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Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror, King of Thorin’s Hall beneath the Blue Mountains and heir to Erebor beneath the Lonely Mountain, had a bit of a conundrum on his hands.
His grandfather had been King Thror I of Erebor, known as the King Who Retook Erebor after the Days of the Dragons and the King of the Arkenstone, brother to the Lord of the Iron Hills and former heir to Daín’s Hall of Ered Mithrin – the Grey Mountains – before cold-drakes attacked the gates, killing his father and brother.
While his brother, Grór, chose to travel further east to found a new realm with some of their people, Thror had chosen to take another portion of the Durinsfolk to retake Erebor, a forgotten colony from the Second Age. Thus the Durinsfolk had divided into two halves, closely connected through travel and trade, and King Thror and Lord Grór stayed close for a while. Thorin remembered years of his youth spent in the company of his 2nd cousin Daín Ironfoot, named for the Hall of their grandfathers’ and an ancestor long gone.
Erebor had had good mines, and the people had invested wisely in training, until the artisans of Erebor grew famous for their high level of craftsmanship, on everything from fine jewelry to exquisite toys, and with fame and fortune, King Thror’s city grew.
King Thror had lived to a great old age, and wealth had grown in his time, leaving Erebor famous for its presumed vast treasury. Unfortunately, treasuries were just the kind of thing to attract a dragon, and around the year 2770 of the Third Age, when Thorin was only 24 years old, the fire-drake Smaug came.
By luck, Thorin had been an adventurous tween, and had been out in the hills overnight, but that only gave him a very good view of the fires and flames, as Smaug burned his way through the front gates of the jewelled city.
His party had thought their king lost, like his great grandfather had been lost to the ice-drake long ago, but in the early morning hours, a soot-covered king and equally soot-covered crown prince appeared, running from the southern corner of the mountain, and together with the rest of the refugees, they had all travelled westwards together, to the hills of Dunland.
Dunland had been a bad fit for dwarves. There had been little of true value to be mined, and their people had grown accustomed to a higher standard, uneasy at the great drop in quality of materials for their trades. After twenty years of eeking a living, King Thror had decided to try the impossible once again.
As he had retaken Erebor after cold-drakes took Daín’s Hall, King Thror I would now retake the shining jewel of Durin’s legacy. He would retake the Dwarrowdelf of Khazad’Dûm, long since known as Moria, the Black Pit.
King Thror had taken only a single companion with him, a dwarrowgent named Nár, and only Nár had returned, sharing a tale of an orc who had taken Moria some time past. The orc had opened the gates to Thror, allowing Thror to enter Moria as a guest, but it was Thror’s dead body which returned, head cut off and carved with the orc’s name, three days later.
Nár had not been allowed to bring Thror’s body home with him.
Thorin’s father, suddenly King Thrain II now, had taken some time to think, during a week of silence and tears, but the atrocity had been too much, and war had begun, a war later known as the War of the Dwarves and the Orcs. It had taken three years to prepare, as Durinsfolk all over received word of the cruel death, and another six years to fight, culminating in the Battle of Azanulbizar – outside the very gates King Thror’s body had been thrown out of, nine years previous.
Thorin had been with them there, and his brother, Frerin, had been there, and his cousin Daín, with his father, Naín, had arrived with reinforcements from the Iron Hills just in time to turn the tide and bring victory to the dwarves!
…but not until Naín, Daín’s father, and Frerin, Thorin’s brother, were already too wounded to live…
King Thrain II, Thorin’s father, had asked the gathered dwarves to help him reclaim Moria, as they were already at the gates, orcs routed, but the orc which dishonoured the late King Thror had already been slain, his corpse impaled on a spike for all to know and see, and the elders spoke of Durin’s Bane, saying the dishonor had been repaid. Half of the warriors of the Durinsfolk had died during those six years, and the armies were heavy with grief, even in their victory.
In the end, the dwarrowkin had returned to their homes, leaving King Thrain II alive, but his people still poor, and now without half their warriors. As his father’s fame dwindled, Thorin’s own fame had grown, and he was now known no longer as merely “the heir”, but as Thorin Oakenshield, after wielding a thick oaken branch in his defence at the Gates of Moria.
Faced with continued poverty, and fewer warriors than ever at their disposal, King Thrain II and Thorin Oakenshield, together, had led their people away from their unfortunate halls of Dunland, and headed further west, towards another old dwarrowdelf: The ruins beneath the Blue Mountains.
It took time, but after years of delving and building, Thorin’s Hall had become the new home for the Durinsfolk, and times were good. Thorin, a grown dwarrowgent himself by then, as well as a famous veteran of the great war, was respected there, and gained much of the honour for finding a new home for their people.
His father, King Thrain II, had never complained at Thorin’s fame and good reputation. He had been proud, ever pleased to see good things come their way. But he had also been a proud dwarf, and often lamented being unable to bring their people to greater wealth and safety, like his father and grandfather had before him. Unlike his ancestors, King Thrain II did not leave his people with a grand treasury, to aid them through bad days, and he grew increasingly restless with his failures until, one day, he vanished…
The year was 2850 of the Third Age and Thorin was a hundred and four years old when he was crowned the King-in-Exile of Durin’s Folk. He was a grown adult, and had been a leader beneath his father for half his lifetime and more, but he had not been prepared for his father to simply… vanish.
And so, after many years of managing Thorin’s Hall under the rule of his father, King Thorin II left his kingdom almost as soon as he was crowned, to search for his father, if only to retrieve his corpse from a closed gate, as Nár had once found Thorin’s grandfather.
Thorin never found Thrain.
Instead, he found friends, companions on the road who protected him as he travelled through the lands of elves and men in search of one old, disappointed dwarf, while his sister, Dís, did the duty of managing the realm and bringing up two heirs, and was he ever happy to have his sister left with him, to be strong and do the right thing by their people when he could not find the strength for it in himself.
When Gandalf found Thorin in Bree, Thorin had already spent as much of his rule on the road as in his Hall, and this made the choice easy when Gandalf told him of the map, of Thrain’s journey to the east, and offered him his father’s key.
He would honour his father’s memory by taking back Erebor.
As King-in-Exile of Durin’s Folk, it was his crowned right to call upon the people of Durin, but as he called for aid in the retaking of Erebor, the Lords of the Dwarrow Halls declined, full of regret that they could only offer such allegiance to he who held the Arkenstone of House Durin, and Thorin saw the truth:
After his father’s bloody war on the orcs, no Lord would answer their family’s call again, until they could prove their worth, as Kings of Durin’s Folk.
He was in exile, in truth, and they would not accept an exiled King.
And so Thorin gathered companions from the road, and families joined in, including his own two heirs, young Filí and young Kilí, both of them already twice the age Thorin had been when he himself first went to war, though they had been born so much later.
After decades of growth beneath the Blue Mountains, Thorin’s Hall and thorin’s family had enough resources to finance one venture, one grand quest, and within a month of first meeting Gandalf, Thorin was ready to travel, twelve companions by his side.
It was not a lucky number, but Gandalf claimed to know someone to fill out the numbers, someone who could help them succeed, someone… who lived in the Shire, of all places.
And so it was, that after ninety years of searching for his father, after a hundred and fifty years of exile, and a lifetime of friendships with dwarves, Thorin Oakenshield found himself walking down the quiet roads of the Shire, watching a small, happy people living easy, peaceful lives, and he wondered what would make a hobbit, of all people, join thirteen dwarves on a Quest to face a dragon.
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