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Accent and Memory

Summary:

“The heart is a fickle and foolish thing,” he replied instead. “I cannot afford to trust my own. Not when wisdom is firm, and so definitively defies it.”

Balin laughed, and with such mirth that he startled the king for a moment, and caused him to worry that he might have been misheard.

“Oh, what nonsense that is,” the old dwarf responded good-naturedly. “It’s quite the opposite. How else could it be that the passage of time might wipe the memory of a person from your mind so cleanly that even their face may one day be obscured from you, yet it is your heart which never grows tired of missing them?

“Did you know, I quite forgot my mother’s name the other day, and I very nearly had to ask my brother for it before it came to me all of a sudden. Still, I cannot eat lamb without wishing it were made by her recipe, and every sunrise I see seems hardly more than a gentle shadow of the warmth she once brought me. She brings it to me still, though she has been gone a century yet. Love is not a physical thing. It is not so frail.”

-- In the Half-Light of the Canyon, Chapter 17

Notes:

Based on canon dates, Dwalin would have been born two years after the sack and subsequent fall of Erebor (2770, third age), and Balin would perhaps barely remember the mountain (born 2763). Fundin died the same year as Thorin's brother Frerin, in 2799, about nine years after the battle of Azanulbizar (2790, when Thror was killed). This would have been at the end of the War of the Dwarves and Orcs, and quite possibly during the Battle of Nanduhirion (which seems like a strangely elvish name for such a thing).
All this means that by the time the Battle of Five Armies and reclamation of Erebor happens in 2940-2941, Fundin would have been dead for more than 140 years. That's a very long time to be missing your parent as a young adult while your entire clan is wandering and displaced from your ancestral mountain.
Additionally, there is a pattern every generation between the Durins of the main line and the cousin line beginning with Borin, wherein the descendants of Borin are born 15-20 years after that generation's kingsline Durin. (Thrór with Farin; Thráin with Fundin and Gróin; Thorin with Balin and Dwalin.) Although both Fundin and Gróin had their first sons when they were around a century old, Gróin lives quite a bit longer, within only a couple decades of the reclamation of Erebor.
You may follow if you would like to confirm.

As for how I insubstantially support my use of Fundin as female here-- there is a reason. Of the nine sibling sets I know of from canon (between the Company and the Line of Durin appendix), nearly all of them have some sort of rhyming structure. In fact, the only siblings that don't display this pattern are Fundin and Gróin, the debatable case of Dáin I and Borin (which may be another example of what I'm about to hypothesize), and Thorin & Frerin with their sister, Dís. Dís, who is the only named female dwarf by Tolkein, and whose name most clearly does not rhyme with her brothers'. Obviously, the difference between Fundin and Gróin is much slimmer, as they both at least share the -in suffix of the Durins, but I claim that as the possibility that perhaps the reason these siblings' names are not an obvious rhyming pair is because they are not meant to be.
Thank you, and good time-of-day. I shall step off my fantheory soapbox now.

 

Hovertext for all Khuzdûl, or translations in the endnotes for mobile readers.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

His amad always held her accent
like her favorite pair of brass knuckles
well-worn, well cared-for,
and strong enough to bust a busybody’s nose.
And, like those brass knuckles,
she passed it on down to him and his brother
in a thick, brisk brogue
Caught between her two good hands
and held there until it began to slip into theirs.

She’d learned syllables of Westron
under a too-bright sky
and chewed them up
and spit them back
until they didn’t all sound the same anymore
And the sky inside her mouth was
dark and lit with stars,
flavored by the tongue of Khazad.

Sometimes she spoke the west-east tongue
just like she used to dance, ni ‘abad,
before the fire and the dragon
and the life where there was no time left for dancing.
When they were in danger
she spun her orders like daggers,
rapid and unflinching
Even though her tongue could never quite lie flat enough
to give up the music of Khuzdûl
between the harpsichord keys of her teeth.

Sometimes she spoke hushed
so all her words blended together
in the raids and festivals of a
people that didn’t use to know quiet
But it snuck up on them
and spilled out
until there was too much of it
Too many voices that would never
dance again,
never speak with the fire of salsa
and the clap of wind id’abadirak.

But always when she spoke,
words pushing up against one another
like the abutments of a battlement,
decorated with firm lines
and the last of the family gold,
her accent was a stubborn compass
pointing back to their ancestry,
pointing forwards with a people
whose hands were all they had.

So when he helps his brother with the housekeeping
and hums a song she remixed while
waiting for her common-voice to arrive,
he remembers the way her lips could only barely
stretch themselves around sound in her excitement.
Or when, out in the markets of Men,
he hears the familiar music of
an accent like hers
an accent like his
and then a meeting with a stranger in a
foreign crowd becomes a family reunion.
Accents remind him,
a letter from his mother
of all they have won, all they have lost.

He remembers the smell of the spices
she used when cooking their meat,
runs a finger over the
braided keychain of her hair
that is all he has of her presence
outside his mind.
The quiet of the mountain is too still
and the thrushes don't sing
and there are no ravens outside
in the Khagal'abbad where Thorin's Halls lie.
But there are his people,
his brother and brothers-in-arms,
and the memory of his mother.

Notes:

amad - mother
Khagal'abbad - the blue mountains, or Ered Luin
Khazad - the Dwarves
Khuzdûl - “Dwarvish”, language of the dwarves
id’abadirak - on the mountainside
ni 'abad - inside the mountain

(I find the name "Westron" to be a bit ironic, considering that "west of the Misties" used to be pretty far inland on Beleriand. But only the elves really remember that.)
Khuzdûl from Dwarrow Scholar and this beautiful Neo-Khuzdûl translation of I See Fire.

And if anyone would like to know how to create mouseover text, the html is:
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