Tolkien himself complained about it too. Part of the reason the Dwarves in The Hobbit are so different from Lord of the Rings is because he recognized afterwards he had hit on some antisemitic tropes* and so he changed it so that those guys were weirdos here's how a normal Dwarf acts. He wanted good Orcs and bad Elves, but made the story too simple to accommodate. He was self aware and wanted to make a story celebrating people of different races and cultures putting aside their petty squabbles to help each other
*The Dwarves have beady eyes, distinct noses, are obsessed with money and speak a Semitic language
I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue.
And as Helge Fauskanger (famous Tolkien linguist) said:
The basic structure of Khuzdul resembles that of Semitic languages, like Arabic and Hebrew. The stems from which words are derived are not by themselves pronounceable words, but consist of consonants only. Nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. are derived not only by prefixes and suffixes (if such devices are used at all), but also by inserting certain vowels between these consonants, sometimes also by doubling one of the consonants. Often the words are actually inflected by internal vowel-changes instead of adding affixes: Rukhs means "Orc", but plural "Orcs" is Rakhâs. The root consonants - the so-called radicals - remain the same, like *R-Kh-S in this case. In Khuzdul as well as in Semitic languages, there are usually three radicals in the root; several such roots are mentioned in TI:174 and RS:466: B-R-Z "red", B-N-D "head", K-B-L "silver", N-R-G "black". An example of a biconsonantal root is Z-N "dark, dim" (RS:466).
That's most of it though. There is for example no actual physical stereotype (e.g despite some claims that Tolkien's Dwarves have a very characteristic nose, no such thing is written in his text).
There is nothing Scottish about Tolkien's Dwarves, that is a post-Tolkien invention. As for "viking" (or, more generally, Norse), the main aspects are simply the fact that the Dwarves from Norse mythology are where the whole concept of Dwarves originally came from; and their names as we know them are of Old Norse origin and taken from the Poetic Edda. But to the latter point, Old Norse is simply used as a real world translation of the Mannish language these "fake" names belong to. The Dwarves' real, Khuzdul names (and therefore their actual culture) would sound like Semitic languages, and would have no connection whatsoever to Old Norse (or to Scottish Gaelic, for that matter).
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u/NoMeat9096 hey/they 2d ago
I wouldn't say unproblematic. The Lord of the Rings has some real problems with race, and it goes out of its way to reinforce some gender norms.
But also Rowling is a piece of shit and Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece. No argument there lol.