Wherefore, they ask, are your folk so surly? Why hoard you your secrets and seal the doors of your innermost halls against outsiders? Why not speak your language freely and teach your ways, rather than shut the world out coldly and turn all your attention inwards?
It makes me think of a time that Maurr and I quarreled. At the time I more disagreed with him than agreed, but — at times like these my thinking turns ‘round the other way, and I think my brother righter than he could even know.
It is because we are Dwarves.
A gift was pressed on me, or more precisely pressed on me as my sister’s representative, by an Elf. I have a flaw, I know, which is that I speak a little too freely and effusively of gifts being ‘priceless’ — this object really was priceless. This was a thing made of materials that can no longer be had, by arts that can no longer be practiced; each time one of those dwindling number who can such a material work choose to so do, it is consumed for ever — one artifact for all future generations created, all other possibilities circumscribed.
If twenty or two-hundred of these things remain I know not, but the number is finite. Therefore they are priceless, the material inheritance of a whole art, a culture. And properly such things should belong to whole peoples, as artifacts; held by individuals to bestow at their whim, such things should not be.
Nevertheless, it was, as an act of cruelty.
I have tried by every power of reasoning to make it into something other than cruelty, in my mind. I would rather imagine it as foolishness or ignorance. But to do so is difficult, for I tried so hard to refuse and to make plain my reasons for refusing. It was pressed on us ‘to put us at ease’, it was said; I refused, for how could it make a caravan mostly of civilian crafters, noncombatant ladies, and the lame easy to have now to escort something so precious so many leagues through wood and mountain? It was pressed on us ‘to prove Elvish goodwill’, it was said; I refused, for from that goodwill already we richly benefit and understand well — after all, not only is the North safe and the High Pass traversable thanks only to the cooperation of all Free Peoples, I myself am here as a student, every day directly benefiting from our hosts’ goodwill.
And when over and over pleas are made to ‘do this not, I beg you, do not press this on us,’ and nevertheless it is pressed — I cannot by any rhetorical arts transform that into anything but cruelty.
I ought to have refused ultimately, not capitulated to that insistence, and brought not this awful burden onto my family. But refuse and what will I be? It will be paraded — ‘Ah, see the ungratefulness of the dwarf. The offer of friendship refused, the hand of hospitality turned away.’ Even so by acceptance it has like already been paraded — ‘Ah, see the greediness of the dwarf. He takes what he knows should not be his, because a dwarf has no will in the face of that which is glittering.’ Hold my line and I would be ‘obdurate’; give in because the pressor would not and, in the interests of friendship, I was unwilling to call his motives dishonest, and I am called ‘yielding’; refuse to be so persecuted and point out that dishonesty, and then I would be ‘belligerent’ and ‘rude’ and ‘a poor guest, like to all those other dwarves who walk over the Bridge in ignorance, leave everywhere foul footprints, and exit in ingratitude’.
I chose to be yielding because unwilling I was to call unfriendliness and dishonesty by their names — for, unlike he, I actually believe that ‘there is nothing more precious than peace’, and I love our two peoples’ peace more than my own, even my family’s. Yet as a consequence, this poison thing was given to our keeping. What to do with it? To keep it in our family when none of us, ordinary Dwarves living our ordinary lives, have the skill of working it — that would really be foolishness and greed. Honor instead would oblige us to bear it to our liege, heir of Khazad-dûm and steward and apportioner of Longbeard wealth that cannot be measured — but what then? Of course my own hope would be that the King Under the Mountain would make it a proper and kingly gift to a neighbor-nation, transforming something given in mockery of peace and friendship into their sincere emissary instead. But — though the King has the full faith of we sons of Bóurr, not so naïve am I to think it could not cause strife in the wider court, the debate over its disposal. And if in Erebor we kept it, in hopes of someday reviving the lost arts of Narvi — then again from the outside will come those slings of ‘hoarding’, of ‘thievery’, of ‘greed’.
A gem of discord it would be, if we bore it to Erebor. And truly I do not want to think it of him, I do not, I do not, but — most probably, that is what he knew and intended: to hurt my entire people, as an act of spite.
For whatever incomprehensible crime we committed — my best guess, a failure to fall prostrate and worship one so superior to us noeg — such a punishment. A mockery of our little quartzes and beryls that we brought to barter and give away; a mockery of the skill of my sister, who in her ninety years has learned merely to work gold and silver and not mithril and starmoon; a mockery of mortal Dwarves who our whole lives will earnestly toil before we die, the sum of whose craft and learning, creations and wealth, blood and tears, will never compare to in worth to an immortal’s, who from his seat atop his millenia of acquisitions may throw away a priceless talisman of culture or two, if he fancies.
And there is no recourse. There will never be any recourse, because we are the Adopted, the in-error-created, the imperfectly envisioned, the flawed and deformed. And they are the Firstborn, the immortal, the beings-as-they-ought-be, whose motives shall never be questioned, whose birthright shall never need proven, whose worthiness shall ever be assured.
Any evil that comes of them is individual, else the tragedy of the Shadow; any good that comes of us is said to be in spite of our flaws.
We will never be vindicated because it has been all decided, before the start.
But it is not that which makes me cry out in hurt and rage. Instead it is this:
If born I was the correct and intended child, with body and mind perfected and life as long as Arda itself, with century-centuries of wisdom and skill and the wealth of all that time’s slow building — if walked I could have all the land and perceived it with unoccluded eyes, absorbing its lore from west to east — if that much power and worth I could have, half inherited and half of my own ascent, concentrated in my individual being and subject to my one will — I cannot understand turning all that to ends of spite.
Stunted they call us, the creations of imperfect design. And flawed we are, and mortal, struggling against our conditions internal and external to create anything in our little time. Our arts we improve by the experiment and labor of one generation after the other; we build our wisdom bit by bit, by scrabbling through nature for precious veins of it to add to the few and precious traditions we strain to remember — as to rap on the workshop-door and ask questions of even our Maker we have not leave.
Such is our lot; such is mine, though by some measures I have even had more than my fair share. And with it I wish to do everything I can do that is good and helpful. The wisdom and song-powers I will never have to heal the hurts of all I come across, and for certain more friends will die in my arms, and scars will remain that I prove unable to do anything about. But if I can alleviate one person’s pain just a little by the gathering of the lore I seek, then I must try and study as diligently as I can. And courtier and ambassador of a hundred languages I cannot envision myself either; but again, if I can by an act of kindness or courtesy deepen our friendships, even just one friendship that might someday inspire an act of kindness again, I must try and stretch my powers of empathy and rhetoric both to their limit.
I wish those powers were much greater. O, I wish I could do more. If I think of the sum of repair our world needs and how little I can effect on my own, I am like to begin to cry. And I feel — I hope — that if I had power and wealth and wisdom, that one drop of Madakh-khatûna’s water had fallen on my head, that I would try, at least, to turn every ounce of what I had to good and merciful ends, or at least to treat all who are weaker than me with loving grace and pour out kindness into the world.
I do not understand choosing cruelty when every other option lies open.
And to us not all options lie open. We are born with our flaws and limitations into a world that is Marred, a maze created by evils intended and unintended, of our own and strangers’ making; we take the passage that seems best, hoping the outcome to be good and if it is not, that we are not judged too harshly.
If a little taller I had been born, able to see a little further across that maze, I hope that I would try to guide others to happy ends — and when they meet them not, weep, and never laugh.
But they do laugh. Not all, but some — and about it, there is nothing we can do.
A great dislike I have, I admit, for Dwarves who forget the importance of courtesy. Crudeness, ingratitude, offensive behavior as an opening, unprovoked — angry it made me in Bree-town and angrier still in the Valley. For a Dwarf who behaves so thinks nothing of his wider situation, and certainly not of others’. He will appeal to history and complain of the Five Armies, forgetting that if it ended differently our Mountain would not stand proud against the Orcs and our rivers of trade would not run again east and west; he will spit obscenities and make accusations with a throat wetted with someone else’s wine that generations of Dwarves before him labored long at trade and diplomacy to be able to sit and taste; cruelest yet, because he is mobile, he will think nothing of the Stone Quarter or the auction-hill, where the livelihoods of honest Dwarves, hard-working Dwarves, mild and gentle Dwarves, depend on the ties of alliance and understanding we have worked so hard to build and so oft must struggle to maintain. Dwarves who behave like those louts are wicked and shameful, and ought not call themselves Longbeards or wear Erebor’s colors, not until they can learn to consider the wellbeing of other Dwarves.
And yet — those Dwarves whose hearts turn cool and resentful, who withdraw their love and trust from the outside and turn it inward, to the shelter of the mountain and the community for which it stands — those who counsel self-reliance and wariness and that courtesy, trade, and pragmatic alliance need not imply warmth, openness, nor willingness to fling wide our doors to plunder — they I cannot judge or resent.
Indeed I am not sure I can even say that they are not correct. Maurr was correct. Based on logic, the proof of history, the proof of experience, they are correct.
For no matter what we do, no matter what choice we make, no matter what we strive to build — we will, to the judgment of outsiders, always be dwarves. Our capacities will always be judged meaner, our perceptions more colored, our wants more selfish, our motives more suspect; our lives will never be weighted the same as others’, our works never accepted without suspicion, scrutiny, and caveat. The broken heart, the hopeful heart, the heart that cries out with desperation and yearning, will always, always be judged by the beard he wears first. And it is because we are the unintended, the lesser copy by a lesser hand designed, that no matter what we sing with all our passion and despair — our music will always be judged out of harmony. By our very existence we embody dissonance, and so always, always, always we will be unbeautiful.
The only recourse is to become Dwarves.
Into the mountain we turn, the great doors closed behind. And there we spread out the fingers of our unbeautiful hands to turn darkness into light, dross into treasure, the ugly and broken into that which once again glimmers and shines. In the mountain we make our own secrets and arts, our own customs and culture, comprehensible only to ourselves: smithing, mining, tailoring, carving, crafting our own stories, myths, families, laws, societies. And by that labor, that effort and that craft — we, who are disharmonious, stunted and misdesigned, sing disharmony into harmony again.
It is something that cannot be done. Dissonance cannot become consonance. No matter how it is attempted, it cannot be accomplished; it is metaphysically impossible. The wise, the whole, the correct — they know better than to try.
Therefore it is we who do it, we who repair, build, and sing. And it is we who fail. And it is through our failure that we put out into the world our music, our own queer music, that soars up towards the ceiling of the possible with wings that cannot fly, and then falls. And yet we will raise it up again, and again and again, and lift up our ridiculous creation to fall short of the divine — and dream, whether it does or not, that it reaches higher, and higher, and higher, every time we try.
That is the greed, the ambition, and the hubris of the Dwarves, and why we are the people chosen to repair the world.
And there is a last gift that we have to accomplish this, something I was given, too. It is stubbornness.
And stubbornness is why I, the queer child of a queer people, acknowledge that my brother and all the rest whose argument is that we must always stand apart, friendly but distant, have behind that argument the superior logic and evidence — and disobey it, myself.
To go as I do into the company of other peoples, humble and supplicant, presenting a wide-open heart and mind (and perhaps sometimes too free a tongue) in hopes of forging friendships and new knowledge — is to invite, inevitably, another unkindness, another act of cruelty, onto myself. Something like this will happen again, and I will again be backed into a corner from which any exit will be criticized. And I will be blamed, because I am a dwarf.
What I did — accepting the poison present and the words accompanying it at face-value rather than fight their dishonesty, because I was and still am unwilling to call an Elf of Rivendell a petty tyrant and false-friend — was cowardly, perhaps, and certainly ‘yielding’, as he sneered. And to take something clearly intended to hurt and drive apart and then try to turn it into something good, to spin at my treadle evil intentions into good ends, was naïve.
But my stubbornness is this: I choose to be naïve. I know it is foolish and trusting, and I know for it I will be mocked as foolish and trusting. But to do otherwise I will not. If an opportunity I have to be trusting, honest, friendly, and kind, I will choose to take it over answering deceptiveness and cruelty with aggression. And for this decision I know I will be burned; nevertheless I make it, for the rewards of peace and friendship are great enough to make such a small sacrifice worthwhile — and, by being burned, I might interrupt a cycle turning with resentment and malice and instead remind onlookers or even the offender what goodwill and open-heartedness look like.
Yet even with none of these rewards — no friendship and no vindication — still I will choose to be gentle, kind, forgiving, and naïve. Even if otherwise I know it is, even if otherwise it is proven to be, I will not stop acting as though this is a world where goodwill can win and where I can by it do the work of the Dwarf, even outside the mountain, even among strangers to whom I may forever be naug. That is the form it will take — my full greed, stubbornness, and pride.
And perhaps it is for this purpose and that mission I am now alive.
I am the dove who was born without wings, whose nature is nevertheless to fly.
