Dwarven Reproduction

[Burzdol]

I'm kind of lost on the female dwarf and reproduction of dwarves thing. Where are all of the dwarven women? Do they reproduce like men?

[Thorongil]

There is something weird about it. I have never heard of Dwarf Women. But they cant just pop out of the ground can they?

[Lord of Angmar]

There are Dwarf women, but they are akin to Dwarf men in size and stature. Supposedly, they even have beards. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

[lord_of_rohan2003]

Could you imagine if all women grew beards like men [img]smilies/eek.gif[/img]

[Silmiel of Imladris]

To quote another New Line movie but this one I didn't care for, at all. I went looking for the exact words of this quote but I couldn't find it. No one has probably seen this movie enough to care to quote on it. I don't know the whole quote but I have the gist of it. This is a comment that the Drawf made to the human, Snails in Dungeons and Dragons as Snails eyes up a female Elf.

Oh sure! Go after an Elf why don't ya! What you need is a 300 pound drawf with a long beard that gives you something to hold on to.

The Drawf makes an obscene jesture with the lower part of his body as he says the 'hold on to' part. [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img] Yuck!

[Knight of Gondor]

This is talked about in the Appendices of Return of the King (book). That whole discussion Gimli had with Éowyn is quite accurate to what it says in the book. Dwarf women are not common, and very hard to distinguish from dwarf men.

Why is it everyone on the board is suddenly obsessed with the reproduction of the various races of Middle-Earth, anyway? [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

[Thorongil]

I would hate it if women grew beards. It wouldn't look good.

[Olorin_TLA]

Even Dwarf kiddies have beards.

They're just ahiry, hairy people! [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

[Gashberz]

NO!!! THEY SPRING OUT OF THE STONE!!!!

[Finwe]

Knight of Gondor, it's because we're all crazy, hormonal teenagers (for the most part). [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img] [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img] We HAVE to talk about reproduction.

[Legolas]

They don't have beards. The quote simply refers to dwarven women and their desire to remain unidentified when outside of their realm - they dress up in typical male dwarf clothing. The beard thing is a joke/hyperbole.

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 3:21 AM December 18, 2003: Message edited by: Legolas ]

[Thorongil]

Reproduction is a natural thing. Why shouldn't we talk about it?

[Potatothan]

I would have to agree with legolas here. Gimli and éowin are talking right before Gimli falls of his horse. It goes something like this:

Gimli: Yes it's true that you don't see many dwarf women. But they are so alike in voice and appearing that they are oftenly mistaken for dwarf man.That made it a legend that there are no dwarfwomen, and that dwarfs just jump out of holes in the ground. Which is ofcourse ridiculous.

And when Gimli said that they are often mistaken for dwarf men, Aragorn makes a beard with his hands saying: It's the beards which makes Eowyn smile. So the beard thing is just a joke. I guess dwarves reproduce just like the humans, elves and hobbits. Well, and the ents and oh, I could go on, you get my point.

~Potatothan

[Castamir]

Yes, that is the quote from the film. In the book it clearly states that less than 1/3 of dwarves are female, and are almost identical to Dwarf men

[Thorongil]

I dont understand the dwarwes. If they care more about gold then women they should see a psychologist. But, men are men, and dwarwes are dwarwes.

[Noxomanus]

If Dwarf Women resemble Dwarf Men so greatly that others can't hold them apart and Dwarf Men allways have beards,it's only logical to assume the Women did too.

[Finwe]

Noxomanus, how many outsiders are allowed within Dwarves' homes? For all we (and the rest of the world) know, all the female Dwarves could actually be beardless, but wear false beards so that they would be mistaken for Dwarf men, and thus, not be trifled with.

[Noxomanus]

Interesting but that doesn't seem to likely,does it? The sentence says something along the line of "they resemble the male Dwarves so much that members of other races can't hold them apart." If the female Dwarves were wearing fake beards it would rather be like "they make themselves resemble the male Dwarves.." Since beards were a quintessential aspect of male Dwarves and females seem to be indistinguishable for the non-Dwarven eye,females in all probability had natural beards as well.

[Fíriel of Ao Tea Roa]

"I would hate it if women grew beards. It wouldn't look good."

Get a life! Many if not most women have rudimentary beards. They are still beautiful.

Mithrandir:"It is not up to you to decide who is to live in shades.."

[Thorongil]

So what! I can like whatever i like.

[Noxomanus]

Pay no heed to that,young Halfling!

[aleesa]

Ok, even if the female dwarves do have beard, they are still female. And i presume that they reproduce like humans do. But why are we arguing about beard and reproduction? They reproduce, regardless of the beard. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

[Noxomanus]

Maybe female Dwarves have styled or braided beards to look sexy to the males.... [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img]

[aleesa]

[img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img] i guess so [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

[Fíriel of Ao Tea Roa]

I could imagine dwarves might simply like beards in both sexes like we like hair on the heads of both sexes; some like it short, others long, some sun-bleached (okay, difficult in the mines), others well-groomed.. or with braids and beads [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

.. for them it must be the most normal thing in the world. And anyway, if human can fall in love with a partner who has terrible burn scars.. what´s the issue? I can imagine many cultures that work a little bit different in their judgment about what is beauty.

The world out there is so much bigger than our horizon..

[Northman]

it makes ya wonder, could dwarves reproduce with men, hobbits, or even elves? what would that be like?

[Kalimac]

Northman, I'm betting it would be like a really bad fanfic [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]. (In fact, it's probably been done. There are some lulus out there).

Actually, what always bothered me about Dwarven reproduction was not the beards (beetles fancy other beetles, after all) but the statistical information. Tolkien tells us a few facts about the Dwarven population: 1) they generally have only one spouse 2) the population is two-thirds men, one-third women 3) despite this enormous preponderance of masculinity, not all of the women choose to marry. So in every generation you have a MAXIMUM of two-thirds of the Dwarves who are even able to take a shot at reproducing.

Is it just me, or does this seem like they'd be fighting a losing battle in terms of keeping the population up? Unless married couples tended to have truly monstrous numbers of children, you'd have an automatic population decline built in there. How did they manage to keep the Dwarf race going?

[Northman]

yeah i was thinking that too Kalimac,
How did they keep the population up. Maybe after the war when there was less evil they had more secure dwellings so maybe there was more reproduction.

[Bill]

Hey, What about Orcs' reproduction??
I didn't hear anything about female orcs!! [img]smilies/evil.gif[/img]
Are they sexless?!

[Thorongil]

Orcs are elves that was captured by Morgoth.
There were both genders i think, so there are probably female orcs too.

I saw a thread on that somewhere around here. If you find that, you'll probably find the answers you want.

[Finwe]

Unless they had (literally) litters of kids, I don't think that the Dwarven population could have held up for much longer.

[The Only Real Estel]

Noxomanus, how many outsiders are allowed within Dwarves' homes? For all we (and the rest of the world) know, all the female Dwarves could actually be beardless, but wear false beards so that they would be mistaken for Dwarf men, and thus, not be trifled with.

lol.

It's really a question that I don't think we'll ever really know the answer to, unless someone has found in Tolkien's letters what he thought about it. All I remember him saying is that there were hardly any dwarven women & so, as Finwe just said, their population was dwindeling.

[aleesa]

lol [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

oh well, i guess they just reproduce at their own pace and when it suits them or when the environment around them is suitable. The female dwarves were able to choose whether they wanted to have a partner or not. It was in their nature, perhaps. I guess they had many other things to think of other than just reproduction, such as mining and building beautiful halls under mountains.
[img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

[Knight of Gondor]

Knight of Gondor, it's because we're all crazy, hormonal teenagers (for the most part). We HAVE to talk about reproduction.

I'm one of you, pal, and I still don't like it.

Though it seems to me like the discussion is just kind of beating a dead horse. It doesn't seem like Tolkien confirmed anything. Since most Dwarves have beards, I'd take a guess that perhaps dwarf-women have them, but that's just my ignorant Gondorian opinion.

[The Saucepan Man]

All I remember him saying is that there were hardly any dwarven women & so, as Finwe just said, their population was dwindeling.

Not necessarily so. Since Dwarves had an extended lifespan, it makes sense that their rate of reproduction was lower than we would consider average.

Mind you, given the extended lifespan of Hobbits and their rate of reproduction (*coughSamcough*), it makes me wonder how they became so scarce. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

[Kalimac]

Knight of Gondor - I don't think we're all discussing it from hormonally-crazed teenagerness. I'm an old married lady of twenty-four and find this sort of question academically interesting (as did Tolkien, in some wise - at least, he laid down quite a number of rules about elvish reproduction, so obviously he considered it as well).

Finwe - you're right about having to have a *lot* of children; they're starting at a tremendous disadvantage with 1/3 of the population automatically out of the reproductive running. However, there are a fair number of sets of brothers among the dwarves in "The Hobbit" and if we threw in, say, one sister for each set of brothers we'd be looking at a guesstimate of 3-4 children per couple. (I wish there was more to the dwarf genealogies in ROTK). Not bad, but also not great. And Thorin Oakenshield seems to be an only.

Saucepan Man, good catch with the long lifespans - hadn't considered that before. I guess I just imagined dwarf gestation as taking a long time - maybe because dwarves seem to take their time in general (you can't tell me that those halls in Moria took a day less than five hundred years to carve out, and even that would be working at a good clip). But they'd still have to have enough children to keep running all those mines and halls, and they'd probably have about 100 years for producing them. They probably started post-100 or so, though - in "The Quest of Erebor" Gimli talks about how at sixty-odd he was considered a mere stripling, not old enough to go with his father, and Fili and Kili are in their nineties and seem to be young-bachelor types.

As for the hobbits...who knows. They seem to alternate between having one child and having a minimum of half-a-dozen. And of course none of them seem to consider marrying until they're in their mid-thirties (Rosie was 35, I think), so that would argue a longer development stage than humans have.

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 3:37 AM December 31, 2003: Message edited by: Kalimac ]