The Kingdom Beneath the Mountain

Full History

The dwarves of Ironforge traced their earliest past not to a single mortal founding king but to the buried works of the titans. Uldaman preserved accounts of the earthen and the changes that eventually produced the dwarven people. From that ancient inheritance, dwarves emerged to establish a kingdom under the mountains. Their later pride in stone, craft, and ancestry had roots deeper than the walls of Ironforge.

Early titan-shaped earthen were linked to the ordering of Azeroth, while the original Uldaman accounts describe transformations leading to flesh-and-blood descendants. The people who left the underground halls spread into the surrounding mountain country. Their settlements grew into a dwarven civilization centered upon Ironforge, whose defenses and foundries would make it one of the great strongholds of the Eastern Kingdoms.

The discovery of Uldaman also gave later dwarves a reason to investigate their own origins, a pursuit continued by explorers in the original World of Warcraft period. The ancient account should not be supplemented with identities and cosmic mechanisms invented in later histories. What the original evidence supports is already consequential: a people whose ancestry passed through titan works established independent kingdoms and would eventually divide into rival clans, even while seeking to understand the earth beneath their feet.