![]() ![]() *Thorin I is six generations Thorin II’s elder he was King under the Lonely Mountain before choosing to abandon it to colonize another set of mountains (descendants would return). He intones in the first chapter of Tolkien’s The Hobbit: “Far over the misty mountains grim/ To dungeons deep and caverns dim/ We must away ere break of day/ To win our harps and gold from him.” Thorin leads his dwarves to settle in the Blue Mountains northwest of the Shire, but never shakes the tug of his eastern birthright and his hatred for the dragon who stole it. His father, Thrain II, wanders off, half-crazy, and, as we learn in Tolkien’s appendices, is captured and tortured by the über-evil Sauron. The dwarves won that fight, but lost half their numbers, including their king Thror, Thorin’s grandfather. orc bloodbath at the gates of the greatest lost dwarf kingdom, Moria-where, amid the clash of blade and axe, he was forced to defend himself with a splintered oak trunk. Played by a frowning Richard Armitage, Thorin in The Hobbit draws immediate comparison to Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn in the earlier LoTR movies- yet another scion of a glorious bloodline reduced to skulking in shadows. Thorin earned the sobriquet “Oakenshield” at the Battle of Anulbizar-an epic dwarf vs. “The years lengthened,” Tolkien writes, and “the embers in the heart of Thorin grew hot again, as he brooded on the wrongs of his House and of the vengeance upon the Dragon that was bequeathed to him.” In his Unfinished Tales, Tolkien describes Thorin as an “heir without hope,” hardened by both despair and rage. As you find out early in The Hobbit film, this gold-rich kingdom (also known as Erebor) was lost to the fearsome fire-drake Smaug. He’s the leader of the company that disrupts Bilbo’s pastoral idyll in the Shire en route to reclaiming his people’s home under the Lonely Mountain. Thorin Oakenshield-technically Thorin II*-is the one dwarf you won’t forget.
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