Resurrecting Dale, City of A Thousand Untold Stories - Page 6
© Michael Martinez
The city should have had a warehouse district, and probably many large houses, the homes of merchants and lords who had grown wealthy on the trade. The farms around the city may have become quite large. Wealthy farmers could have bought out smaller farmers. And there should have been towns and villages stretching out along the various trade routes (east, west, and south) to provide travellers with comforts and help supply the growing kingdom. Girion most likely lived in a great hall, and there should have been craftsmen such as tanners, tailors, carpenters, weavers, shoemakers, cartwrights, and so forth. Dale should have buzzed with plenty of activity.
Something I have always wondered about was what Tolkien would have called the other Kings of Dale (and, indeed, any men which might have emerged in its histories and legends). The language of Dale is represented only in the names of its few kings and the Longbeard Dwarves. These are all Norse names (or Germanic names modelled on Norse styles). In a note Tolkien wrote for himself while working on The Lord of the Rings he identified the language of Dale with Old Norse and the language of Rohan with Old English, but their ancestral language he identified with Gothic (the oldest recorded Germanic language).
Old Norse and Old English are actually closely related languages, separated by a phonetic shift and some alterations in grammar in the 7th and 8th centuries. The Angles were a Danish people, in fact, and eastern England (where the Angles settled) was later known as the Danelaw, because many Scandinavians had settled there. So the relationship between English and Norse is used to imply a similar relationship between Rohirric and Dalic.
But Tolkien nonetheless applied a certain style to his selection of names. Though he took the Dwarven names from Scandinavian mythology, he decided these represented a special name-set used only by the Dwarves. Men would have used different names. Some likely possibilities (in my opinion) would include Jarl (similar to Eorl for the Rohirrim), Agnar, Bjorn (similar to Beorn), Grim, and Karl (similar to Ceorl for the Rohirrim). Of course, he might have Anglicized these names a bit.
In many ways Dale and Laketown sound like old Viking trading cities. Tolkien might have developed an entire Viking-like culture for them, perhaps modelled on Icelandic towns with some Swedish trading motifs. The core of the royal armies were probably freehold farmers with many servants. The fleets were probably manned by adventurers. And many of the young men may have gone off to work as mercenaries to earn their fortunes and reputations. One can almost see runestones dotting the landscape commemorating the adventures of men through the centuries.
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