The Book of Lost Tales - J. R. Tolkien [155]
The account of the Dwarves in this tale is of exceptional interest in other respects. ‘The beards of the Indrafangs’ have been named in Tinúviel’s ‘lengthening spell’ (pp. 19, 46); but this is the first description of the Dwarves in my father’s writings—already with the spelling that he maintained against the unceasing opposition of proof-readers—and they are eminently recognisable in their dour and hidden natures, in their ‘unloveliness’ (The Silmarillion p. 113), and in their ‘marvellous skill with metals’ (ibid. p. 92). The strange statement that ‘never comes a child among them’ is perhaps to be related to ‘the foolish opinion among Men’ referred to in The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A (III), ‘that there are no Dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves “grow out of stone”.’ In the same place it is said that ‘it is because of the fewness of women among them that the kind of the Dwarves increases slowly’.
It is also said in the tale that it is thought by some that the Dwarves ‘have not heard of Ilúvatar’ on knowledge of Ilúvatar among Men see p. 209.
According to the Gnomish dictionary Indrafang was ‘a special name of the Longbeards or Dwarves’, but in the tale it is made quite plain that the Longbeards were on the contrary the Dwarves of Belegost; the Dwarves of Nogrod were the Nauglath, with their king Naugladur. It must be admitted however that the use of the terms is sometimes confusing, or confused: thus the description of the Nauglath on pp. 223–4 seems to be a description of all Dwarves, and to include the Indrafangs, though this cannot have been intended. The reference to ‘the march of the Dwarves and Indrafangs’ (p. 234) must be taken as an ellipse, i.e. ‘the Dwarves of Nogrod and the Indrafangs’. Naugladur of Nogrod and Bodruith of Belegost are said to have been akin (p. 235), though this perhaps only means that they were both Dwarves whereas Ufedhin was an Elf.
The Dwarf-city of Nogrod is said in the tale to lie ‘a very long journey southward beyond the wide forest on the borders of those great heaths nigh Umboth-muilin the Pools of Twilight, on the marches of Tasarinan’ (p. 225). This could be interpreted to mean that Nogrod was itself ‘on the borders of those great heaths nigh Umboth-muilin’ but I think that this is out of the question. It would be a most improbable place for Dwarves, who ‘dwell beneath the earth in caves and tunnelled towns, and aforetime Nogrod was the mightiest of these’ (p. 224). Though mountains are not specifically mentioned here in connection with Dwarves, I think it extremely likely that my father at this time conceived their cities to be in the mountains, as they were afterwards. Further, there seems nothing to contradict the view that the configuration of the lands in the Lost Tales was essentially similar to that of the earliest and later ‘Silmarillion’ maps; and on them, ‘a very long journey southward’ is totally inappropriate to that between the Thousand Caves and the Pools of Twilight.
The meaning must therefore be, simply, ‘a very long journey southward beyond the wide forest’, and what follows places the wide forest, not Nogrod; the forest being, in fact, the Forest of Artanor.
The Pools of Twilight are described in The Fall of Gondolin, but the Elvish name does not there appear (see pp. 195–6, 217).
Whether Belegost