about female dwarves

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i have heard, in D&D world, that female dwarves have beard. But i never seen one, or "read" one for that matter, order of the sticks shows no bearded female dwarves, can't find them in BG series, NWN or any books even that describe bearded female dwarves.

And so i download this NWN modules, scourge of the slaveloards, in its second modules, i found meself a bearded female dwarf henchwomen. Scary, extremely!

Besides her beard, her avatar looks normal, but then she has this long blonde beard. The image of a short female with a beard just .... sickens me.

How you .... European guys get pass this eerie image? Where you guys being brought with this kind of notion, the notion of a short female might have beard. This new discovery of my has haunted me for several days.

really, biologically, evolutionary speaking, human males prefer smooth surface on women. i am trying to be technical here, don't get me wrong.

 

Aaaaaand there's your answer. Dwarven females are supposed to be bearded, but most people just can't seem to deal with it. So they simply ignore that particular oddity and don't beard the females.

 

There is the bearded Dwarven woman Sarhedra in Baldur's Gate. She's on the map North-East of Nashkel, and gives you a pretty pointless quest of killing some ogres who you pretty much have to go through to get to her anyway. Dunno if it's just my version or not, but I'm pretty sure that she's always been beardy, even before I installed TotSC.

But yes, otherwise no dwarven women have beards in IE games, AFAIK. I think Fel's right about people not being able to deal with it.

 

@teekc
read some of Salvatores books I know that he mentions female dwarves when drizzt is speaking to regis during the war with the dark elves.

 

In BG at the FAI, Landrin, the one I first thought of as a dwarf because of the beard, is a gnome. IIRC, the paperdoll of a female dwarf has a beard.

I've always been under the impression that computer programmers were just too lazy to add beards to female dwarves avatars. Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, especially concerning Captain Carrot Ironfounderson, get into there being no real distinction between male and female dwarves.

 

Actually, I read somewhere that not all dwarven women have beards. It was also bad ettiquette to ask a dwarven male whether he prefers his women with or without beards.

 

This is true, in the same way that not all human men have beards. Some people shave.

 

It has also been compared to asking a DWARF (male or female) to shave their beard would be the same as asking the most noble of Paladins to go slaughter all the babies in that nice little farming community over there.

Dwarf women have beards in the Forgotten Realms and in Discworld and it's completely normal. In both it seems the beard itself is a symbol of pride. The longer the beard the older the dwarf and thus the more respect he/she deserves. However Dwarves that spend more time around humans are known to 'style' or 'trim' their beards and more traditional dwarves view such actions in a way that our society today would consider homosexual or compare them to transvestites.

 

In the prologue of IWD1 there is a bearded dwarf female, because she gets confused when you confuse her for a male.

 

O.K. I just have to say that I thought about this thread today when I was walking through the library downtown and walked by an older lady who did indeed have a thin but prominent beard and moustache. Because of her culture I was wondering if shaving herself might have not been an option. It was very odd to look at although I tried not to.

 

Where?

 

A dozen posts and no mention of Lord of the Rings? That's (I assume) where the idea originated. Gary Gygax et. al. adopted it when they first drew up D&D, which was pretty much exactly based on LOTR in those earliest incarnations.

The IWD bearded female dwarf is in the starting Inn, right when you start the game. Like BG, I think they just didn't bother to create female dwarf avatars and so just used male dwarf ones. Same with gnomes I think.

 

but how to you get pass the mental image of a short bearded women?

 

You don't. You accept it as the norm. Women have facial hair, just very little. It's the same as how I came to understand that many Asian countries view white skin as beautiful as opposted to tanned skin.

 

Women have facial hair, just most of us have blonde/light hair that you can't see well. I'm glad I don't have my sister's mustache.

If I started shaving these longish hairs off, I assume it'll grow back in a darker shade and giving me a beard to be proud of.

 

/looks at pic

 

Women shouldn't shave their factial hair. They need to WAX it or even pluck it. However they deal with it they need to rip it out, not cut it. Painful? Yes. Makes you look nearly 1000 times better? Yes.

 

@Tal:
That's a woman? Looks like some gay guy. (Dwarf with blond hair just doesn't seem right.)

 

bearded dwarf women come from that the Nordic Dvärg are entirely male (I leave the continental duergar is the same way). Therefore any female dwarf would have to look male. The refence in LotR that people think dwarves crawled from holes comes from Nose mythology where dvärg actually did come forth from holes in the ground (they where the maggots feeding on Ymir's body). Guaranteed, the part about the dvärg turning to stone when contacting sunlight was completely ignored.

Tolkien's dwarves are a mishmash of nordic mythology and continental mythology. Master smiths and miners stems from nordic mythology, while the warriors stem from german mythology.