Middle-earth Dwarves: Dwarf, Durin, Thorin Oakenshield, King under the Mountain, List of Middle-earth Dwarves, Gimli, Balin, Durin's folk - Softcover

Chapters: Dwarf, Durin, Thorin Oakenshield, King under the Mountain, List of Middle-earth Dwarves, Gimli, Balin, Durin's folk, Dáin II Ironfoot, Fathers of the Dwarves, Mîm, Thráin II,. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 17. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Dwarves are a race inhabiting the world of Arda, a fictional prehistoric Earth which includes the continent Middle-earth. They appear in his books The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (195455), and the posthumously published The Silmarillion (1977), Unfinished Tales (1980), and The History of Middle-earth series (198396), the last three edited by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien. In the earliest version of The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, the very few Dwarves who appear are portrayed as evil beings, employers of Orc mercenaries and in conflict with the Elves who are the imagined 'authors' of the myths, and are therefore biased against Dwarves. Tolkien was inspired by the dwarves of Norse myths and dwarves of traditional European fairy-tales (such as those of the Brothers Grimm), from whom his Dwarves take their characteristic affinity with mining, metalworking, crafting and avarice. The representation of Dwarves as evil changed dramatically with The Hobbit. Here the Dwarves became occasionally comedic and bumbling, but largely seen as honourable, serious-minded, but still portraying some negative characteristics such as being gold-hungry, overly proud and occasionally officious. According to The History of the Hobbit, Tolkien was now influenced by his own selective reading of medieval texts regarding the Jewish people and their history. The dwarves' characteristics of being dispossessed of their homeland (the Lonely Mountain, their ancestral home, is the goal the exiled Dwarves seek to...http://booksllc.net/?id=63446