As has been our tradition with all LOTR movies, my oldest bestie treated me to each installment of The Hobbit trilogy, and I replay her with fanfiction that meets her needs. If this sounds like she's my patron, that's because she kind of is.
WHAT IT IS: These are snapshots of Thorin's voice at different times of his life. It's written in the close/intimate third-person, with each installment addressed to a character. Of course, you can expect him to change and contradict himself. You can also expect Unnecessary Capitalization of Important Dwarf Words.
HE DOES NOT
You Do Not See
Thorin Oakenshield is a Dwarven Prince and he does not mine.
To mistake his statement for disrespect is presumptuous, for there is nothing wrong with mining, and a warrior ought not fault those hands that touched his steel long before it became swords, axes, clubs, knives. A kingdom of mountain is built upon mines. A blade that cuts orc is melted of mines. Even the coat buttons, beef cleavers, ponies' bits, the edge that he uses to shape the black of his chin – all are metal, and as such, made first from the work of men who mine.
It is not a lowly profession. It is not labor of shame. You have put words in his mouth, old sage, if you think a Durinson would disgrace this trade – one of the oldest trades – a toil that lifted the Dwarven people to their irradiant heights, etched their glittering channels, and filled the howl of their feldspar coffers with unblemished gold.
But it is not a prince's place, and Thorin – who remembers nothing if not the rightful place of things – does not mine.
He thinks this many times. He thinks it with a pick in his hand; in the moment it hovers, like a bated breath, over his head; as the pebbles burst from cavern walls. He thinks it with the iron mist in his lungs and so much dust on his body that it turns his prince braids into birds, into ravens that have rolled in the dirt. One day he will think it with a wry, dry twitch in his cheek, with his nephews bickering behind him, over the pregnant knolls of a green-grass Shire. But for now – in a time before his full name, Thorin II, was won, in the weeping grove away from Erebor, when grief's red fingers are still fresh and nothing shields his arm but skin – Thorin of Thráin of Thrór works a mine until blood blisters through the wrappings on his palms.
It is the darkest kind of dark in the belly of a mine. You see nothing that is not lit by lantern or torch – not the wink of your tools, not the dull glean of mineral before it is purified, not the texture of hands made rough upon slag. Yet there are many colors and textures of that darkness, many varying degrees. It changes with every level you struggle lower towards the core of this earth. Thorin's superior size (for he is a Durin) means this Dwarf Lord may toil high, hauling crates in the shallows, where sun still sinks though this warm soil. He feels badly for those who must climb deep. The ropes they tie fast 'neath their arms make the support beams shiver and groan; he worries, and he frets, and it all shows in how the once-prince frowns. Thorin son-of-Thráin was first a prince, you see. He was a prince before everything else. He was a much-preened, much-spoiled, lovely brat of a prince who knew he was made to be king, whose lofty expectations and lucent voice had defined him – and, in truth, he is a prince who has never forgotten that of himself. A hundred years of worry and fret and frown will intensify the structure of his face – will gild him with the shade of silver that comes only from great shock and mighty grief – but it will not make him forget. Thorin of Erebor will not forget what they were before. This prince will take these things that he has – this echo of vanity, memory like a mirror shard – and use them to be sure. Sureness, the new duty of a prince exiled: to be sure his people remember who they were. For you can see none of it in the cold damp nothingness of mine that swallows them whole.
He binds his raw palms in linen and hoists a pickaxe; he carries ore and chokes on soot; but Thorin Oakenshield does not mine. He cripples stone. He fights. Every day, he fights.
Thorin Oakenshield is a Dwarven Prince and he does not chop wood.
Perhaps you do not know this, being what you are, for your bones are fragile and your beard is long, but timber is not highly prized by Dwarrow. There is not much use for lumber in Erebor – Erebor, citadel of a race harder than oak, where stone cold is not a saying but a fact of who they are. It is not fit to build anything proper with. It is not lasting enough to make crafts of substance. Frankly, it does not matter that Durin's Folk have no tree-cutters, for the Men of Dale saw enough elms and alder to suffice what needs their betters have. Thorin has never wasted his thoughts upon mundane trade. And why ought he now? Perhaps your people find it to be tougher stuff than his; to Dwarves, to those forged from corundum and bedrock and lava, tree wood is for nothing but children's weapons and cooking pits.
One day tree wood will be all that stands between death and a prince in the hot fist of rage, full of magma, charging for the pale hide that holds Grandfather's head before realizing there is nothing in his hands. One day tree wood will stop short Azog the Defiler's mace. One day tree wood will give him his war-call and his hero fame – but today, it splinters and groans, and this weak, inferior cedar is all that falls beneath the nose of an axe never intended for bark.
It is an unpleasant sort of chill on the shore of this forest. The air is thick, damp, and smells of rotted peat moss. It made him ill when they first entered the wet ranges beyond Long Lake – long ago, when they were at their most lost, new to the daze of homelessness, decades before the caravans of his exiled people quieted their feet, stilled their wandering, and settled in mountains said to be bluer than the larimar-green of a Durin's eye. Thorin would cough in the morning from the sumac and woodchips; he would cough in the evening from the soot of these unclean Mannish mines; he would cough and cough and cough. Coughing is all their people do in Dunland. He fears selfishly that this bad air, with its bitter black sand and pneumoniac mist, will ruin his voice – but it never does – and, he thinks, it is not so selfish to preserve the ashes of your heritage in whatever ways are left. The birch dust sprays. The mine dust plumes. The Dwarf Prince ignores the mud plastered to his shins and he works.
He cleaves crude halves into pulpy fir and snapping elm; he saws white aspen; but Thorin Oakenshield does not chop wood. He splits and divides. He puts up a house for his sister to birth his nephews in – not a proper house, not Mountain-Made, not one that will last the ages. He gives rise to a sparse, ugly cottage of dark clay and dead tree. He builds.
Thorin Oakenshield is a Dwarven Prince and he does not smith.
Even you, gaunt and brittle as you are, must know that this craft – of all crafts – is the dearest to a Dwarf. In their very meat and marrow is the craving for metals that glow. In Erebor, you will hear, always, the symphonies of workers culling, heating, molding, shaving, shaping, shining – for shine is the currency and calling of a lonely fortress perched upon riches too deep for the gropings of Men. Their home hosts more smiths than warriors. So much making to be done: jewel-setting, blade-folding, pot-pouring, brass-welding, copper-bending, ingot-casting, steel-plating, armor-latching, coin-etching, gem-cutting. Ferocious fighters they are, but beyond anything else, this is the lifeblood of those who live under the mountain cold.
There is nothing to be sniffed at in such art. Dwarves love what is beautiful and strong. They love what lasts. But this prince – Prince Thorin of Thráin of Thror – has long been vainglorious about beauty, a worshipper of permanence, and vindictive about strength. He is a Durin, this prince would have told you; he is Mountain-Made, Dwarrow-Hearted; he is and has beauty and strength already, by nature of his blood, by right of his birth. He was not asked to toil at an anvil. So Thorin Oakenshield does not.
The Dunland midday is not merciful or mild. There is hummock fog soaking his shirt. There is s a mess of swart hair twisted beneath sunlight at the back of his neck – it has shed its sapphires, traded its diamonds, lost its luster, left to mourn the vanity it once had. For you cannot be vain, Thorin has learned. There has come a time when even he, Thorin of Thráin, Heir of the Silver Fountains, Voice of Durin, darling of his Queen grandmother and grandfather King, cannot care about beauty – not in the withering of his great people, as their glamour dims and their children starve. His lips bleed. His fingernails break off.
The first humid summer and the flavorless human food leaves Durin's Folk ill, emaciated, low. None of them still standing can afford not to work. And so work Thorin does. He breaks and cleans the iron he's mined, hammers it into other forms. Not into amulets or armlets or swords – but into beams, nails, forks, and indeed, into whatever other unspectacular, unbeautiful, simple thing needs making.
Tools made for Mannish hands are tall and unwieldy, like Men themselves. If he had afore learned the skill (for their master smiths are dead by drake fire), he might have used these poor utensils to make another, better set. Thorin holds his missized tongs as straight as he can. At each strike, he feels the tremor from wrist to arm, through chest and stomach; it rumbles his ribs and rattles the teeth in his jaw.
"This is the work of our first fathers' fathers," Father tells him one morning, scrounging the humbles of honors to sustain them, mantras Thráin repeats between the bouts of coal-black blood he spits at night. Our first fathers. Perhaps there is some comfort in that, Thorin thinks, as he hands him a bucket and a tonic-soaked cloth. Perhaps there is some brief solace in being a Dwarf at a smoldering forge – even a disappointing and ungainly forge; even a Dwarf who has always thought he deserved more. It is a thing that comes naturally, a task worthy of lifting their kingdom, and molding the powerful foundations of its golden doors.
But it is not the work of a king.
One day, Thorin will boil a pot of jewelry – treasures pulled from killed friends and dead foes – and from that hard-won metal, will smelt himself an instrument of rough loves. It is a poor replacement for what is lost. In Erebor, there is a fine harp waiting, two Dwarrow high, strings of horse gut, body of beauteous silver and ivory. He still hears how the notes would echo and pine in those cavernous court halls. Often would Thorin play for his grandfather – old music, the blood songs of dynasties before them, melodies mournful and proud. Dwarves are a sorrowed, arrogant people with much to be arrogant about and much to be sorrowful for – but some must keep the stories, too.
He knows more was meant for him, but this is what he has.
So it goes with castaway rulers. In these nights, as they sleep unceilinged in camps, their hide tents ragged from unhindered wind, Lonely Mountain's throneless king will take the hand of his son's son and ask for songs. Now this young Dwarf Prince has no polished halls or shining harp. He has neither fine furs nor moonstones in his braids. But he has his voice, and if there ever was a voice of Durin, it is the clear dark voice of Thorin of Thráin of Thrór.
"That tongue of yours is a terror, son-of-my-son," Grandfather would chide him in a full court, insults he did not really mean, his favoritism as plain as the rubies on his second heir. So many gifts given; so much faith placed in ebony princes with sharp, haughty egos; so many nobles left blustering in embarrassment at some offense Thorin of Thráin dared say at his predecessor's side. Father would bellow silence in all his best roars; Thrór only tutted and laughed. "Better you would never speak but for to sing."
One day, Thorin will not speak so much. His high-and-mighty self will be chiseled down, sculpted into a curt and vicious pride, wintry as a lonely mountain; and his voice will learn to hold its songs dearly, not parade them, not belt them out in a council hall. The vestiges of pomposity are behind him. These are the traits that must now be hardened or heated out.
Thrór of Dáin of Náin is an old, old Dwarf; he is a waylaid, dying sovereign, head gone sick with greed dashed and grief immeasurable. As his heirs melt iron, they long for bygone days. And Thorin sings his grandfather from feeble-minded madness to sleep beneath an open, homeless sky.
Beneath the prairie sun, these chants and lyrics are haunts of memory between hammer and anvil. He hums in the quiet of his head. He punctuates stanzas with the pound of another bolt or nail. He makes barrelsful of hinges and he makes practical things and he makes his soft princely hands coarse – but Thorin Oakenshield does not smith. He remembers in smoke and heavy blows. He honors. He does not forget.
Thorin Oakenshield is a Dwarven Prince and he does not pamper the dead.
But so many are they – those killed, those missed, those suffocated by their exile and the crush of what they no longer have, who they no longer are. There are fleshy corpses and crackling skeletons and bodiless memories, lost. There is ash that settles in the steaming bulwarks of Erebor and family markers littering the highways that brought them here. There are more dead than princes and kings can count.
Thorin has known this since he watched scarlet wings bear down from the heights beyond his home. At no time does he feel the weight of defeat more heavily than when they start digging graves.
It is their custom to entomb or to burn. Planting the deceased is an odd practice for more delicate peoples with more delicate earth. The Dwarves do not treat dead bodies with the same squeamishness as you, for as warriors know, flesh is a vessel; it become but a shell when the soul pours out. The elves say the ancient Dwarrow of oldest yore – before Erebor or Durin or Khuzdul tongue – used to eat them. This does not bother the pragmatic Dwarf nearly as much as some might hope. But history is history, and now is now, and ritual can carry or change. The sad state of things remains plain. There is no burning or tomb-building to be done here – for they have no undying slate, no basalt, and their funeral pyres would draw orcs from the rot-caves, slavering for child meat.
So they dig, and they bury the vessels of family in this foreign dirt.
Of all these unroyal tools he has come to use since they left the Lonely Mountain, a shovel is the most effacing. He throws soil over his shoulder until the death-holes are just deep enough not to be by wolves undug. They cannot delay in this grim task, and it is never-ending, for always do the elders and infants seem to die. Troves of youngling bones, of Dwarrowdam pleats, of white-beards – these scatter the paths Erebor's orphans have walked. No rites or gemstones have they to adorn them, to lessen the hurt. And there are uncountable hurts. Dwarves do not believe suckling babes have souls – it is too painful a thing to think when so many are born still, and so many more will not survive – for they have long been accustomed to losing their young. This the cur-elves say is the price of their ancestors' cannibal ways – that the Valar have put a curse on their breeding – but Durin's Folk care not for elf-lies. It is a pure and noble agony to mourn a child. It is a suffering the Dwarves must bear in their blood. But somehow it feels differently now. Somehow, when he sinks the grain sack that wombs cousin Dori's not-yet-son, there is a strange breathlessness in the cove of his chest. This is the labor of collapse. It puts an ache in Thorin's back that never fully fades.
One day the griefs will overspill and he will lament no more, but this anger – doom-driven, ingrown – shall root and twine for the length of this prince's life.
You have, no doubt, felt darkness during the many decades of your long life. Thorin is not like you, wizard; he is not so supremely arrogant are you are; he does not presume to understand all that works in others' hearts. But you have never ruled anything. He can see that in the errant way you stand and in the wanderlust your fading eyes, fae as they are, still kindle. You have never ruled anything, and you cannot comprehend that kind of loss.
The nomadic Dwarves will tend no dead-yards, no exquisite catacombs, like those beneath Erebor's heart for many years. One day, Thorin of Thráin, oak bark newly smashed on his arm, will set aflame a hill – a hill mortared by blood, build of slain brothers – a hill so high he can see no sickle sun beyond the dread mist of Moria. But today, and the next day, he digs low. There is a question of succession and the bleakest of hopes on his mind.
Time blurs all but Dwarven steel and stoutest stone. Yet this Prince of Durin will ever remember how Durin's Folk, pushed from their Houses, wept for the lines that would be clipped short, mourned for heirs they would never know. Small bodies blue tossed in with wrinkled ones lain finally to rest. And on spade and shovel, he makes himself an ironclad promise. No son of his will mold in the muck like a wastling elf. When the times comes that they will end their final walk to Ered Luin, Dís is quickly wed and fast fat with Fíli (scandalously fast), but Thorin is not to take a Durinbride. Thorin will have no children wailing their birth cries outside the boom of Erebor rock. He will have no wives or concubines until there are diadems and satin and snow lion furs to bristle upon their shoulders, heads, hands. He will dress his queen in dragon scale, and she will sit upon a divan of Smaug's tooth, talon, bone.
And should his family die, they will have opals upon their shrouds.
This does Thorin II make his oath.
If you underestimate him, you are a knock-knee and a fool, old man. One day in the future you will meet him in Bree, and he will be most impressive with the wild wood of his armor and dusk of his long mane, but you should be impressed regardless. Scoff at him now in shirtsleeves and sweat lines. Laugh if you can – go on, scarecrow, he dares you to – for the opinions of fossils mean nothing to Dwarf Lords. You have no idea what a Durin is on the field of war. You have no idea how deep and deadly this blaze of their desire runs.
He is not a smith. He is not some dog-whipped hero panting for emeralds and dreaming churlishly of an obsidian throne. He is birthright. He was born to be King.
But there is, from this Dunland marsh where his shovel plunges and his voice carries far, a very long way to go. Thorin's claims are diamond-true but even a true king must first have a kingdom. And he is not the same magpie prince whose somber bass once drenched Durin's Halls in hero tales. The magpie has become a crow; the romances of olde have become something to swear upon, a tragedy to shake the peaks apart. Of his fine things, his instruments, his rings, his silver daggers and mink boots and silk capes – oh, he has sold them, sold them all and then some, sold for bread and lodgings and the tangy bite of meaningless coin. He had clung so tightly to such small treasures in the broken forest roads as they few survivors walked, sobbing, from Erebor – walked with barren pockets, broken vows, wyrm smoke in their mouths, and no songs but the wailing ones. For the song of Erebor has become lament: it is a dirge of riches, castles, stone and sons. And sure and sturdy and terrible as Durin before him: Thorin Oakenshield will sing it.
He does not hew trees. He does not tend boneyards. He does not heave through the moist tar of loam miles deep, does not scrape shale, does not cough up the black in those grueling hours before dawn.
Thorin Oakenshield is the King of a Lonely Mountain – and he does, he does, he does dig graves.
One day they will return to Erebor. One day there will be a victory chorus and oiled strings. One day, he will put this world and all things in it within their proper place again. And if you doubt him, wizard Gray, then may your long beard burn bare in the bowels of Khazad-dûm.
Thorin Oakenshield is a Dwarf King, and he will serve no one when the titan doors of Erebor split their locks and shed their claws and a thousand gems hum to the rule of a singing lord again.
But for now, he works, and yes – in the height of a dry, dirt noon – he mines.