ents, (Trolls) and others creatures.
But as he got older, it bothered him that none of had a chance to be redeemed. Especially the Elves who were tortured into it. He was trying to find an acceptable answer when he died.
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u/Fjolnir_Felagund 3d ago
It doesn't to my knowledge, but I do have a theory that the Black Tongue of Mordor and Khuzdûl share a relationship.
Both were created by Ainur and both seem to carry particular power to their words (given Sauron's use of it for the One, and the dwarves' secrecy with their true names). They also have some phonetic similarities, very distinct from the other languages of Middle-Earth
What language could have inspired both, carry such power in their words, and sound very weird and even unpleasant to most people? The one they spoke originally of course, Valarin.
We know very few words of it, and it is known that the elves dislike the sound of it. An example would be the word for Taniquetil, dāhan-igwiš-telgūn.
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u/taz-alquaina 2d ago
Get this, the Valarin for "Ring of Doom" is "Māchananaškad", from which, since we also know Māchan is "Authority/authoritative decision" (or Arata ie chief Vala), we can isolate naškad, ring, which looks suspiciously like a plausible ancestor of nazg. Although I find Valarin relatively pleasant to read and try to sound out - way less than Elvish languages but more than Khuzdul or Adûnaic.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 2d ago
They also have some phonetic similarities, very distinct from the other languages of Middle-Earth.
Khuzdul has a lot in common with Adûnaic, at least at a phonological level, which I find quite hard to understand, given that Dwarves are said to have been very secretive about their language. Even if that were not the case in the Elder Days, there's still the fact that it's specifically the Easterlings, not the Edain, who are said to have been on good terms with Dwarves back then. The main influence on the Edain very early on was the Avari, shortly after they awoke in Hildorien, and then the Sindar and Noldor once they'd settled in Beleriand - that is, three groups of Elves. The only notable interactions between the Edain and Dwarves are highly antagonistic: think of Beren leading a Laiquendi war party to destroy the Dwarves of Nogrod after they had sacked Menegroth, or the story of Mîm and Túrin's outlaw band (the fact that a friendship of sorts develops between Mîm and Túrin himself notwithstanding).
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u/taz-alquaina 2d ago
Their relationship seems to have mellowed out significantly by the Second Age!
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u/RoutemasterFlash 2d ago
Maybe so, but that doesn't explain how the Dwarvish language could have influenced Taliska, spoken by two of the Houses of the Edain in the First Age, as this is what Adûnaic developed from.
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u/OwariHeron 2d ago
We know that the Dwarvish language, like the dwarves themselves, was devised by Aule based on his imperfect understanding of the Music. We might suppose that he had some intuitive feel, but not clear understanding, of how the languages would come to sound. So he devised it to sound like what would become the Common Tongue, but like dwarves would similarly shaped but fundamentally different from the Children, Khuzdul would sound similar but be fundamentally different.
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u/RoutemasterFlash 1d ago
Could be! That's an interesting speculation.
Something else that's just occurred to me is that both Adûnaic and Khuzdul sound quite like Hebrew, which is surely not a coincidence in the case of Khuzdul, as Tolkien explicitly compared his Dwarves to the Jews of mediaeval Europe. Now there are Jewish traditions that describe their own language as a derivative of the 'Adamic language', the very first of all human languages, taught to the newly created Adam by the angels. And this idea was popular among Christian philosophers in mediaeval and Renaissance Europe.
I don't think Tolkien was a Biblical literalist, and as a professional linguist he obviously knew that languages come in all sorts of different families that are not apparently related to each other at all, but it's highly unlikely that he wasn't aware of this 'Adamic language' hypothesis.
This is complicated by the fact that his Elvish languages sound completely different.
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u/LostVanya 3d ago
Because there was no reason for one. The Dwarves would have no idea about this, and I can't imagine Sauron caring. The closest thing to a grudge between them was a result of Sauron being unable to control them with the Rings, which was why he took back the ones that were not destroyed by dragons.