Dwarf Name Generator

Tolkien did not invent his dwarf names

He took them off a list.

The Poetic Edda opens with a poem called Völuspá. Buried in the middle of it, in among prophecies about the end of the world, sits a passage that scholars call the Dvergatal, the Catalogue of Dwarves. It is exactly what it sounds like. A list of dwarf names.

Thorin is on it. So are Dwalin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Fili, Kili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin and Durin. Tolkien lifted nearly the entire company of The Hobbit straight out of a medieval Icelandic poem, and he said so himself, first in a private letter and then publicly in a newspaper within months of the book coming out.

Two things about that list usually get missed.

The first is Gandalf. Gandálfr is on the Dvergatal too. The wizard is walking around with a dwarf's name, and Tolkien knew it perfectly well.

The second is Oakenshield. In Völuspá, Eikinskjaldi is simply another name in the list, not a nickname earned by anybody. Tolkien turned a plain name into an epithet, invented a story to explain it, and now nobody can imagine it any other way.

Later he had to explain why his dwarves were wandering around Middle-earth with Old Norse names, and the answer he built was enormous: the whole conceit that the books are a translation, with Norse standing in for the language of Dale. That is a great deal of scaffolding erected around a name list he borrowed for the pleasure of it.

The second name is a job, a deed, or an insult

Look at the second names in the list above. Goldgut. Kegaxe. Shadowcoat. Darkchin. Leadcoat. Graymantle. Longbuckle. Axehide.

Every single one is two ordinary English words pushed together, and you can read it on sight. That is not laziness. That is a byname.

A byname is what people use before surnames exist. It is a tag hung on you by everyone else, and it records what you do, what you did once, or what people cannot stop noticing about you. Oakenshield is a byname. So is Goldgut, and it is not a compliment.

Watch which words keep coming back. Endings like -er and -ard. Beards. Hammers. Kegs. Axes. Stone. Because those second names are built from words you already know, you can practically sort the whole clan by trade just by reading them: the gold in Goldgut is greed, the axe in Kegaxe is a fight, the beard and the stone and the hammer each tell you what a dwarf spends his days on. Read a dozen of them in a row and you have the whole culture without anybody explaining it to you. They mine, they drink, they fight, and they pay a great deal of attention to facial hair.

This is exactly why a dwarf surname can never sound elvish. An elf surname hides its meaning inside a language you do not speak. A dwarf surname tells you to your face.

Building a dwarf name from its two halves

Take Thutdron Kegaxe.

Thutdron is doing the sound work. Short vowels, a th at the front, a hard n at the end. It is Norse shaped without being a Norse word. Nothing about it means anything, and it is not supposed to.

Kegaxe is doing the story work. Keg. Axe. You have just been told something about this dwarf, and you have opinions about him already.

So the two halves have two entirely separate jobs. The first name gives you a mouth-feel. The second gives you a character.

Which means you can build your own in about ten seconds. Take a blunt first name with a cluster in it. Then choose a noun from what he owns, what he drinks, what he swings, or what part of him people stare at, and weld a second noun onto it. Goldgut is greed. Darkchin is a description. Kegaxe is a warning.

Names that sound carved rather than sung

Three ways this goes wrong.

Norse cosplay. Sticking -in on the end of a word does not make it Old Norse, it makes it look like you have read the first page of a wiki. If you want the real thing, go and read the Dvergatal. It is short, and the names in it are better than anything you will invent.

The joke that never stops. Goldgut is funny once. If every dwarf in the hall is a pun, none of them is a person, and the reader stops caring which one is talking.

Halves that do not match. A soft, flowing first name in front of a heavy compound byname reads like two different characters got introduced at the same time. Both halves should sound like they came out of the same mountain.

Say the whole thing out loud before you commit. Dwarf names are meant to be shouted across a mine, not whispered.

How the list was put together

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, pairing a blunt Norse-shaped first name with a plain-English byname. One is drawn at random each time. Everything happens on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about dwarf names

Is it dwarves or dwarfs?

Both, and Tolkien was cheerfully unrepentant about it. The ordinary English plural is dwarfs. He used dwarves throughout, called it a piece of his own bad grammar, and explained that if English had kept the word in daily use it might have grown an irregular plural the way goose grew geese. Fantasy has followed him ever since.

Did dwarves have secret names?

In Tolkien, yes. The names we know are the outer names dwarves gave to everybody else. Their true names in their own language were kept private, and were not even carved on their tombs. It is a lovely detail, and it means every dwarf name you have ever read is a nickname.

Which of these are female dwarf names?

The list is not split. Bynames never were, since they describe a deed or a trade rather than a person's sex. For the first name, the softer and more open ones will read as feminine to most readers, and the ones that end on a hard consonant will not.

Why do dwarf names sound so blunt?

Because they are built to. Short vowels, hard consonant clusters and heavy compound bynames give the names a carved, hammered quality that matches the culture they belong to. The bluntness is the point, and it is what sets a dwarf name apart from a flowing elvish one.

Is a dwarf just a dark elf?

Strangely, in the oldest surviving source, possibly yes. The Prose Edda describes black elves who live underground and do all the smithing, and scholars have argued for a long time that they are simply dwarves under another name. We keep them apart, as everybody now does, and you can find the other half of that argument on the dark elf name generator.

References

1. Völuspá, the Dvergatal, stanzas 10 to 16. Poetic Edda.
2. Völuspá. Tolkien Gateway. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Völuspá
3. A Rabble of Uninvited Dwarves. Tolkien Studies, Project MUSE. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/890654/summary