Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Anonymous asked: You've read Sansûkh, right?? because that's like, the pinnacle of the A+++ dwarf worldbuilding and love

In fact, I have.

And it is a world-changing experience.

justangrymacaroni asked: i'm imagining the significance of the dwarves inventing a printing press. like you said, their years spent traveling without a home probably did a lot of trauma, which trickled down through the generations. to be able to tell their own stories and to see them permanently pressed with something stronger than a hand and pen, is probably really special. catch me crying in the fuckin' club thinking about this, goddam fucking line of thrain and children of Mahal.

Honestly I need a shirt that reads “Catch me crying in the fucking club about the children of Mahal” because HARD SAME.  THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

princehal9000:

ok but what if

the tolkien dwarves invented the printing press

give me that fic

I never thought about it, but, I mean…of course it’s the dwarves.  

The elves would never think of it, fading out of Middle Earth with their perfect memories entirely intact, bearing the lore of ages in their own lifetimes.  Elrond would never think to write down the story of his life, for all that it stretches back to the Silmarils’ crafting.  When they do write things down, they believe in taking the time to inscribe the words with their own hand–no one knows the hard truths of permanence and impermanence like the Firstborn, and if you are going to take the time to make something ephemeral into something lasting, you do it right.  And besides, Quenya and Sindarin and forgotten Noldorin, all are made with elaborate curling letters, intended more to be written with a brush tip or a calligrapher’s pen than printed for clarity.  A printing press would never capture the fluidity quite right.

The race of men…well, they’re still trying to recover.  The great kingdoms of the human race–hard Gondor and broken Arnor, wild Rohan and poor shattered Harad to the South–took the brunt of the Ring War hardest of all.  Even the strongest of them is left in fragments.  New rulers, damaged walls, burned cities.  Not many have time, in those first years–and it does take years–to worry about the lore that might have been lost or muddled by water and fire and falling stone, not when there are still leaderless orcs roving and people starving as they try to stretch the harvests.  By the time they do, they’re trying to piece together what they used to have.  No one thinks twice about trying to piece it together the way it was, and the way it was, was handwritten.  Someday the race of men will be great innovators, reaching toward the stars with sure hands and bright eyes.  Now, though, the race of men is enduring, is rebuilding and making alliances, trying to prevent the losses of the war from reappearing ten, twenty, a hundred years down the line.  They are doing well, at enduring–pragmatists, grim and tough and determined–but they hardly have the time for mechanical marvels that don’t aid building, speed farmwork, or otherwise smooth the path.

The hobbits persist in being stubbornly hobbitish.  Oral history is what they do, and their memories for family ties and dramatic gossip could give the oldest Eldest a run for their money.  Who’s going to bother to write down the story of the time Athella Proudfoot–no, not that one, the other one, Odo’s great-great-great aunt–drank half the tavern under the table, got up on the bar, did a jig in nothing but her bloomers, and then settled in to drink the place dry?  (And still looked fresh as a daisy, if quite a bit less sober, the next morning.)  No one, because anyone you ask knows the story of everyone who ever did anything worth knowing the story of.  What do the hobbits care for legends and lore?  They know who they are and where they come from, songs and stories and all, and there’s a certain level of strength in that.  Strength enough to walk into Mordor, strength enough to reclaim the Shire.  

The dwarves…the dwarves are a people who once had libraries, sweeping and beautifully full of knowledge.  The libraries in Khazad-dum have rotted, by now, ransacked by orcs and goblins or burned entire by Durin’s Bane.  Books and scrolls, illuminated with precious metals and expensive inks by the finest scholars, are worth nothing to a dragon, nothing but fuel for amusement, things to send sparking.  The library where Dis learned to read, where Thorin and Thrain before him learned statecraft, are nothing but ash.  The Iron Hills, Ered Luin, those places were filled by a people seeking refuge.  Few dwarrows snatched tomes as they fled Erebor.  Fewer still kept them at the ruin of Azanulbizar.  The dwarves escaped their ancestral homes with the clothes on their backs and scraps of bread baked on stones, with the pyres of the burned dwarves still smoldering behind them.

It’s a survivor of that flight who scratches down the first idle plans.  She remembers seeing Dain Ironfoot, barely more than a child–but then he seemed such a grown-up to her, at the time, when she was still a beardless babe only just walking–bloodied and limping on a crutch as he stood up to claim the leadership his father had left in his wake.  Dain and Thorin, young dwarrows still, but already old with the weight of the world.  She remembers that better than the dragon, better than the battle.  Her mother died in Ered Luin, but not before writing a poem for the burned ones, a poem for the two dwarves who had surrendered their own youth for the sake of their people.  She can’t stand the idea of her mother’s poem being lost, the way so many things were lost in flight after flight.

That dwarrowdam dies, an old dwarf in her bed with her loved ones around her, and it’s her best friend’s daughter who comes across the plans, many years later.  Yes, she thinks, looking at the levers, at the vague notes about possible lettering methods, yes, that could work.  

It doesn’t work, at first.  It doesn’t work a lot, really, but the dwarves are a stoneheaded bunch and not in a rush to be put off by a few petty failings.  Or by a total collapse of the base mechanics, the first time she tries to pull the lever.  The dwarrowdam unearths herself from a pile of metal and gears and wood, with the help of a few other folks who heard the complicated crash and weary cursing, and starts again. 

It takes most of two years and a lot of brainstorming–first with her friends, then with her guild, then with any poor fool careless enough to wander into her workshop–but the scribe-machine works.  She shrieks and bursts into tears when the first page comes out crisp and clean and beautiful, and sprints into the great hall waving it triumphantly over her head.

The paper says, in kuzdh runes, plain and clear, We are Mahal’s children, and we are yet unbroken.

Anonymous asked: Okay so you mentioned kind of missing Tolkien and I've been on a bit of a Tolkien kick lately ('lately' she says as she scuttles deeper into the horde of Tolkien marginalia beginning to resemble a small mountain) and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on dwarves. I know the Men of Gondor are more your thing, but I was struck by sudden curiosity.

notbecauseofvictories:

I LOVE DWARVES

look, the beauty of Tolkien is that, as far as I know, he is the only creator who firmly maintained, all his life, that filling in the blanks of the world he had generated was actually an act mirroring divine creation. (He called this “subcreation”—as human beings, we are made in the image of the divine creator, and therefore, we are driven to replicate creation on a minor scale. Tolkien wholeheartedly loved fanfiction, in a way I’ve never seen in any subsequent content-creator.)

but

I love dwarves!!!!

I love dwarves particularly, because tolkien dismisses them in the context of a numnber of stereotypes, and actually this opens the door for the way fandom has taken then and run with what if dwarves are super jewish. maybe that’s because I follow @goodshipophelia and @swanjolras and @silentstep but the reclamation of very jewish dwarves is beautiful

(thorin harp-player as david springs to mind)

and honeslty to this day, my favorite idea about dwarves is @silentstep’s conception that “mountain” refers not just to the idea of a physical mountain, but everything that lives inside it, all the songs and stories and philosophies, that “mountain” is shorthand  for community the way “Judah” or “people of the tribe” does in more modern Judaism 

it leads to so much articulation and fictionalization of Judaism and I love that, everyone one should have a fictional articulation of their religion, it allows for so much more freedom than would otherwise be.

Also, I love the idea of thorin fictionally composing the lord of the rings alternative to song-of-songs, so. that’s something, right???

bilboo:

baggvinshield:

baggvinshield:

sometimes i get really messed up thinking about Erebor. 

• it’s hugely vast - Thorin says there are “halls upon halls beneath the mountain” and i imagine it stretches vertically as well as horizontally, so like lots of levels climbing upwards and downwards and just a HUGE amount of square footage, an entire city (perhaps larger than Minas Tirith) literally carved out of the interior of a mountain
  
• on that note, travel around Erebor must be facilitated by something. what if they use goats or ponies? imagine little carts, coaches, etc., driven by dwarves and transporting dwarves and visitors from point A to B, ex: the residential level is the main level but the market is three levels below - no one wants to haul groceries by hand up miles of stairs/ramps and damn like, who has enough hours in their day for all that walking? draft animals it is then. (for that matter, oxen could also be involved, in which case they would need cows to keep supplying offspring to be turned into oxen, and that means some dwarves could be dairy “farmers”).
• which brings us to… what are all these pack animals eating? hay would be easy enough to purchase from Dale or other neighbors but then it needs to be stored. and if there are lots and lots of load-bearing animals needed for everyday life in the mountain (and also for mining operations, lots of material to be hauled there) then that’s a LOT of hay and other feeds needed.
• so maybe the dwarves have something akin to a pasture somewhere in the mountain, high up, with an entire exterior wall made of glass or a similar transparent substance that lets sunlight in and creates sort of a giant greenhouse or cold frame, so they can grow grass year round for the ponies and goats and cattle to graze. otherwise hay expenses could be astronomical. 

i don’t know. just. Erebor everyday life stuff. fascinating. 

• it doesn’t have to be coaches and buggies tho, they could use rickshaws (do NOT let me fall into a Memoirs of a Geisha au please)
  
• there are likely very affluent districts and less affluent ones as well, but i’d like to think there’s no abject poverty in Erebor. like, let’s not assume the dwarves have fucked up socioeconomics as badly as we have 
• miners, for instance, wouldn’t be part of a lower- or poor class, but instead would be held in places of honor and paid very well for the dangerous and important work they do - after all, they’re directly responsible for unearthing the mountain’s wealth. why should they be underpaid just because they’re physical laborers? no.
• gender roles are virtually nonexistent because it’s better that way and dwarves are awesome and i said so
• the streets are kept clean and orderly; every citizen has a sense of belonging as well as ownership in the mountain

Bilbo called it “the greatest kingdom in middle earth” and i’m not about to take that lightly

EREBOR EVERYDAY STUFF IS SO IMPORTANT TO ME???

• venTIL ATION? how do you ventilate such a huge fucking mountain, so that nobody suffocates from the heat down low? there’s a lot of natural updraft and stuff like that, but god the master level skill that would have to go into carving out a webbing of ventilation shafts that pretty much work on their own is kILLING ME
  
• same goes for plumbing, I mean we saw in dos that they are no strangers to using water powered mechanisms, so I’m just imagining the sweltering heat and quiet plip-plop and of pipes running through the entire mountain, meeting in like this massive brain-like rattling sputtering structure somewhere where dwarves readjust their massive cogs and shit maybe that’s too steampunk but I love it anyway
  
• as for the farmyard animals, erebor is a MASSIVE self-sustained kingdom, the expenses if they were to import everything would be EXORBITANT, so I bet rachel’s right, they’ve found a really clever way to grow pastures for their livestock, and also have really resilient animals who don’t mind grazing on the (newly rejuvenated) mountainsides I bet
  
• as for the society aspect, I wouldn’t go so far as to presume they totally eradicated poverty, but they do have a very strong system that I still believe has a lot in common with a caste system (though looser), where you’re probably born into a guild and might be expected to take up that job, but nobody except for your overly traditional parents/grandparents/wider family is going to raise an issue if you decide to do something else
  
• dwarven pubs
  
• dwarven brothels
  
• dwarven LIBRARIES 
  
• DWARVENM ARKETS with like this entire MASSIVE cave spanning AT LEAST five floors dedicated to it and more adventurous buyers can rope right down the bridges if they know where they want to get, they’re selling uncut lapis lazuli down there again brb [whooshes into the depths of the mountain swan-dive style] (okay I’m exaggerating but you get the point)
  
• basically a dwarven kingdom works like a machine of its own, every single person is a cog in it and everyone has to work efficiently for the machine to operate smoothly oKAY FIGHT ME ON THIS (or alternatively send me more headcanons bc this is fun)
  

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)