Rodish, the late and much missed Chief Dwarf, was famed for his honour and courage. He was also a good constituency Council representative (roughly equivalent to an MP). He had an ancient manor house, mainly to make his guests welcome as most of them (elves, fairies and the like) would not be comfortable in a mine, though at the back of the ancestral home, Rodish did have a huge cave of his own. Whenever he felt the call of his species telling him to go and mine, that’s exactly what he did. He was a mean thrower of the pickaxe too and though he didn’t survive the battle with the Witch, he took out a number of her cronies on his own, much to her annoyance (and to a certain extent admiration as she does have a soft spot for bravery as, indeed, does Eileen).
Rodish had the finest collection of dwarf armoury but this was broken up by the Witch in her battle with him. His brother, Balkish, who took over the Chief Dwarf role, is trying to start again with this collection by persuading his fellow dwarves to hand over some of their ancestral weapons but is having great difficulty here. Given what happened to the last collection, the dwarves’ attitude is understandable but frustrating from Balkish’s viewpoint. He is hoping to enlist regal support in the belief that will make his fellows co-operate but intends to wait until the Queen is over her fixation with getting Jenny and Eileen back in the Kingdom permanently. He rightly believes until Her Majesty is over that, she won’t take much notice of any other issue she considers trivial. And he wants her to take the issue of rebuilding collections (not just the dwarves’ one) seriously. He’d also like any such collections housed in the Palace. Although the Palace was attacked, it took an act of sabotage against the protection spells to achieve that. And the Queen’s strengthened and improved the protection on the Palace since then.