camwyn | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Brane:

Pls to not be writing early history / sociology / anthropology of Tolkien dwarves. Also to not be assigning names in Linnaean system to races of M-E. Or dwarven economics in pre-human-contact times.

Not that I don't want to know these things but the USB key is at home & I have nowhere to save the whole ruddy lot.

Thankee, Brane-sai.

-Camwyn

PS: YES. I KNOW. YOU WANT TO SEE ICKLE!GIMLI CHASING MICE WITH AN AXE. WILL WRITE LATER. EASE OFF ALREADY.

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Somewhere, I have a few pages on a plausible evolutionary biology for Tolkein dwarves. Also, there are terrible, terrible pictures.

But I really don't need to start on a ceramics stratigraphy for major Dwarven sites. That would just be silly.

I generally skip trying to do evolutionary biology and proceed straight from the mythic origin explanation when dealing with something like Tolkien, but anything that happens after their creation is fair game. F'r instance, the whole 'one birth in three is female, many of them never marry, dwarves marry only once in their lives, and few dwarves have more than three or four offspring at the very most' doesn't really work very well given that the dwarves are also characterised as reproducing slowly. Unless dwarves have different incest standards than humans or elves (proceeding from the assumption that when Aule made them, he left out things that would result in bad births), there's not much room for 'seven fathers of the dwarves, each except Durin with a spouse from the beginning, plus a couple of other dwarves at each individual site where a father awakened' to work into a sizable population either. So there have to be some other assumptions made...

But my USB key is at home, dammit.

Pls to not be writing early history / sociology / anthropology of Tolkien dwarves

What, you mean you're not going to just steal from Terry Pratchett?

Aside from adjusting the gender statistics a little so that 'one in three is born female' instead reflects the proportion of dwarves who are acknowledged female, thereby easing the truly bizarre reproductive rates, nah. Pterry is wonderful but he's another world entirely, really.

Frankly, the whole problem with the sex ratio could be solved with legalized polyandry.

Yeah, but the Professor was all 'bla bla marry once in their lives bla bla some want one man and will have no other bla bla did I mention bunches of the men don't bother getting married either bla bla etc.'. I"m starting to think that he was squicked by the process of dwarf sex and opted to give as few of them as little of it as possible so he didn't have to think about it- especially since he wrote three different origin stories for the female dwarves, then said 'I give up, I'm not using ANY of these' and walked away from the problem.

One gets the idea that the old man didn't much like writing sex in general, really. His elves, great big racial Sue that they are, are almost the same way, except that most of them do marry.

...Great, you've awakened a colony of bunnies in my brain. Members of the various Ardan races whose sexuality is transgressive in some way (some way, rather, that doesn't involve homosexuality, as Eru dammit I've seen enough of that in fanfic). Incest, polygamy, fetishes...I'm not sure how transgressive asexuality would really be in the Tolkienverse...a fun outing for the whole family!

Asexuality would certainly be interesting... a third of dwarves are female, a third are male, and a third LOOK male but are 'neutral'. And the dwarves can tell them apart but no other race can, and doesn't understand why some dwarves are obsessed with gold and others (the one with sex drives) aren't.

Hee. Interesting, yes.

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