Monday, August 15, 2022

"The Last Word on Dwarven Women's Beards"

The issue of whether or not female dwarves have beards is a longstanding one in the hobby. It has its roots in Appendix A of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which says of dwarf women that "They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart." Some readers assert this statement is ambiguous, though it seems pretty clear to me.

Of course, whether or not dwarf women have beards in Middle-earth doesn't have much bearing on whether or not they do in Dungeons & Dragons – just ask Gary Gygax. In issue #41 of Dragon (September 1980), in response to a letter to the editor, Gygax said the following:

I don't claim to be an expert in Teutonic and Norse mythology, but, based on my reading, I'm hard pressed to recall a single instance of a female dwarf, bearded or otherwise. Consequently, I can't help but feel that Gygax is being disingenuous when he claims that D&D's bearded female dwarves are derived solely from mythology – and I say this as someone who's generally sympathetic to his claims elsewhere that D&D and The Lord of the Rings don't mix well. Am I missing something? Is there, in fact, a mythological basis for bearded dwarf women or Gygax simply trying to obfuscate the matter?

30 comments:

  1. There is not a mythological basis for bearded dwarven women that I know of--but I also can't think of a single instance of a mythological female dwarf.

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    1. That's where I'm at too, but I am quite prepared to be proven wrong on this.

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    2. The best I can offer re: female dwarves is in the Fáfnismál, where the "daughters of Dvalinn" are mentioned -- but this is a reference to the Norns governing the fates of dwarves, and as such, it's unclear to me whether this is meant to be a literal description or something more poetic.

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    3. Yes, came to say the same thing. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)#Norse_mythology_and_later_folklore:

      Dwarfs in folklore are usually described as old men with long beards.[13] Female dwarfs are hardly ever mentioned. Dvalinn the dwarf has daughters. The 14th-century romantic saga Þjalar Jóns saga gives the feminine form of Old Norse dyrgja, but the few folklore examples cited by Grimm in Teutonic Mythology may be identified as other beings.[14][15] However, in the Swedish ballad "Herr Peder och Dvärgens Dotter" (Swedish 'Sir Peder and the Dwarf's Daughter'), the role of supernatural temptress is played by a dwarf's daughter.[16]

      So dwarves have daughters; but are the daughters themselves dwarves? If they play the role of seductresses, perhaps the daughters don't resemble the fathers much at all? The trope of the gnarled, ugly old man/fairy/witch with the lithe, seductive daughter is ubiquitous: the daughter is typically regarded as being a different sort of being altogether.

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    4. The only RPG I'm aware of that ran with this is R. Talsorian's Castle Falkenstein.

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  2. Sounds like Gary is trying to avoid a lawsuit.

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    1. Yep, this sounds like someone who had to edit "hobbit" out to me too.

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  3. Tolkien himself almost certainly knew more about mythological dwarves then Gygax or most anyone, and he himself flip-flopped back and forth on whether his female dwarves had beards.

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  4. I read Gygax's last sentence in the quotation as essentially tongue-in-cheek, as it is not at all hard to imagine how one could play without bearded female dwarves.

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  5. “Frankly, while D&D is flexible, how can one play without bearded female dwarves?”

    This reads exactly like satire: two opening sentences that are perfectly reasonable; a third sentence that only seems reasonable read in conjunction with the beginning (and not thinking too hard about it—D&D and D&D adventures precisely do pull bits and pieces from multiple sources, which means that there is no requirement that one piece means you must adopt the whole thing); and a final sentence that is meant as a complete joke, whose joke is hidden by its conjunction with the rest of the statement.

    Could there be anything less “flexible” than a player or group that can’t alter the hirsuteness of dwarves? He’s pulling the leg of people who can’t stand other people playing fantasy races differently.

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  6. I was in a gaming shop once when 3rd edition had just been released, and I watched a guy flip through the first 10 pages of the new Players Handbook before returning it to the shelf in disgust. He then announced so all could hear, "Female dwarves don't have beards... this new edition SUCKS."

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    1. ...I hope you also thought 2e sucked, because anything good about 2e is better in 3e, and a lot of the bad stuff was removed.

      It's NOT perfect, obviously. But it's miles better than 2e, and serving a very different goal than OD&D was.

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    2. Never played 2e. Seemed too crunchy to me and want interested in that edition at all. I started with B/X in 1981 and played some 1e when my character got past the level limits of Expert. Dabbled in 3e and played 5e for a while, but generally I play B/X retroclones like LotFP now. Never played straight up 0D&D

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    3. I admittedly have only played it in CRPG form, where it does all the math and rolling for you automatically, and remembers the rules, and it's still incoherent.

      3e had its faults, but it was a coherent system using consistent rules that you can grasp the core mechanics of instantly and enough mechanics to functionally play in about ten. And making D&D consistent did a LOT of good, IMO. There are other aspects, of course, that are not so good.

      These days I quite like Worlds Without Number, myself.

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  7. Gnomes are a cousin( if not literally brothers) to dwarves, I've never seen a female gnome depicted with a beard so the answer for me is, no. Honestly, I think Tolkien was just making a joke out of the idea that all dwarves have beard as the idea is funny.

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  8. honestly I'm not sure why this is a point of discourse. any sort of woman CAN have a beard-- drawf, human, elf. likewise any sort of man might be unable to have a beard. the whole fascination with "drawven women with beards" honestly feels vaguely queerphobic to me, idk tho.

    besides, there's a whole history of nineteenth-century European eugenicists using "pronounced sexual dimorphism" in White people as "justification" for white supremacy, and focusing on bearded dwarf women (and beardless elf men) in order to exoticize and other them apart from "baseline" humans kinda feels like it's just playing into that :(

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    1. Elven men can't have beards, let alone female elves. Different types of creatures and genders are different and that is ok.

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    2. again, this idea of "they're similar to us, but they're *other* and *different* because their men and women look alike" is a trope absolutely rooted in eugenicist race science. although tbf I'm not entirely sure that's applicable to elves, there's probably another layer of stuff entirely going on with beardless elves 🙃

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  9. GG's claim that AD&D dwarves aren't Tolkien dwarves is about the least convincing assertion of originality he ever made. Even the plural "dwarves" is Tolkien's, as opposed to "dwarfs."

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  10. Here's the interesting and oft-forgotten-now thing: the plural of dwarf is, or used to be, dwarfs. Tolkien intentionally used a variant spelling "to remove them a little, perhaps, from the sillier tales of these latter days" (Lord of the Rings, Appendix F).

    Surely, if Gygax were completely serious that the dwarfs/ves of D&D weren't drawn from Tolkien, he'd have spelled their name correctly. He was of a generation that would know the correct spelling.

    He didn't, because he's being disingenuous in the response quoted. Of course his dwarfs are Dwarves, just like his halflings are Hobbits and his treants are Ents.

    I suspect Gygax was in a bind, not so much because of the IP issues (though there was that), but I suspect also because he was sincere in not much caring for Tolkien (being someone whose idea of Fantasy was Howard, Leiber, Burroughs, etc.), while also being more than smart enough to recognize that the Fantasy revival launched by the paperback publication of Lord of the Rings in the 1960s and its enthusiastic embrace by the counterculture was a big part of the zeitgeist pushing D&D to inordinate success. He may not have cared for Tolkien, but he knew perfectly well Tolkien was buttering his bread.

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  11. Ironic that Gygax should deny a Tolkien connection when the plural form "dwarves" is 100% from Tolkien, who was it's inventor. The correct English not-Tolkien plural is "dwarfs", and early RuneQuest for example was very careful to use that form. Gygax really should have known better, if he was even half as clever as he thought he was.

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  12. I don't care one teeny bit what other players and DM's do in their games. But your not going to a female elf, halfling, lizardman, or even a flumph have one in my campaign world, and I know other gamers as well.

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  13. I love that several of us picked up the "dwarfs/dwarves" point at around the same time!

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  14. I love dwarves too much to give their wives beards.

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  15. All dwarven women grow beards. A dwarf woman without a beard has little chance to find a good husband. The ones that can't grow beards are considered witches.

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    1. Well, that just depends on the campaign world in question.

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  16. It seems the simplest way to see it is that Gygax didn't quite despise the influence of ME as much as he later said. Plus there were others who threw their nickels and dimes of creativity into the mix who may have seen Tolkien's world as more influential than Gygax did. That would explain many of his 'it has nothing to do with Tolkien' responses to things that seemed to have at least something to do with Tolkien.

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  17. I can think of examples from myth where there's a daughter of a dwarf...but I think they all tend to be normal women (or at least it's not implied they're tiny). And mythological dwarfs certainly seem to lust for human women on at least some occasions.

    As others have commented, the idea that D&D dwarves aren't Tolkienesque is laughable, and if Gygax genuinely thought he was deriving them all from myth he was insane. I mean...axe use alone is a Tolkien thing.

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