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Significantly older

The year of Gimli's birth is given in Appendix A, in the family tree for the Line of Durin, as 2879 of the Third Age (click to embiggen):

enter image description here

Appendix B gives the date of the Council of Elrond as October 25, 3018.

So Gimli is actually almost 140 years old when we first meet him, and is certainly that age by the end of the trilogy.

So yes, in general, Dwarves live longer than humans do. Tolkien nowhere specifically discusses their lifespan, but we can look at the dwarves whose ages we know (which is basically just the people in that family tree), and see that most of them hover around 250 years:

enter image description here

Outliers include:

  • Durin I (not included on that chart, because he'd screw with the scale something awful), who lived for at least 2395 years1
  • Dwalin, who for no adequately explored reason died at the age of 340, presumably of natural causes
  • Borin, who died at age 261, presumably of natural causes
  • The four dwarves who didn't reach 100 years: Frór (37), Frerin (48), Kíli (77), and Fíli (82). All of them died in battle: Frór fell to a dragon in the Grey Mountains, Frerin died at the Battle of Azanulbizar, and Fíli and Kíli both died at the Battle of the Five Armies
  • The four additional dwarves who didn't reach 150, all of whom also died in battle: Náin son of Grór (134) and Fundin (137) were both killed in the Battle of Azanulbizar, Náin I (149) was killed by Durin's Bane, and Dáin I (149) was killed by the same dragon that killed Frór

Such a limited sample size makes it difficult to say anything intelligent about dwarvish lifespan, but it's clear that it isn't unusual for a dwarf to celebrate his 250th birthday.

Gimli himself, it may interest you to know, left over the Sea with Legolas when he was 262; we don't know how long he lived after that point.

In the films

It's worth remarking that this may or may not be true of the films, which notably condensed the timeframe in some places (in particular, they almost certainly removed the 17-year gap between Bilbo's Party and Frodo setting out for Rivendell). That being said, every source cited above (not those cited below) would have been legally available to Peter Jackson to use in his films, so it stands as a fair guess.


1 We don't know precisely when the Dwarves first awoke, but the first reference to them in Elvish histories is about YT 1250, in the Years of the Trees2, so he must have been "born" before that time. His death is given vaguely in Appendix A as "First Age", meaning he died sometime between YT 1500 (the final Year of the Trees) and FA 590. Because the Years of the Trees reckoned years differently than the Years of the Sun, this puts a lower bound on Durin's age at 2395 solar years

2 Though some earlier drafts put their first meeting in the First Age, which would make Durin substantially younger

Jason Baker
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