Durin VI

Lineage

Durin VI was born in T.A. 1731 in Khazad-dûm, the sixth king of Durin's Folk to bear the founder's name and, by the belief of his people, Durin the Deathless come again. He succeeded to the kingship of a realm that had stood for the whole of recorded history, and his son was Náin I.

Khazad-dûm in the Third Age

By his time the Dwarves of Moria had been shut behind their doors for more than two thousand years, since the fall of Eregion. Their numbers had dwindled as the numbers of all Dwarves did, and the halls, though still vast and rich, held fewer people than in the great days. But the Dwarves had one thing that no other people possessed: mithril, the true-silver, which was found only in the mines under Caradhras and which they had sold, in the days of friendship, to the Elves and to Númenor. Through the Third Age the seams grew harder to reach, and the miners dug deeper.

Durin's Bane

In 1980 the miners, seeking mithril far below the deepest halls, broke into a place where something had hidden since the end of the First Age: a Balrog of Morgoth, one of the fire-demons that had fled the War of Wrath and buried itself in the roots of the mountains. Awakened, it came up into the mansion. The Dwarves could not fight it; it slew Durin VI, and the terror of that year is remembered simply as the coming of Durin's Bane. Náin his son succeeded him and was slain in the same way the next year, and the Longbeards fled from Khazad-dûm, abandoning their mansion, their mines and the tombs of their kings.

Legacy

With Durin VI the history of Khazad-dûm as a Dwarf-kingdom ended after some seven thousand years. The Elves called the place Moria thereafter, the Black Pit. Orcs moved in, the Balrog remained, and the fall of the mansion drove Durin's Folk into the wanderings that shaped their later history, to Erebor, the Grey Mountains, the Iron Hills and the Blue Mountains. The Balrog that killed him was at last destroyed by Gandalf on the peak of Zirakzigil in 3019, more than a thousand years later, and the possibility of a return to Moria was reopened. His name lived on in the expectation of a seventh Durin.

Slain by the Balrog in Khazad-dûm in T.A. 1980.