The Dwarves at Khazad-dum should not be blamed for delving “too deep” and disturbing the Balrog, given that their intensive mithril mining was serving a largely external demand for mithril, especially from the Elves. Attributing the awakening of the Balrog and the downfall of Khazad-dum to the Dwarves’ greed is a simplistic and racist explanation that obscures the market pressures to which they were subjected in order to meet Elvish demands for the rare precious metal that they alone had access to. In this essay i will
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[Okay instead of writing my 500-word economic geography assignment, here’s 500 words that are still technically about economic geography… if you squint… ]
So Gandalf explains the issue as follows: “even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also it was their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled, Durin’s Bane.” But why did they mine so much for mithril anyway?
The downfall of Khazad-dûm can be seen in light of the overall negative portrayal of industrialism and its fallout throughout LOTR, and as such, I think it’s particularly important to note that while Dwarves did the work of mining, it was not for just their own benefit, much less just out of greed. Gandalf explains that Moria contained gold, jewels, and “especially iron; but they did not need to delve for them: all things that they desired they could obtain in traffic.” So fundamentally, as I read it, they need not have mined much at all in Khazad-dûm, were it not for the demand for mithril.
It’s suggested that it was the corrupting influence of the seven Rings given to the Dwarves by Sauron that led to their focus on amassing wealth, but I think it’s equally important to look at what they were mining and why – mithril served not just their own acquisition of riches, since “all folk desired it,” as Gandalf says, and especially “the Elves dearly loved it.” To suggest that the Dwarves delved too deep out of their own greed, Rings’ influence or no, is a rather disingenuous sleight of hand, shifting the blame from the consumers of the resource to those who carried out the labor of extraction.
(There’s some parallel in present-day issues like artisanal gold mining, in which “informal” mines arise under unregulated and often unsafe conditions, and risk serious environmental and health consequences; however, one cannot fairly judge the miners for the “destruction” they may cause without looking at the global demand and market for gold that compasses and fuels the extraction done under such conditions.)
Additionally, to malign the Dwarves for destroying their own city at Khazad-dûm through reckless greed diminishes their complex relationship with extraction (which might have been kept in check were it only to serve their own needs for iron, etc.) versus a genuine respect for the earth around them. For one, you have this evidence that they would have mined far less if not for the external demand, and then Gimli in The Two Towers explains at length how the Dwarves honor and prize natural geology itself for its beauty, not its utility.
There’s also much more to be said about how the image of Dwarves as greedy and obsessed with gaining and hoarding treasure has highly antisemitic overtones, more evident in the caricatured portrayal of Dwarves in the Hobbit, but there’s also a great deal of textual evidence in LOTR that defies this stereotype, making it all the more dangerous and intellectually lazy to reproduce it. They may have delved too deep, Gandalf, but I do not think they did so too greedily – say rather that the greed was in those with the insatiable appetite for mithril, and who benefited from its rampant extraction.
