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All dwarves have beards

133 (41.7%)

Males bearded; females beardless (default setting)

163 (51.1%)

Females bearded; males beardless

14 (4.4%)

All dwarves beardless (horrors!)

9 (2.8%)

Total Members Voted: 319

[Lord Shonus]

What was Tolkien's stance on ladybeards?

Never came up in any of his works. I can't recall a single instance of him even mentioning female dwarves. I do know that Aragorn's "It's the beards" comment in the movie of The Two Towers was cited by Christopher Tolkien as a major reason why the Tolkein estate will never license another movie version, but that MAY have been his distaste for using Gimili as the comic relief.

[Thundrim]

What was Tolkien's stance on ladybeards?

Also, my friend tried to get me to play Dragon Age. I started making a character, then went to check if female dwarves had beards. When I found out they didn't, I was like fuck this

Tolkien indicated outsiders would have a hard time separating a female Dwarf from a male one, down to being unable to make the distinction. But as far as I know, he was vague enough to not say how this was accomplished exactly. The Beard thing is an indirect assumption, so in a sense it can be argued both ways, since the author can't provide input on the subject anymore. Female Dwarves are extremely rare and well guarded in his world, so a game like LOTRO didn't even dare to create two genders for them. Hehe... ( There is one Female mentioned in the afterwords. "Děs", unless I am mistaken, the name, not the fact he mentioned a Female. Hehe. Further reading indicate that all the Seven Fathers apart from Durin the Deathless was laid down in pairs ( Male with Female ) until awakened.)

As for Dragon age, they had MALES without beards, which was disturbing beyond any doubt. But the Dwarven realm grows on you, it's probably the best part of their game, not that uttermost bias might be involved in any statement regarding Dwarves here, mind you.

---

[OmnipotentGrue]

My females have beards. It seems natural now for some reason.

[Alastar]

I don't feel too strongly on this particular matter, but I dislike the tendency to cute up all females according to conventional human tastes. Beards it is.

[Jordrake]

I'll drop the assumption that beards are something to be proud of, then, thanks.

Don't be silly. They're dwarves. If we're going to drop that, we might as well make them all teetotallers with a fear of the dark as well.

While the beard is regarded as a symbol of dwarfdom, here is my argument against it being such.
DF is, first and foremost, a work-in-progress reality simulator. It can be also used as a game, but a perfect simulation of creation is clearly it's primary purpose. In real life, female humanoids, for the most part, lack the ability to grow a good beard. They do, in some cases, have facial hair, but not of dwarfy length. So, I put it to you that realistically (Unless dwarves have a different balance of hormones and such to us, which Toady has yet to specify) female dwarves would also be mostly incapable of beardiness.
As such, to say the beard is an important part of a dwarf would be to intentionally segregate men from women in terms of status. Alcoholism, justified. Depth-delving, justified. Why? Because both men and women can stake a claim to such symbols of dwarfiness. Dwarven women can be just as awesome, just as ass kicking and just as insane as men. Do not look upon them as less for their bare chins.

Of course, this is all just speculation assuming that by real-world parameters, dwarven women cannot in fact grow beards.

[TurnpikeLad]

My female dwarves aren't just beardless, they're entirely clean-shaven.  Even the kids...

[DG]

In real life, female humanoids, for the most part, lack the ability to grow a good beard.

Are you referencing more than just humans by using the term humanoids?

[Josephus]

I'm pretty sure female Ourang-outans don't have beards, while male Ourang-outans do.

[DG]

Primates would be the term to use, I think. Not sure how common or uncommon facial hair disparity between sexes is amongst them.

[Africa]

We can resolve this by using a bit of armchair evolutionary biology. What is the function of the beard? If we could somehow determine that, we can make predictions about whether all dwarves will be bearded. This assumes beards are adaptations. I'm pretty sure that if the dwarf beard is an adaptation, then we can almost certainly expect both male and female dwarves to have beards. If it is a "spandrel" as it were, then perhaps not. Or if it is merely a sexual ornament - perhaps dwarf evolution diverged from human evolution after the point where both species began to have enough sexual dimorphism for females not to have facial hair, then perhaps the beard on men became an ornament, but there was not enough selection pressure for females to also grow beards.

If the function is basic safety, i.e. protection from cold, insulation from heat, protection of vital organs behind a mass of thick, wiry hair, then we can expect all dwarves to have beards, since they all do the same work and therefore would all need the same protection.

If the function is to promote that one has good genes, then although there is little functional difference between males and females, because of the fact that females take care of babies, perhaps having a beard would be more important for males. After all, a male dwarf contributes nothing to the care of a baby, even though dwarves mate for life, so all that really matters is his genetics. This provides a reason for male dwarves to have a luscious beard that shows how healthy they are.

Of course, the function could also be to hold a baby. Perhaps dwarf babies grab onto their mother's beard with a deathgrip, enabling the mother to go on blacksmithing, farming, glassmaking or wading into bloody melee against goblins and have both hands available. In this case, we would expect females, but not necessarily males, to have beards.

Anyway, that's a lot less conclusive than I thought. Also, I just spent 15 minutes typing up a few paragraphs about the evolutionary biology of fictional dwarves. Wtf

[Shrugging Khan]

Also, while often overlooked, one might wish to remember that there's a lot of human males that can't grow a proper beard either. We should be careful when speculating on dwarves by proxy of humans.

[NW_Kohaku]

What was Tolkien's stance on ladybeards?

Basically, nothing much was said because of Tolkien's general gynophobia.  Especially because dwarves were fairly blunt and industrious and generally displayed masculine traits.  Wouldn't want any empowered females outside the nobility ruining one's notion of a perfect pre-industrial world...

We can resolve this by using a bit of armchair evolutionary biology. What is the function of the beard? If we could somehow determine that, we can make predictions about whether all dwarves will be bearded. This assumes beards are adaptations.
etc. etc. etc.

Technically, as humans evolved out of hairy apes into creatures that had less hair, we can assume that the adaptation was to grow less hair. 

Although still controversial (as it was caught up with the Feminist movement largely only because a woman proposed it,)  the "Aquatic Ape" theory states that humans lost their hairy body (where hair would keep them warm) in favor of more fatty bodies because they started becoming dependant upon rivers (and their fish) as a source of food as the Desertification of the Sahara began, and humanity's ancestors were forced out of the trees.  Hair is generally useless as an insulator when wet (excepting extremely oily hair, like a water dog's), and fat was a better insulator.

If there is any historical evolutionary parallel to dwarves, however, it would actually be the Neanderthals.  Neanderthals were cousins of humans who left Africa earlier than other humanoids did (and so were cut off from the full evolutionary progression into humanity), and were generally shorter, broader, more muscled, and tougher, but also not as efficient a long-distance runner (thanks to the shorter legs).

Because of this, they were better adapted for colder weather and forests like Europe had during the Ice Age, and were better adapted to be ambush hunters, while humans were better adapted for warmer grassy plains.  While humans hunted by traps or throwing spears, Neanderthals hunted by hiding behind (or in) trees, and leaping down upon megafauna like a wooly rhino's back, and then repeatedly beating it to death with a spear, hopefully before the wooly rhino could toss him off and trample his stupid ass to death for grappling with a critter that outmasses him 10 to 1.

In short, there are many parallels between dwarves and Neanderthals (and I'm honestly not sure why more people don't notice this...)

So then, the question is, "do Neanderthals have beards the same way humans do?"  The answer to that is, essentially, yes.  They were generally hairier (and probably more women had chin hairs or thin mustaches than human women do,) but there was a male/female difference according to every mockup I've seen. In fact, this article here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/his-name-is-a-common-term-of-abuse-its-time-neanderthal-man-got-a-better-press-argues-colin-tudge-1601789.html actually argues that the beard of a pre-historic human was actually the equivalent of a peacock's feathers or a stag's horns - they are how males attract females by asserting their fitness to mate through growing one. 

[Beeskee]

The "female dwarfs have beards" thing came from Tolkien, like nearly everything else in fantasy settings nowadays. In the books and movies it was said that female dwarfs looked identical to the male dwarfs, or at least close enough that non-dwarfs couldn't tell them apart. The dwarfs themselves didn't seem to have any problem with it, and the feeling I got is that any one of the dwarfs featured could have been female, but would look male to me, and other dwarfs would probably refer to them with male pronouns and etc.

Maybe Tolkien was super sexist but the impression I got was that dwarf society treated both members equal and the dwarfs themselves didn't have any issues, except the possible confusion they caused in other races.


As far as what I'd like my dwarfs to be like, I guess that's really up to them. It would be neat if different civs had different preferences as to shaven-ness and the dwarfs would vary their appearance depending on that.

[Glanzor]

Bearded female dwarves make much more sense to me.
I've always imagined dwarves as a fairly egalitarian society when it comes to stuff like gender. With the importance of beards in the dwarven society, it would be weird to me if half of the population would completely lack the possibility to earn such a important status symbol.

Plus it makes them less human. If they were just small humans living of mining and wouldn't even have an own sense of aesthetics, their existence would be pretty pointless to me.

[Rose]

I mod my game and play as humans.

....what?