An Alternate Ecology of Dwarves, Gnomes, and Halflings: Part 1, Dwarves.

The various short folk of fantasy fiction and tabletop roleplaying games often suffer, from my perspective, from lazy characterization. They aren't given nearly as much attention as elves or even orcs. I'll be looking at all three, in this series, in alphabetical order. I'll also be tying them together.

A lot of the time, Dwarves are just miners and craftsmen, living in their mountain halls, ala Tolkien (which is understandable given their origins in Germanic myth), or hard fighting, hard drinking Scotsmen for some reason, or both. Vague references and hints in Tolkien cause enormous fights over whether Dwarven women have beards, and the dwarves as a whole get used for comedy relief far too often. “Not the beard!” and “ Never toss a dwarf!” are artifacts of Dungeons and Dragons I could do without.

So. How do we fix that, and give dwarves depth and novelty that is still faithful to their mythological roots? Easy. We get more faithful, and draw deeper from the Norse and Germanic myths and folklore.

Let's start with the Norse, though. There are elements there that get missed. The Dvergr, or dwarves (sometimes conflated with the Dokkalfar, that's a whole thing I don't have time for) were not created by the gods, anymore than the Jotun were. Instead, they were born from the flesh of the primordial frost Jotun, Ymir, when Odin, Vili, and Ve slew him. The usual story is that they were maggots in his flesh. We'll come back to that in a minute, and strip it of Aesir bigotry. (Look, they actively practiced genocide against the Jotun, to whom they were actually related . . .)

4 of these dwarves were taken and set to hold up the four corners of the sky, made from Ymir's skull. They were named for the four directions. Other dwarves made all the magical artifacts the gods wielded, because for some reason the Aesir didn't include a smith god, which is honestly a little odd.

So right from the beginning, dwarves are very important. They made Mjolnir, and Gungnir, and all the rest. They are as old as the gods, and born separately. Stripped of Aesir judgment, the 'maggots' might be seen as just a poetic reference to burrowing through earth and stone, ie mining and living below ground. For me, this causes an immediate association with badgers: strong, fierce, tough, defensive, family oriented, with large communal burrows.

And that's just Norse myth. Later German myth and folklore has the dwarven men as short, stunted and 'ugly' (big on judgment, again), but the women are described as radiantly beautiful, sometimes taller than the men, but not always. Probably not bearded, but I wouldn't judge them if they were.

Dwarves also seem extremely fascinated by beauty, throughout mythology and a lot of the fiction, and it isn't restricted to stone and metal. They craft the Brisingamen necklace for Freya because she is beautiful. Gimli is struck by the glory of Galadriel, especially her hair. They even made the famous mead of poetry . . . although they did brew it from the blood of Kvasir, himself made from the mingling of Aesir and Vanir spittle. So in addition to smiths, miners, warriors . . . we have a folk who are extremely artistic, making (and coveting) many things for their beauty alone, not just boring practical people.

That gives us a picture of a folk who are, in fact, consummate builders and craftspeople, as well as aggressive warriors who mainly fight to defend their homes. They value things of beauty, so it is more wonder, than strictly greed, that motivates their making and taking. While the men are bearded, and to Norse eyes at least, 'ugly', there is no good reason for them to have particularly large noses. Living underground as they do does give them reason to have downturned noses, unlike the orcs, because you might want small pinched nostrils to better filter the air and avoid dust settling in them. For that matter, the beard and mustache might serve a filtration purpose. They are probably quite sexually dimorphic, as their women are described as very beautiful, though more rarely seen. (I leave the beards up to individual tastes.)

Their vast halls are wondrously crafted, full of life and light, and their voices regularly lift in song. Poetry is regarded highly, and dwarven skalds are very high status individuals. (The idea of the blood mead of poetry gives kind of an interesting notion: they actually keep bees, even below ground . . . but they are a kind of vulture bee, fed on meat and fungi, thus, blood mead from blood honey.)

Like badgers, they live in family units organized into far larger clans, all living within the same vast delve, also sometimes called a sett. Their cities thus tend to be groupings of clan dwellings as separate neighborhoods within the larger delving. Closeness of relation directly corresponds with physical closeness of dwelling spaces, and there is never any expectation that offspring will 'move out', rather that they will expand the dwelling space of the entire community if the population grows enough. They reproduce only slowly compared to humans, and must defend themselves against many threats, so population increase is relatively rare, except via immigration.

In general, there are 4 or more dwarf men born for every woman, and they have a greater tendency to die young for both societal and biological reasons. This results in a clearly matriarchal society where the women often take several men as husbands. The children are raised as belonging to the entire family, even the entire clan, but all of the husbands share the role of father with each other, for every child. As dwarven women have the badger's ability to delay implantation of fertilized eggs, there is no clear connection between the physical act of mating and the production of a child, and the tendency to marry several brothers confuses the issue even more, so that the society is entirely matrilineal.

Competition for marriage can still be quite steep, and is carried out via crafting challenges and poetry contests, primarily. Violence is almost entirely reserved for outside threats to the clan. Breech of this custom makes a dwarf and outlaw, an outcast, and they are often branded so no other dwarf sett will accept them. Doomed thus to a solitary life on the surface, many become criminals or adventurers. Some take on impossible challenges in order to prove themselves worthy and redeem their honor, if only in death.

They trade a great deal with the surface for food, although they do have many meat animals, crabs, and fish that live in the caverns attached to their vast halls, and they eat a lot of fungus and lichen. As we discuss the other small folk moving forward, we'll cover how they differ from each other and how that came to pass . . . because in this set up, they are all branches of the same lineage.

As an aside: 'elven chain' and mithral armor isn't elven, dammit. It's dwarven. Always was.:)

This is getting long, so I might talk even more about dwarves next time. What do you think?