Nogrod

Name and Position

Nogrod — “Dwarf-hollow” — is one of the two great mansions of the Dwarves in the Ered Luin (the other, its sister, Belegost): a deep city of vaulted halls and forges, delved by the “fathers of the Dwarves” who — the smiths of Nogrod were the most cunning of the eastern kindred’s craft and the keepers of the jewel-lore.

The Deeds of its Smiths

• The works: With Belegost it raised the cave-halls of Menegroth for Thingol (the “thousand caves”), and the friendship of the mountain-Dwarves with the Elves was the era’s unusual peace; its smiths’ craft appears in the age’s finest things.
• The Nauglamír and the king’s slaying: When Thingol called its smiths to set the Silmaril in the Nauglamír, the greed of the Dwarves of Nogrod, grasping the treasure, slew the king in his halls and sacked Menegroth, carrying off the necklace — the deed avenged by Beren and the Green-elves — the ruin that (through its consequences) began the end of Doriath.

Significance

Nogrod is the “smith’s city of the doom” — its gold-lust (and that of its sister Belegost in the legend’s works) turning on the Elves, it becomes the instrument by which the age’s second tragedy (the fall of Doriath) is opened.

Related

• Dwarves
• Belegost
• Ered Luin
• Nauglamír
• Thingol
• Doriath
• Beleriand