Thorin and exiled Dwarves were once coal diggers?
 

The Hobbit
Did Dwarves after the fall of Erebor resort to digging coal and doing other dirty unwanted jobs like shoveling dung etc? I suppose they would take any job because they had lost everything and had no place to call home. Where were they digging coal? Did they work with other dwarves? Where were these exiled Dwarves digging coal? Was the payment decent or not?

And is thirteen really a unlucky number? :smokin:

Yes, I always took that literally - and I like that idea. I assume, since coal, at least in our world's history in the Middle Ages, was mostly the one you "make" from wood, while the Dwarves did actually dig it, it points towards some advanced technology, and therefore probably means working in some Dwarven mines, most likely in the Blue Mountains, where we know Thorin and co. lived for a long time. So, I think it was simply a "working class-Dwarves'" job, while the coal would later be used for Dwarven furnaces, since that coal can produce much more heat than wood and you need high temperatures for making all kinds of super-extra steel and whatnot. So I imagine the Dwarves would be working among their own, but it would be just a very mechanical, "dirty" job for someone as fancy as Thorin.

Of course, it's possible Gandalf was only exaggerating and being sort of ironic. Actually, I am pretty sure he was. But that doesn't rule out the possibility of some of the Dwarves, if not all, at some point really making their living by digging coal.

Ahh...dwarf topics, how I love thee...
 

...unfortunately, I don't have much time to devote to discussion at present.

I doubt dung but I think it likely that in the early phase of their exile the dwarves formerly of Erebor probably did dig for coal.

Dunland is one place specifically mentioned.

Probably not until they got to the Blue Mountains.

It probably wasn't particularly.

However, I think once the exiles of Erebor settled in the Blue Mountains they were able to mine for other things than coal. The Hobbit indicates the exiles of Erebor were prospering again to a degree.

Gandalf was probably to some degree speaking with a bit of classic Gandalf sharpness when he made the coal reference.

For further reference, here is a thread that talks about this specific period of dwarf history in some detail.

Actually the tech level would probably have to be even higher than that. To make really good steel even coal isn't usually capable of generating enough heat; you need to burn it in a low air condtion and turn it into coke. Wood Charcoal usually doesn't make good coke; it has too much ash and sulphur content. So for the dwarves to be able to make the steel they could, coal would be a neccesity as it might be for some of the other metals smelted (I can't think of any others explicit ones off the top of my, but there are some people who think mithril might be a lanthanide metal like platinum, and most of those require extreme heat to smelt. But it would be a low class task, basically the Dwarf equivalent of blue collar work, well below the dignity of an heir apparant.
Just for the sake of completeness, theoretically, Thorin and co. could have still been gem mining as they dug . I'm not saying it was likely, in fact I think it isn't but I should point out that techically, jet is coal (well pre-coal), and yet is considered a minor gemstone.
Incidentally, given ME's very strict creationist orgin and accompanying shorter geological timeline, anyone want to speculate where the coal came from? Did Aule finally get tired of bickering with Yavannah about dwarven wood needs and call into being (or I suppose petition Illuvitar to bring into being). rocks that could burn and take some of the wood's place?

That is a very interesting theory.

Kuru you're so cute.

Yup it's definitely there, and while, objectively, it's likely they did dig for coal, I don't think we can use anything Gandalf says in that tone as proof.

That's an interesting idea. Then again, it took at least tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years to get to the Years of the Sun; and even so we don't know how long the Valar were there before the Years of the Lamps.

Or then perhaps...

Digging coal is a nasty, hard job, but is it a low, despised job? Does Middle-earth carry the same class connotations that England had/has?

I AM! :D ;)

It was/is not just England. Class structure is a pretty universal human experience from pretty much the dawn of recorded history. I'm not sure we should assume that Middle earth was conceived to be much different.

Actually yes, I like that, a pretty nice idea of how this could have been. "Burning stone", why not?

Although...
Given the somewhat "dark demeanor" of the coal, I would not be opposed to it being some sort of by-product of Melkor's meddling, similar to, for example, snow. Or even, as Agan said, if we take into account the possible undefined amount of time before the First Age, there would have been time for fossilization - and that again could point to Melkor: after all, it's all remnants of some poor dead animals and plants. Therefore, coal would in its way be a slightly sinister thing, or then perhaps not as positive, "dirty", because of its association with the poor creatures that died to "make it happen", so to say.

Actually, given all the other cultural similarities, I would pretty much expect it to be so. Also, to come back full circle, because Gandalf obviously uses exactly that expression as obviously somewhat derogatory.

No question, I merely put the idea forward as a possibility, not a certainty. Though a lot of the "dead" nature of coal sort of relys on on the peoples of ME recognizing coal as originating with dead plant matter. We don't know much about ME fossil record; tongue stones, snake stones, toad stones etc. don't enter in to the writings.
That being said, they probably did get some idea eventually. ME has coal beds in the making along with actual coal. The Barrow Downs and (possibly) the Dead Marshes certainly SOUND like peat bogs of some sort. In fact some bits of the Dead marshes description always sounded to me a bit like a story I read once about what an explorer who found himself in what he THOUGHT was a simple lake, but turned out to be a precursor zone for cannel coal (a special very rare kind of coal you get when a body of water gets staturated for millenia by massive amounts of pollen. Instead of peat you get this stuff that looks like water and acts like quicksand.) With time, peat becomes lignite and lignite becomes coal. And while, as I pointed out, you don't hear much about fossils, they are probably there, somewhere. In fact the whole Melkor thing might be reinforced by what they found; fossils found within coal are often pyritized (much as the bodies they sometimes find buried in peat bogs often come out looking like someone bronzed them), so the dwarves as they burned their coal might find these tiny slivery fossils and see them as Melkor's mischief, some sort of curse that could turn bone and shell to iron.
As for the seeing it as evil bit, harder to say.After all the people of ME do hunt, and fish and fell, so the concept of making use of dead things would not be inherently something they would shy away from. Thought now that I think of it, except for Turin's Ivory sword sheath, you don't hear much about the free peoples making much use of bone or such, that seems more of a darkness thing. And the gems we hear named seems mostly to be pure mineral ones (is there anything in the HOME about amber?) The elves make a LITTLE use of animal bits; the pipes Bilbo gives Merry and Pippen when they visit him in Rivendell on thier way back to the Shire are said to have pearl mouthpieces (by which I assume they mean mother of pearl ones, who would take an actual pearl and try and carve a mouthpiece out of it.) But that is presumably new, fresh material like using a piece of wood. I suppose it depends on which part you think the people of middle earth would find distateful, using material from a living thing that is now dead or using material from a living thing that is LONG dead.)

Well, when talking to Dwarves, the implication would be not only that it's nasty and dirty, but also that there's not nearly as much profit in it as mining gold, or even iron. I don't know how Dwarves felt about "class", but it's pretty clear how they felt about wealth.