"Kobolds don't always make good neighbors, but I think we have very different sorts of problems than they do."

"Bad neighbors mean wars, eventually, and no ownership means starvation and disease and very slow or no inventing new things and losing old inventions and everybody suffering."

"We live in small enough groups that we only have a couple of those problems, and we don't really care about inventing much. War, though, yeah, that happens - we aren't warlike, we don't start them, but they happen anyway."

They have a hard time relating to not caring about inventing things, but express sympathy over the wars happening even though the kobolds don't start them. 

Yeah. Her Quendi are mostly busy with the war here, but they're trying to help with that.

The Enemy is pretty terrible and it's good to help with that.

Yeah. Her world doesn't have gods at all, so the Enemy was a nasty surprise.

Really? That's pretty sensible of her world. Gods are - well, it's good that they made Dwarves in the first place, but nothing else they've done seems especially commendable.

Well, it's possible there are some somewhere and she's just never heard of them doing anything, but that seems just as good for her purposes. She hasn't heard much good about the local gods either.

Maybe they have a reason for paroling Melkor, but it's hard to think of one.

...she hadn't heard about that bit yet, she thought they just weren't helping. Wow.

They only heard it recently, from the Quendi.

Maybe each of the Quendi tribes assumed the other one had told her, that seems possible.

The Quendi seem kind of embarrassed by everything relating to how they left Valinor.

That too, yeah. She doesn't have the whole story, but part of it is that they'd never really taken a meaningful risk before? Which is the Valar's fault, not theirs, but, like, literally only one person had ever died, where they were before; they had no idea what they were getting into, and they made some really bad decisions because of it.

That does seem like a recipe for making bad decisions. Quendi. They shake their heads despairingly.

Yeah. Well, they're learning, anyway.

Good? Is that good?

Well, she thinks so. She doesn't know anything about the Doriath Quendi, but hers came to try to kill the Enemy; getting more sensible about that and better at avoiding mistakes that hurt each other or other people is a good thing.

Yes, but if their flaw in the first place was never having seen anyone die, then 'now they're better about that' sort of suggests a painful learning process.

...ah. Yeah. Her tribe - the one they've been talking to - got here by walking across the ice, which took them a few decades; the other one got here first and had to fight a lot of orcs.

The Doriath ones had to fight a lot of orcs too.

Yeah, that only fixes some kinds of problems.

Better than nothing, but yeah.

The thing where the Dwarves aren't the first species they've met that aren't gods or orcs probably helps, too. Not that they've had much contact with kobolds, but having some still helped, she thinks, and then also there are the Men.