Nowhere and Back Again: Moria (Azanulbizar & Peter Thiel) (Patreon)

• Name(s): Khazad-dûm (Khuzdul: “dwarves’ mansion”) ; Moria (Sindarin: “dark abyss”)

• Synopsis: Ancient subterranean dwarf-kingdom beneath the southern Misty Mountains.

• Shooting locations in Peter Jackson’s films: Mount Owen, Tasman District, South Island; Kawarau (The Remarkables), Otago, South Island

The adventure that began on a mountain now plunges into another mountain’s gut. Mountains are Middle-earth’s maternity wards: the places whence apocalyptic history creep. In the bowels of the mountains, the outside world is changed forever. Only by retreating from the outside world can we hope to understand it.

Moria is one of Middle-earth’s hallowed grounds. Its heyday is the Dwarves’ greatest triumph, and its fall to Orcs and Balrogs throws Durin’s Folk into dispossession and poverty. It is both a holy kingdom (though not a utopia) and an underworld: the place where those who “dig too greedily and too deep” find untold treasures and inexorable doom.

The Dwarves are our midwives in this maternity ward. They do indeed “spring out of the ground,” as Gimli says, but they try not to spring too far from it. However, we come to Moria not by springs but by waterfalls. The Dimrill Dale, or Azanulbizar, takes us down the Redhorn into the valley by Moria. 

At the bottom, Azanulzibar is a place of grief. It is where the Fellowship stops to mourn Gandalf after his apparent death fighting the Balrog. And it’s where one of the nastiest battles between Orcs and Dwarves happens, where even a victory by the Dwarves is meaningless, as “the dead were beyond the count of grief.”

Like Erebor, Moria both exalts and curses its inhabitants. It’s an underworld, rife with riches and tombs and demons. The Rings of Power has a rare interesting turn in its treatment of Moria, having the Elves’ survival rely on mithril, or true-silver, the Dwarves’ great metal found in Moria.

Moria is a place of wealth and death. Tolkien doesn’t equate the two per se — he’s comfortable with wealth if it stops short of outright violence to the earth or its peoples. It’s when the search for wealth becomes a scorched earth campaign that Middle-earth plummets into catastrophe.

As Gandalf explains to the Fellowship, “here alone in the world was found” mithril. He estimates that “its worth was tend times that of gold, and now it is beyond price.” It’s a rare metal who “could be beaten like copper, and polished like glass,” to the point even the Elves use it extensively. Thorn’s gift of a “a corslet of Moria-silver” to Bilbo is nothing short of a birthright donation, more akin to a romantic overtone than a special occasion parcel.

It makes some ironic sense, then, that the fictional property of mithril has become so popular in the real world. The metal appears throughout high fantasy, spanning role-playing games from Final Fantasy to The Elder Scrolls (though Final Fantasy bucks the trend by spelling the word “mythril,” which is completely transformative). That this item becomes so popular as an item to, say, restore the player’s in-game health, really shows how the fantasy genre becomes a commodity in itself. 

But outside of video games, mithril has taken a more sinister form. Silicon Valley has latched onto Tolkien as a seminal text of the nerd pantheon. There’s a history of tech overlords making literary works core parts of their ethos. Look at Facebook’s Meta, copped from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

Furthermore, look to gay right-wing financier Peter Thiel. When he founded PayPal, he had his employees read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, a dense, timeline-hopping techno-thriller in which a WWII-era team of Allied scientists attempt to surreptitiously crack the Enigma code is juxtaposed with a 90s plot where the team’s descendants establish a data haven. Perhaps Thiel, a billionaire who wants to drink the blood of the youth for eternal life and propped up author and Ohio Senator-elect J. D. Vance, sees brilliant underground hackers and pioneers shaping history as a model for his own work.

Certainly Thiel gravitates to Tolkien. A number of his pet projects derive their names from Middle-earth. His surveillance company Palantir Technologies is his most famous one for its United States Intelligence Community and Department of Defense Ties, clearly looking at the magic stone that drives people into suicidal despair and going “this is cool.” Fitting for a CIA contact.

Mithril Capital, his venture project, is more vital for our purposes. The outfit is dedicated to boosting companies just beyond the start-up stage. Mithril is a self-aware name: digging too greedily and too deep is Thiel’s M.O. That he graduates to drinking the blood of the youth isn’t entirely unexpected.

And clearly it hasn’t entirely paid off: the FBI has investigated Mithril for financial misconduct (a sentence that would be absolutely bizarre to read in 1954). It hasn’t disrupted Thiel’s larger project of turning the United States far-right — look at J. D. Vance’s victory in Ohio. But it’s a symptom of something grimmer underneath.

Like the dwarves of Moria, Thiel’s success is fundamentally grounded in doom. Unlike them, it’s not he who’s doomed. He’s a Saruman figure with the dignity of Lotho Sackville-Baggins. Thiel looks at Balrogs and goes “how can I unleash this on the Shire?”

Once again, death and wealth in Middle-earth extend beyond the page of Tolkien’s books. It’s Erebor all over again. Why do the dwarves keep shaping reality, from American politics to New Zealand labor laws? Sadly, we must dig even more greedily to find out.