Petty Dwarves and the Sindar Massacre of Them

[Rivvy Elf]

Is there any source of Tolkien's that retcons this, clarifies, justifies, or removes this event? Because the Sindar hunting short bipedal humanoids because they thought they were "animals" is something that I cannot ignore, and is borderline irredeemable in my eyes. Particularly because they named them "petty" dwarves, which implies that the Sindar did not believe that what they were doing was 100% wrong. It also gives support to the people who think orcs came from elves, because that is a very orcish thing to do.

Anything that can help explain this event in anything other than what it looks like?

[Eldy Dunami]

I think the fullest account of the Petty-dwarves comes from "Quendi and Eldar", published in The War of the Jewels. They're mentioned a couple times in that chapter. This first quote can be found on p. 388 in the Houghton Mifflin hardcover edition:

The Eldar did not at first recognize [the Petty-dwarves] as Incarnates, for they seldom caught sight of them in clear light. They only became aware of their existence indeed when they attacked the Eldar by stealth at night, or if they caught them alone in wild places. The Eldar therefore thought they were a kind of cunning two-legged animals living in caves, and they called them Levain tad-dail, or simply Tad-dail, and they hunted them. But after the Eldar had made the acquaintance of the Naugrim, the Tad-dail were recognized as a variety of Dwarves and were left alone. There were then few of them surviving, and they were very wary, and too fearful to attack any Elf, unless their hiding-places were approached.

The passage goes on to mention that although "[t]he great Dwarves despised the Petty-dwarves", they resented the Elves for hunting and killing fellow Dwarves. However, they set this grievance aside when making treaties with the Sindar, accepting the Elves' excuse "that the Petty-dwarves had never declared themselves to the Eldar, nor presented any claims to land or habitations, but had at once attacked the newcomers in darkness and ambush." This is followed up by Note 7 (p. 408), which mostly restates the same material, further noting that the Eldar recognized the great Dwarves as Incarnates from the start, but were initially suspicious and thought them to be related to orcs. (This invites the question of whether orcs were Incarnates, which Tolkien didn't find a satisfactory answer for.)

I personally find the Sindar's argument to be a pretty flimsy justification for a war of extermination, and I think they come out of this looking really bad, but people can obviously draw their own conclusions.

[Eldy Dunami]

Something I missed:

Particularly because they named them "petty" dwarves, which implies that the Sindar did not believe that what they were doing was 100% wrong.

As per "Quendi and Eldar", the original Sindarin name for the Petty-dwarves was Levain tad-dail, which literally translates to "two-legged animal". Only after recognizing them as fellow sentient beings did the Sindar begin calling them Nogoth niben, "Petty Dwarf", and Nogotheg, "Dwarflet" (HoMe XI, p. 388).

[Rivvy Elf]

@Eldy Dunami Needless to day, my estimation of the Sindar (those who lack access to lore) has plummeted even more than it already has.

[Oak]

This explains the rift between Elves and Dwarves, which is pretty sad.

The Sindar excuse is pretty flimsy in my estimation.

[Galastel]

I think we should treat the Sindar with a little more kindness. The same plotline of "we didn't know they were sentient" is seen more than once in SF, with aliens. It is, for example, the plot of Star Trek TOS episode "The Devil in the Dark", where the humans are breaking alien eggs and trying to kill the mother alien, realising neither that the objects they're breaking are eggs, nor the fact that the alien is sentient and protecting its brood. In "Ender's Game", it is the aliens who attack us without realising we're sentient, and then we go and decide to exterminate them, assuming they can't be talked to. M.R. Carey's "The Girl with All the Gifts" is about the humanity of zombies, building on all the literature that doesn't see them as capable of thought.

How we can recognise something alien as sentient, or even alive, is an interesting question indeed, one sometimes raised even in RL, as we look towards space.

As I recall, the Sindar encountered the petty dwarves before they ever met any other species that was sentient and not in the service of Morgoth (that is, they've met orcs, but not yet humans or dwarves). Consider RL humans - we're fairly sure we're the only sentient thing walking the earth. We meet something new, it's obviously an animal. We didn't look at monkeys and think "maybe they're sentient, we should see if we can talk to them". And our situation is better than the elves': at the very least, we don't have orcs hunting us. (Speaking of animals, btw, how many species have we hunted to extinction or near extinction?)

If there is anything I would judge the Sindar for, it's hunting what they thought was an animal to near extinction. Had they thought the petty dwarves were akin to orcs - sentient and evil, their actions would have been easier to understand. Such thought would not have been without justification either - the petty dwarves attacked them. But if an animal, consider a tiger or a bear, attacks you, you don't go and hunt the whole species until it is no more. You do what you need to protect yourself, while recognising that the animal attacking you isn't "evil", but merely trying to live its life according to its instincts.