This will be a long bit of background so bear with me...
I was ruminating about the fate of the seven rings and where those rings might have been bestowed. Thinking of the fate of the Broadbeams and Firebeards and their potential merger with the Longbeards, If the peoples had merged, I wondered if two of the rings might have been given to great lords of the Longbeards in addition to the king.
While this might be an idea worthy of its own topic, I discarded it because the Longbeards in the books that referenced the rings never gave any indication that more than one ring was ever given to Durin's Folk. My other thought (more based on the nature of the rings and their maker than anything) is that more than one ring would not co-exist with another well in the same realm.
Thrown back upon the original notion of the rings were given to the leaders of the seven dwarf peoples, it was thus inescapable that all seven peoples survived to some extent as independent entities.
How does all this relate to this topic?
My thought now turns to what
Pitchwife said in post #3...
Quote:
Off the top of my head, maybe there already was a Dwarven King of the Blue Mountains when Thorin came there.
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Maybe that was exactly it. Maybe since the Kings of the Broadbeams and Firebeards were already in the remains of the Blue Mountains it would be considered very rude indeed for Thorin to make himself a king there since he might have been there in some sense as a guest. This might also explain why the Longbeards there were in a relatively resource poor area, the surviving Broadbeams and Firebeards were living in the surviving better areas.
I'm not proposing that significant populations of Broadbeams and Firebeards existed, but that their royal lineages did and there were enough remaining members to sustain distinct communities. Tolkien nowhere said all dwarves abandonded the Blue Mountains after the First Age, just "most."
Or maybe there were more survivors than we might think since the remains of the Blue Mountains were in the sleepiest part of Middle-earth where nothing ever happened and there was little reason to describe goings on there again.