The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf

Poems by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf
Poem Information
Other names	Mîms Klage
Written	1961 or 1962
Revised	1961 or 1962
Published	Klett-Cotta: Das erste Jahrzehnt 1977-1987: Ein Almanach The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien
Subject(s)	Mîm

”

Still, he works: 'Tink-tink, grün und gelb, tink-tink, blau und weiß' ('Tink-tink, green and yellow, tink-tink, blue and white')

Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond (2017), The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide (Second Edition): II. Reader's Guide, Part I

The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf is a short poem and prose text that was written by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by Christopher Tolkien about the petty-dwarf Mîm and how he struggles with not being able to forgive. The poem contains twenty-six lines while the prose text consists of seven paragraphs.

Poem excerpt

Under a mountain in a wild land
a cave opened paved with sand.
One evening Mîm stood by its door:
his back was bent and his beard was hoar;
long ways he had wandered homeless and cold,
the little dwarf Mîm, two hundred years old.

Prose synopsis

One day, Mîm stopped for an hour and beheld the works he had created. He marvelled at them, that they had grown out of him, but were of him no more. He felt a great pride in his hard work, and the fire that was once within him, and that he had poured nearly all of himself into these works. They were a part of Mîm, and without them there would be little left of him.

Mîm further noticed that they were strewn all about—laying on the floor, piled in corners, or hanging on pegs—and devised a proper way to hoard them. He created a magnificent chest, filled with compartments and secret drawers, detailed with intricate dragons and ancient Dwarves with axes, and locked with a key bound by magic. With the closing of lid on the chest, which now contained his hoard of memories and bygone years, Mîm too closed his eyes and slept with his head upon it.

Unaware of how long he slept, Mîm was awakened by choking smoke, even though his forge was cold. Men had found him, and set fire to his dwelling. They carried away all his ore, gems, and his great chest. Chased out with the jeering sounds of their mocking songs, Mîm fled his home, only able to save a sack of hand-tools, and a secret knife with poisoned runes on its blade which he since frequently sharped, spitting on the cutting edge until it shone under the cruel stars. He begrudged those that took his work, making of them rings and artless ornaments, trading them for petty kingdoms and feigned friendships, and noting that there was power in the works of old Dwarves that drives people to madness.

Mîm, now old and bitter, came to a refuge in the wild hills where he had to begin his work anew, seeking to catch an echo of his memories before they were lost forever. While his work was still good, the freshness was gone, and he could only glimpse the work he had once created, not that which he had once seen. Mîm understood that others thought of him as full of hate and malice, that he would bite and stab if approached, and for that he was shot at with arrows if he dared show his face to the Sun. He laments that if he could forgive, then perhaps he could still create shapes such as a leaf or a flower with dew, as it once shone at Tarn Aeluin in his youth, but that he cannot as embers still smouldered in his heart.

Background

In either 1961 or 1962, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote an early version of the first and second stanzas of the poem "on the reverse sides of" a draft of The Mewlips. In that version, Mîm is three-hundred years old instead of two-hundred and mentions "gold and garnet" instead of "graven silver and twisted gold". Sometime after finishing a first draft of the poem and prose text, Tolkien decided to revise it and made comments on changes to be made. After Tolkien's death in 1973, his son, Christopher Tolkien, made a typescript and revised the poem and prose text to include Tolkien's intended revisions, adding the title, The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf, in his private notes. After which, he provided it to Klett-Cotta in Stuttgart to be translated.

On 1 January of 1987, the original text was translated from English into German by Hans J. Schütz and first published as Mîms Klage on pages 302-5 of Klett-Cotta: Das erste Jahrzehnt 1977-1987: Ein Almanach, the anniversary volume of the publishing firm Klett-Cotta. As a result a translation being published before the original text, there had been multiple unofficial attempts to reverse translate the text "back to English". In 2017, Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond included a one-paragraph summary of the poem and prose text in the second edition of The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. Hammond and Scull likely did not know the dating and the location of the manuscripts of the poem and prose text until at least after 2017. Before then, it was believed to possibly have been written in or after the 1950s because Tarn Aeluin first appeared as a term in The Grey Annals and The Lay of Leithian Recommenced.

On 21 April of 2024, it was hinted by Hammond and Scull in a blog post that the original poem would be included in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. On 24 August, the poem's inclusion was eventually confirmed to be the case when Hammond and Scull leaked a PDF of their own book's table of contents. In an early review by the Tolkien Collector's Guide on 11 September, The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf was listed as one of the "poems which" would "please readers". On 12 September, the original English text was first published as entry 185 in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. In their commentary, Hammond and Scull suggested that Tolkien may have been inspired to write a poem about Mîm while working on The Hoard and the "Preface" for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book. In a note to line 17 of the poem, they suggest that the phrase "Tink-tink-tink tink-donk" probably refers to "the sound of Mîm hammering". Hammond and Scull also observed that some of the words referring to Mîm's smithing were originally used by Tolkien "to suggest the sounds of motorcycles" in an earlier poem The Motor-cyclists. In their commentary to The Hoard, they wrote "see also poem no. 185" in connection with a passage they quote from page 132 in The Shaping of Middle-earth. In a review of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien in the Journal of Tolkien Research, John R. Holmes notes that the text The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf uses a medieval genre known as a complaint, called planctus in neo-Latin and planh in Occitan, which "were usually laments for lost love, but…found any number of subjects".

External links

• Éarendel (30 September, 2019). "Mîms Klage [The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf"]. Tolkien Collector's Guide. Retrieved 15 May, 2020
• Huinesoron (24 February, 2023). "Mîms Klage / The Complaint of Mim the Dwarf". The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum. Retrieved 7 October, 2024
• Helpful_Radish_8923 (March 2025). "The Complaint of Mîm the Dwarf: an attempted ordering and analysis". Reddit. Retrieved 18 July, 2025