So anybody who follows my blog knows that I fell back into some Khuzd Feels™ recently, and when I realized that, by my own personal headcanons, Thorin and Frerin were developmentally/comparatively speaking the same age my sister and I were when our baby brother was born, I had to draw this pic.
Translation: “Hello, little sister.”
[Image description: Fanart of Thorin Oakenshield from The Hobbit, as well as his siblings Frerin and Dís. Thorin is a young dwarf child with pale skin, dark brown hair, and blue eyes. He has a braid in front of each ear, a missing front tooth, and the beginnings of a beard and mustache around his mouth. The rest of his hair is pulled behind his head. He is curled over, holding his little sister Dís, staring down at her with a huge smile. Dís is a newborn dwarf infant with pale skin and curly wisps of dark hair on her head. She is sleeping with her eyes closed, wearing a white gown. Beside the two of them, their brother Frerin kneels, both hands clinging to his big brother. He is a very young dwarf child with pale skin, blue eyes and blond hair, which is pulled back in a french braid, with two smaller braids hanging in front of his ears. He is looking down at his little sister in awe. End ID.]
Six runes… would they too become a word she’d hate forever? No. She refused to accept it. Of course the quest was hopeless, but she would not lose another man she loved. She had big plans for their future, for their son, and they all depended on that one word. He had given her the badly crafted bracelet just before walking out the door. Probably a last minute project. It was not like him to give her presents and she told him so in a mocking voice (hoping it would lighten up the mood). “It’s not a present. It’s a promise!” He had said. And now there she was, staring at the word. “What does it say, mother?” Death, she thought. Future, she hoped. But that was not what was engraved onto the beads. It was just the name of a place, just a mountain like so many others, and yet it meant so much more. Maybe one day it would even mean happiness. For now it just spelled “Erebor”.
These are two different questions, but since my answer for both comes from the same passage in the appendices, I’m answering them together. About Khuzdul, and the use of it by the dwarves, Tolkien says:
Yet in secret (a secret which unlike the Elves, they did not willingly unlock, even to their friends) they used their own strange tongue, changed little by the years; for it had become a tongue of lore rather than a cradle-speech, and they tended it and guarded it as a treasure of the past. Few of other races have succeeded in learning it. In this history it appears only in such place-names as Gimli revealed to his companions; and in the battle-cry which he uttered in the siege of the Hornburg. That at least was not secret, and had been heard on many a field since the world was young. Baruk Khazad! Khazad-aimenu! ’Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!’
The two bolded parts are the important bits in answering your questions. As for when dwarves learned Khuzdul, I’ve got to say right off the bat that I don’t think there is an “official” answer to this - Tolkien wrote so little about Khuzdul (and, honestly, the dwarves in general), that I really don’t know for sure when they learned Khuzdul. I’m tempted to say that they would have learned it from birth (it being such an important part of their culture,) but this passage makes me question that impulse. Tolkien says that Khuzdul was “a tongue of lore rather than a cradle-speech”, which implies to me that it wasn’t used as much as a day-to-day language, but rather was saved for important events. In the end, I think the debate could go either way, so I’d say believe whichever version you like more. :)
As for Aragorn learning Khuzdul - I like this thought, and if this scene occurred in the book, I’d say that you were probably right. But, since this whole exchange happens only in the movie version, and Tolkien was very clear about Khuzdul being a language that the dwarves worked to keep secret from other races, I think it’s actually not very likely, unfortunately. He says right here that dwarves didn’t teach Khuzdul to other people, “even to their friends.” And I haven’t read anything to suggest that Aragorn had dwarvish friends before Gimli, so I don’t think it likely.
Now, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if Elrond could speak Khuzdul (the dwarves weren’t quite so secretive about their language in the First Age, and there are mentions of some Noldorin elves learning the language to study it. Elrond being such a loremaster, it’s possible he studied the language as well.) Assuming that he does speak Khuzdul, I suppose it is possible that he might have taught Aragorn a little bit of it (though Tolkien also mentions that the men of the First Age that the dwarves originally tried to teach Khuzdul too had a lot of difficulty picking up the language, so I wouldn’t think that Aragorn was too proficient.) So it’s possible - though improbable - that Aragorn would understand Gimli’s insult because of that. More likely, though, I think he could just tell that it was an insult based on Gimli’s tone of voice.
SOURCES: LOTR, LOTR Appendix F, History of Middle Earth vol. 12 (“Of Dwarves and Men”), The Silmarillion
Elrond learning Khuzdul in the First Age doesn’t really make much sense, unless you’re thinking Maglorspoke it? It’s true that Dwarves got along better with Elves in the First Age, and that a few Elves learned Khuzdul then (Curufin certainly, probably Celebrimbor, probably Eöl) but that was before the Sindar retaliated for Thingol’s death by killing every Dwarf within Doriath’s borders, and the Dwarves retaliated for that by sacking Menegroth, and Beren retaliated for that by ambushing and killing all the Dwarves of Nogrod, and all of that was before Elrond was born. I can’t imagine Khuzdul spoken at Sirion: all Dwarves were hated by the Sindar by that point, and anyone who knew it probably kept quiet about that.
In the Second Age one assumes that the most trusted of the Noldor of Ost-in-Edhil learned it, but Elrond never lived there, and very very few of them survived its fall. I don’t imagine Elrond as ever prejudiced against Dwarves, but it seems like they mostly taught their language to those with whom they had a close working relationship, and he doesn’t seem to have ever been positioned (geographically or in terms of skills) to have that. If anything I can imagine them being less inclined to teach it to someone whose interest is entirely academic/historical rather than creative/personal.
