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Lord of the Rings Dwarf Name Generator

Are you handy with an axe? Do you know lots of songs about gold? Are tunnels and caves the places where you feel most comfortable? If so, you may be in need of a new identity from our Lord of the Rings dwarf name generator!

Regarding Middle Earth Dwarves

The proud race of dwarfs have been a fantasy standard ever since J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit. Our generator gives you the chance to create Lord of the Rings-style names. It's a great way to create distinctive character names for MMORPGS like World of Warcraft, for tabletop role playing games, or just to add a little heroic fantasy splendor to your day. Unfortunately there is only one female dwarf mentioned in Tolkien's histories of Middle Earth! We suggest visiting our other dwarf generators linked above for more female characters.

Tolkien's Dwarves

Tolkien stuck relatively close to the original Norse tales when he was first creating the stories of Middle Earth that would later become The Silmarillion, although he did end up using a different plural version of the word – 'dwarves' instead of 'dwarfs', a change which he later referred to as a piece of 'bad grammar'. In the earliest tales of Middle Earth (collected together in The Book of Lost Tales), the dwarves are portrayed as largely evil and nefarious creatures working for orc mercenaries.

However, when Tolkien utilized his setting for Middle-Earth in order to write the story that would become The Hobbit, he significantly changed the portrayal of the dwarves. While there was still a major influence from Norse and Germanic mythology – the dwarves use Anglo-Saxon runes as their writing, and all the original dwarvish names hail from the 'Catalogue of the Dwarfs' that appears in the Poetic Edda, a collection of original Norse poetic myths – Tolkien was equally influenced by medieval texts describing the history of the Jews, leading to concepts like the dispossessed nature of the dwarves and their struggle to reclaim their homeland of the Lonely Mountain. Once he came to writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien deep-ended these themes, and even used the Hebrew language as a rough inspiration for creating the dwarvish language of Khuzdul.

Dwarves in The Silmarillion

Tolkien eventually wrote a specific creation myth for the Middle-Earth dwarves into the collected tales of The Silmarillion (finally published after his death in 1973), including the original clans of the dwarves – the Longbeards, the Firebeards, the Broadbeams, the Ironfists, the Stiffbeards, the Blacklocks and the Stonefotts. The most dwarf-centric story in The Silmarillion – 'The Nauglafring' – was also the earliest written and still had the more 'evil' portrayal of the dwarves, leading to it being rewritten after Tolkien's death by his son Christopher Tolkien and fellow writer Guy Gavriel Kay in order to be more consistent.

Disclaimer: this is a fan commentary page intended to encourage interest in the fantasy race known as dwarfs. Our page is not an official publication and is not in any way affiliated with or endorsed by the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien Enterprises, or any of their licensees. Copyrights and trademarks for the books, films, articles, and other promotional materials are held by their respective owners and their reference is allowed under the fair use clause of copyright law. Tolkien created an extensive world in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and other works, and a very small amount of the Tolkien's works are quoted here under fair use. All information was gathered from factual reference material lists in the public domain. (Wikipedia 1). The extremely limited quotation of Tolkien's works is in no way intended to harm or undermine the market value of those works, rather to encourage fans to engage with and seek out those works.