Dwarves - All Beauty Or Is There Something Else?

                       By James Judge

Over the past few weeks my mind has been doing some thinking,
mainly how to make games and books believable. It's all well and
good having a hero that defeats twenty giants with a bat of an
eyelid, but is that truly believable? I think not.

Then I started thinking about Science Fiction adventures and
things like suspended animation. You keep on seeing these films
(2010, for example) that have people coming out of suspended
animation after years and years just lying there and all they have
got for it is a stiff neck. If anyone had been laying down for,
say, ten years without much movement your muscles start to become
weak, so I started to think of ways to stop this. The obvious one
is delivering short, sharp electrical shocks to all the major
muscles, making them twitch, thus keeping them in condition. This
could also be a way to improve your body strength - continuous use
of a muscle (either by your own will or electrical shocks) builds
it up, making it more able to do the job it was designed to. I
have still got to ask a scientist friend about this though.

Then I got onto the subject of mythical worlds, and I started to
think whether they are all that mythical or not.

Take any mythical world, be it Krynn, Middle Earth, Pern -
whatever. In all of these worlds you have got humanoid creatures,
be they human, dwarven, elven etc. This must mean, then, that the
environment of that world is similar to our own - same atmospheric
content and gravitational pull. The reason why I say this is that
we, the humanoids, are perfectly suited for the world we live in
and the environment around us. So, if there are humanoids on other
worlds, the environment must be similar to ours.  Anyway, then I
started thinking (I'm sounding like Jim Johnson now) about all the
individual creatures. I skipped humans, as they are boring, and
went on to my favourite animal - the dragon. I soon forgot about
them as they defy most natural rules there is nothing to say that
they aren't mythical. Then came elves and dwarves. Here I came
across a stumbling block.

We all know that in most books, elves and dwarves are long-lived
creatures. Let us discount elves as they are also mystical, like
the dragon, being faerie and all.

So, dwarves, the short people with beards and bad temperaments.
Here we have a problem. We know that they are about as mystical as
flu so they should obey all the physical lores that we humans do.
Wrong. They don't, according to many authors.

If you take the average 100 year old human - be they male or
female, they tend to be bent with age, shaking and extremely
wrinkled. Also the women start to grow facial hair (some more
profusely than others).

Let us take the average 200 year old dwarf - be they male. They
are still short, strong, stocky, not shaky and (apart from the
normal battle scars) perfect in features - not a wrinkle in sight
for another few hundred years. Now, the females of this breed.
Some authors (but very few) actually give them beards, and even
then it is the comedy writers such as Terry P. I think other
'serious' authors should take note here as I think that if we had
a 200 year old lady on this world, we would find that she would
have to shave every day due to the excess of hair growth on her
face. Maybe women are lagging behind the men when it comes to hair
in our breed. So, as we have established that the dwarves follow
the same principals as us, the ladies of that fair (ahem) race
should be buying Gillette razors along with their hubbies.

OK, next point. As humans age, the gravitational pull on us makes
us bend over and our skin starts to droop towards the ground
(commonly called wrinkles). What has happened to the dwarves? They
are still wrinkle free, and I don't think they use Oil Of Ulay
every morning, do you? So, if we take into account their height
and overall build, they should remain young for about an extra 100
years, but then all of their body should start drooping downwards
due to gravity.

Interesting fact - an apple never did hit Newton on the head, he
observed one falling from a tree, some distance away.

So, hopefully I have proved that Dwarves are mystical, and not the
children of the earth that they pretend to be. If we came across
one they should be, by the age of 200, bent, wrinkled and their
nervous system shot to hell after many years of use. They should
also be as blind as a bat and deaf as a, erm, deaf thing due to
long and hard usage of both receptors. In other words they will be
decrepit old fools who are no better than things to get money out
of for the kids at Christmas.

Grimwold, I think you have got some explaining to do...

I didn't mean this to be a 'serious' article, just a little thing
my strange brain concocted one night and I thought it may be
interesting to some people. If it hasn't, sorry, please forgive
me.

@~Over to you, Grimwold?