The Doors of Durin & What Lies Beyond | Tolkien Explained

The Doors of Durin & What Lies Beyond | Tolkien Explained Speak, friend, and enter. Everyone knows the riddle. Almost nobody knows what it actually meant when Narvi and Celebrimbor built it. The Doors of Durin were not designed as a puzzle or a security measure. They were built as an open invitation during the greatest friendship between Elves and Dwarves that ever existed. The instruction was written in plain sight because the world that built the door assumed that anyone approaching was a friend. The word was not a secret. It was a declaration of relationship. The door opened for you if you were what the inscription said you should be. By the time Gandalf stands before it in the Third Age the friendship it was built to serve has been dead for over three thousand years. Celebrimbor was murdered and desecrated by Sauron. Eregion was burned to ash. The Dwarves sealed the door from the inside as the last of their Elven friends died. And then they delved too deep and something far worse than Sauron's armies took the mountain from within. The riddle is not about cleverness. It is about how completely the world had forgotten what that door was built for.