Books

Fictional mines, commodities and disasters whose setting began in books, grouped by setting. Each record is researched and structured like its real counterpart and sourced to canon; see the Fictional section for what that means. The full lists across every medium are Mines, Commodities and Disasters.

Mines (19)

A Song of Ice and Fire

• Castamere
  A mine that became a palace, then a tomb, in that order.
• Casterly Rock Gold Mines
  Two versions of the same family secret: one where the gold ran out, and one where the gold was always going to run out first for the family spending it.

Discworld

• Koom Valley
  Every Low King has been crowned on the same rite since B'hrian Bloodaxe — the same king this valley's flood eventually proved had brokered peace with the trolls, not war
• Schmaltzberg
  A mining region so politically central that its own name became a faction: 'Schmaltzbergers' are the dwarfs who still refuse the safety lamp their modernising cousins use
• The Ankh-Morpork Dwarf Mines
  It is never once shown producing any ore, metal or mineral — the whole story that plays out in it is about dwarf law, a murder, and a three-hundred-year-old lie

Germinal

• Le Voreux
  One of literature's most famous fictional coal mines — its climactic flooding, sabotaged from within by an anarchist, drowns or traps dozens of miners in a catastrophe modelled on Zola's own visits to real French coalfields in 1884.

Harry Potter

• Overlook Mine
  A mine already abandoned for its own reasons before being pressed into service twice over — once by goblin rebels, once by the game's own hidden-journal mystery.
• The Mine's Eye
  A goblin mine turned improvised drilling rig, built specifically to break into a magic repository nobody but its architects was ever meant to find.

How Green Was My Valley

• The Colliery (How Green Was My Valley)
  Never given its own name in either the novel or its Oscar-winning film adaptation, yet it's one of the most vivid fictional collieries in English-language literature — deliberately anonymous, standing for an entire vanishing way of life.

King Coal

• North Valley Number One Mine
  The camp where the company nailed boards and a tarpaulin over the pit-mouth with a hundred men below, to save the coal from the fire.

King Solomon's Mines

• King Solomon's Mines
  The legendary lost diamond mines of the fictional African kingdom of Kukuanaland, the object of the entire quest in H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel -- arguably the foundational work of the 'lost mine' adventure genre.

Middle-earth

• Erebor (The Lonely Mountain)
  A kingdom that lost everything to one dragon, and got it back because of one burglar.
• Khazad-dûm
  Gandalf never says where mithril came from — only that the Dwarves found it here, delved too deep chasing more of it, and lost their entire kingdom for it

Sherlock Holmes

• Crow Hill Mine
  The one Vermissa colliery that would not pay the Scowrers, until its manager and engineer were shot down at the pit head before a hundred miners.

Sons and Lovers

• Minton Pit
  The pit where Walter Morel hews: 'Minton's knocked off. My dad'll be at home.'

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

• The Washington Diamond Mine
  A diamond mountain so valuable its owner would rather destroy it — and kill his own family alongside it — than let the world know it exists.

The Hunger Games

• The Coal Mines of District 12
  Where the story's own narrator's father died, and yet the books never once give the mine itself a name.

The Princess and the Goblin

• The Goblin Mines
  The tunnels dug by the goblins beneath the mountain in George MacDonald's 1872 fantasy novel, threatening the human miners' own workings -- including those of the miner boy Curdie, one of the book's central characters.

The Stars Look Down

• Neptune Colliery
  Cronin's Neptune: seams under the sea, a fault the only barrier against the flooded Old Neptune, and an owner who strips the coal off it for a coking contract.

Commodities (2)

Discworld

• Schmaltzberg Fat
  Its own myth of origin is a fifth elephant that fell off the back of the World Turtle and crash-landed on Überwald

Middle-earth

• Mithril
  It was worth ten times its weight in gold while the mine was still working, and 'beyond price' the moment it stopped

Disasters (7)

A Song of Ice and Fire

• The Flooding of Castamere (During the reign of King Aerys II Targaryen, exact date not given)
  A single song is enough, centuries later, to end an argument — because everyone already knows exactly how the last one who tried this ended up.

Discworld

• The Summoning Dark at Koom Valley (Not dated (contemporary with the events of Thud!))
  The Summoning Dark didn't need to break into Vimes from outside — it just needed him to forget he'd promised to read to his son at six o'clock

King Coal

• The North Valley Explosion (King Coal) (Autumn, in the novel's single year)
  Boards and a tarpaulin over the pit-mouth for three and a half days, with a hundred men below.

Middle-earth

• Durin's Bane (T.A. 1980)
  Two kings of Khazad-dum died in quick succession over the same vein of mithril, and the response was to abandon the richest Dwarf-realm in Middle-earth rather than go back down after it
• The Bridge of Khazad-dûm (15 January T.A. 3019)
  Cinema's most quoted line from this scene — 'You shall not pass!' — is not what the book actually says; Tolkien's Gandalf says 'You cannot pass', twice
• The Sack of Erebor (T.A. 2770)
  A disaster with a survivor list of exactly two named dwarves — a king and his son, out a secret door — and an epilogue that took a dwarf, a wizard, a hobbit and thirteen years to even attempt putting right.

The Stars Look Down

• The Neptune Colliery Inrush (The Stars Look Down) (A snowy Monday morning in the winter before July 1914; the novel gives no calendar date)
  Eighty-nine dead in fifteen minutes and nine more dying in the dark of the Old Neptune, jowling on the rock for rescuers who arrive too late.