Chamber of Records

Plan view of the Chamber of Records within Moria¹

A chamber within old Khazad-dûm that lay on the Seventh Level of that mountain city, close to the Twenty-first Hall. From that vast Hall, an archway led northward into a corridor, and the Chamber of Records lay through a stone door on the right-hand (or eastern) side of this corridor. The chamber itself was large and square, and brightly lit (at least during the daytime) by sunlight slanting down a shaft carved in its eastern wall. Beneath the shaft was another doorway, leading out eastward to a long flight of stairs that ran down into the lower levels of Moria.

The Dwarves had cut many recesses into the stone walls of the room, and these recesses held chests strongly bound with iron. These chests were presumably used to store the records that gave the chamber its name (their contents are not in fact specifically described, although the Book of Mazarbul, the record of Balin's colony within Moria, had evidently been kept in one of these chests).

The old Dwarf-city of Khazad-dûm had been abandoned by the Dwarves in III 1981 with the coming of Durin's Bane, and so most of the surviving records within the chamber must have dated back to that time. After its abandonment, the city was occupied by Orcs, and no Dwarf entered it for more than a thousand years. In III 2989, the old Dwarf Balin led a company into the city and succeeded in defeating the Orcs they found there. They established themselves in the great Twenty-first Hall, while Balin himself took the Chamber of Records to be his seat. After five years, in III 2994, a new force of Orcs came up the valley of Azanulbizar, and Balin, who had ventured out of the city into the vale, was slain. The body of the fallen Lord of Moria was recovered by the Dwarves and entombed within the Chamber of Records. Soon afterward, the Orcs forced their way into Moria and drove back the defending Dwarves, who were eventually trapped within the Chamber of Records and slain.

After that final battle of Balin's Dwarves, the chamber was left strewn with bones and broken weapons, and so it remained for the next twenty-five years, until the Company of the Ring found their way into it as they passed through Moria. There they discovered the records of Balin's lost colony in the Book of Mazarbul, which was taken by the Dwarf Gimli to be returned to King Dáin in Erebor. In the event, this was the only one of the records to escape the chamber's collapse. The Company was soon attacked, and after a skirmish within the chamber itself, they fled down the eastern stairway. Covering their retreat, the Wizard Gandalf fought a short but explosive magical battle with the Balrog known as Durin's Bane. The clash of their powerful magic left the chamber in ruins, and its ancient records were buried beneath tons of fallen stone.