Jim C Hines on Fantasy Dwarves and real Little People

[jesse_the_k]

The author and blogger who has often used his privileged perspective to productively rant about rape targets an arrow at a common fantasy trope:

begin quote  From Chapter Two [D&D Rule Book 3.5]: Races—“[T]he promise of power and profit brings together people of all the common races: “humans, dwarves, elves, gnomes, half-elves, half-orcs, and halflings.”

Um… call me crazy, but I thought dwarfs—little people—were human. quote ends

Comments

[bibliofile]

Alas, not in Tolkien they're not.

Tangentially, have you seen The station agent? Peter Dinklage's breakout movie, I think. (A kid asks him if he's a dwarf. He say no.) Excellent about friendship and people and also, yes, little people.

[bibliofile]

(This is not the only problem in modern fantasy that links directly back to Tolkien, either.)

[jesse_the_k]

Oh! I adored the Station Agent. A true homecoming movie for mopers :,)

Indeed, Tolkien's "othered" handling of dwarves is square in the Nordic tradition. My first time through the Lord of the Rings I was deeply puzzled whether the dwarves he wrote about and the little people I saw in my neighborhood and school were actually the same thing.

Well, yes & no.

Speaking of which I just watched Willow for the first time. It's very sweet, and Warwick Davis was charming as a back-door hero. (And he was just 18!) Damn you Peter Jackson you could have trained an entire generation of short-statured actors and saved some money on CGI.

[rainbow]

i take his meaning, except that (to me, ymmv) calling human beings with dwarfism "dwarves" is FAR more problematic than using "dwarves" to refer to non-humans.

i had a friend with dwarfism growing up, and she made sure everyone around knew she was a little person, not a dwarf, because dwarves were make believe and she was human.

i've known a couple other little people who expressed the same feeling.

[jesse_the_k]

I do get the preferred terminology is "little people" (in the US) and "short stature" (in the UK).

But when I was a little bookworm, I didn't understand whether the actual little people in my world were the same thing as the "dwarves" that Tolkein and such were always on about. That blurring was disturbing then and is happening still.


(This might be an age thing, because I was a little bookworm in the 60s, and there were still people distinguishing between midgets, and dwarfs, where the former "look normal" because of inadequate growth hormone delivery, and the latter look "handicapped" because their body proportions are atypical.)

plus babble, I was entranced by Warwick Davis' disproportionately lovely long fingers in Willow, but nodded off during the fight scenes. He was just 18 in that movie!!

[rainbow]

i hear you (i was also a little bookworm in the 60s, as was my friend m).

i do agree the blurring is the problem, but addressing the older usage rather than the problematic othering seems backwards.

if i ruled the universe, i'd want to have everyone taught (preferably when they're quite young and first having stories read to them) that "dwarves" are magical non-humans. yes, there are people with dwarfism, just like there are plants with dwarfism (cue visit to garden/park/library to compare a big tree and a dwarfed tree), but we don't call them dwarves, we call them PEOPLE. sometimes they call themselves little people, people of short stature, people with dwarfism, but in the end they're people. they're not magical beings like dwarves, who are only make believe. if you use it for people it's a rude word, so don't, just like the other rude words we don't use for people.

oh, man, the midget vs dwarf controversy. *sigh* m had wonderful parents who instilled in her a fabulous self confidence and the ability to stare down people who wanted to tell her who she was. in junior high one day she took on a new boy in science who loftily tried to explain that she WAS a dwarf because x, y, and z meant she wasn't a midget, so she had to be a dwarf. and she gave it to him with both barrels, much to the amusement of those of us who'd been in elementary school with her.

warwick davis was wonderful in willow, yes.