The Battle of Azanulbizar, ft. Artigas

"That was the beginning of the War of the Dwarves and the Orcs, which was long and deadly, and fought for the most part in deep places beneath the earth… Both sides were pitiless, and there was death and cruel deeds by dark and by light. But the Dwarves had the victory through their strength, and their matchless weapons, and the fire of their anger as they hunted for Azog in every den under mountain."

--The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A: Durin's folk

The war of the dwarves and orcs is Tolkien's grimmest episode; the moral lines of who's right and who's wrong (usually so clear in the many conflicts throughout Middle-Earth's long history) becoming all but lost in the ten-year campaign for vengeance against Azog the orc and, seemingly, his whole race by extension. The dwarves are, at this time, a displaced and desperate people; humiliated by the loss of Erebor to an enemy they can't hope to fight, and forced to endure poverty and the scorn of men, and when their king, the heir to the Father of their people, turns up murdered by some self-proclaimed orc-king - in what used to be their great ancestral home no less - their response strikes me as a venting not only of their grief and anger at the killing of Thror, but at all the woes which had beset them. The war masks seemed a good way to present the dwarves - ostensibly the good guys - as the orcs might see them during this long genocide; impersonal faces of steel, cold, hard and ruthless. How far does Tolkien mean to go with a line like "both sides were pitiless?" Do the dwarves indiscriminately slaughter orcish women and children in the aftermath of these brutal underground melees? What do the orcs do to any dwarves they manage to capture alive? When the two forces go head to head for the last time before the doors of Moria where the blood-feud all began, it's an orgy of unsparing, unappeasable race-hate. The dwarves win the day and Azog is killed, but less than half of them that marched into the valley of Azanulbizar live to walk back out, and among the dead are the king's cousin, his close kinsman Fundin, and his younger son, along with countless others of the younger generation, all to avenge an already old king of a questionable mental state who chose to wander the wild with no armed escort. Durin's heir or no, it might have served Thrain better to have done nothing.

this is the fourth in a series of ten illustrations I'm doing for an italian-language audiobook of the "Durin's Folk" section of the Lord of the Rings appendices, it's also a collaborative piece (my very first, to date) with the very talented Sergio Artigas artigas.deviantart.com/ who I recently met in person after our many years of trading ideas/concepts/musings here on the deeves. We're both big time dwarf-fans and working with him on this was a tremendous pleasure. I can only hope we get the opportunity to do something like it in the future.

see also: The Heir Of Durin 
The Great Worms attack
Durin