Resurrecting Dale, City of A Thousand Untold Stories
© Michael Martinez
Dale is one of those far-off places in Middle-earth that people sort of occasionally wonder about. Like many other aspects of Middle-earth, Dale has its mysteries and enigmas. Tolkien wrote two accounts of Dale's origins which contradict each other completely: Thorin told Bilbo, in The Hobbit, that in his grandfather Thror's time "men, who lived to the South [of Erebor], ... were gradually spreading up the Running River [and] ... they built the merry town of Dale there in those days."
But in "Cirion and Eorl" (published in Unfinished Tales) Tolkien wrote in the section titled "The Northmen and the Wainriders": "As for the Northmen, a few, it is said, fled over the Celduin [in the year 1856, after Narmacil II was defeated by the Wainriders] (River Running) and were merged with the folk of Dale under Erebor (with whom they were akin) ... " Thror took his people back to Erebor in 2590, more than 600 years after Narmacil II's ill-fated battle with the Wainriders.
What happened here?
Of course, the short answer is that we'll probably never know. Tolkien most likely never really put together a detailed history of Dale and its kings. The only five Dalian kings ever mentioned lived late in the Third Age: Girion (died 2770, when Smaug destroyed the city of Dale), Bard (Girion's descendant, who slew Smaug), Brand, Bain, and Bard II. It's possible (though not provable) that King Bladorthin, briefly mentioned in The Hobbit, may have been a king of Dale.
The Northmen were descendants of ancient Edainic peoples, and were most closely related to the Marachians, the Third House of the Edain, those people who entered Beleriand under Marach and eventually settled in Dor-lomin, where Hador, one of Marach's descendants, was made their lord. From Hador were descended the Kings of Numenor and the Lords of Andunie, and from the Lords of Andunie came the later Kings of Arnor and Gondor. It's entirely conceivable that Marach himself came from an older family of chieftains who continued to lead other communities in Eriador and Rhovanion.
Whether any of Marach's kinsmen founded dynasties which survived thousands of years into the Third Age is another matter. But these Edainic peoples in the east continued to have their own leaders. They suffered terrible setbacks in the Second Age when Sauron destroyed their culture in the War of the Elves and Sauron, but some of them survived in the far north and around the end of the Second Age and the beginning of the Third Age they began spreading south around the edges of the Forest of Greenwood.
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