Frór was born into the royal line of Durin's Folk, the second son of Dáin I, at a time when the Dwarves of that clan were dwelling in the Grey Mountains. Frór's great-great-grandfather, Thorin I, had led his people there to exploit the riches of those unexplored mountains, and over the generations they had amassed immense wealth.
Northward beyond the Grey Mountains, Dragons dwelt, and over the years these Dragons had begun to trouble the Dwarves more and more. By the time Frór's father Dáin I took the throne in III 2585, the treasuries of the Dwarves were being plundered by the Dragons. Four years later, when Frór was just thirty-seven years old, a Cold-drake came against the hall of the Kings, and both Frór and his father Dáin was slain by the monster before their own doors.
This disaster led the Dwarves to abandon the Grey Mountains altogether. Frór's elder brother Thrór became King, and led his people back to Erebor, where his ancestors had established the first Kingdom under the Mountain long beforehand. Meanwhile Frór's younger brother Grór went farther east, establishing a Dwarf-colony in the Iron Hills. Nonetheless, Frór was by no means the last of the Dwarves to fall to a Dragon, and within his brother Thrór's own lifetime - some 181 years2 after Frór's own death - the Dragon Smaug sacked Erebor and took its treasures for himself.
Notes
1 |
Frór's name is Old Norse in form, but does not carry an obvious meaning, and it seems quite plausible that Tolkien simply designed the name to mirror that of his important elder brother Thrór. Alternatively, the name is just conceivably based on Old Norse froðr, 'wise' (the Old Norse equivalent of Old English fród in the Hobbit-name 'Frodo'). This is, however, something of a linguistic stretch, and 'wise' seems rather odd choice of name for a Dwarf who died while still a youth, at least in Dwarf terms.
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2 |
This length of time is certainly considerable, but within a typical Dwarf lifetime. Frór and his brothers had been young when the Cold-drake sacked their halls in the Grey Mountains; at that time Thrór had been forty-six, which was accounted young for a Dwarf. Thrór went on to rule Erebor until Smaug's attack in III 2770, when he would have been 228 years old. Dwarves typically lived for about 250 years, so King Thrór was certainly old at that point, but not unusually so for one of his kind.
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