Durin was one of the first and greatest of the dwarves in Norse myth — named in the ancient lore as second only to the foremost dwarf, Mótsognir, and as a maker of many of his kind. A figure from the very dawn of the dwarf-race, his name became legendary, echoing down through later fantasy as the archetype of the ancient dwarf-lord.
The First of the Dwarves
Durin (Old Norse Durinn) appears in the Völuspá, the great Norse poem of creation and prophecy, in the famous catalogue of dwarf-names. There it is told that when the gods created the dwarves, the foremost was Mótsognir, and the second was Durin — and that these two, the greatest of the dwarves, then fashioned many more dwarves in human form from the earth and stone, as the gods had commanded. Durin thus stands at the very origin of the dwarf-race, one of the first two dwarves, a maker of his own kind, a being of the primordial dawn of the world.
The Birth of the Dwarves
The Norse told that the dwarves had originated as maggots in the flesh of the slain primordial giant Ymir, from whose body the world was made, and that the gods gave them reason and human shape and set them to dwell in the earth and the rocks. Durin and Mótsognir were the first and greatest of these beings, and from them and their making came the whole multitude of the dwarves — the master-smiths and craftsmen of the underground, the makers of the gods' treasures, the keepers of the deep places of the world. Durin stands at the head of that lineage, an ancestor of the dwarf-race.
The Catalogue and the Legend
The Völuspá's long list of dwarf-names — the “Dvergatal,” the catalogue of dwarves — preserves Durin among many others, and these ancient names have echoed remarkably down the centuries. The very name Durin, along with many of its companions in the list (and the name Gandalf, “wand-elf,” which appears there too), would be drawn upon in modern times as the archetypal names of dwarves and wizards in fantasy literature, giving Durin a strange afterlife as the model of the ancient, noble dwarf-lord of the deep mountains. But in his original Norse context, he is one of the primordial first dwarves, a maker of his kind at the dawn of the world.
The Ancient Dwarf-Lord
Durin endures as one of the first and greatest of the Norse dwarves — second of his race, a maker of dwarves, a figure from the creation of the world. He embodies the Norse vision of the dwarves as an ancient and venerable people, born at the dawn of the cosmos, dwelling in the stone, masters of craft and the deep places — and through the long echo of his name, he stands as the very archetype of the ancient dwarf-lord, a name from the dawn of the world that has never quite faded.
Second of all the dwarves, born at the dawn of the world and a maker of his own kind — Durin's ancient name has echoed down the ages as the very archetype of the dwarf-lord.