03-03-2019, 01:25 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
I always understood Tolkien's Dwarves to have a strong Jewish theme to them... no idea where the Scottishness came from.
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03-03-2019, 03:24 PM | #12 |
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
It's because a Scot's accent is fun.
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03-03-2019, 05:50 PM | #13 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
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03-03-2019, 06:00 PM | #14 |
Doctor of GURPS Ballistics
Join Date: Sep 2004
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
I personally think this is exactly right. Three Hearts appeared in 1953 as a novella and 1961 as a book. It's thought/known to have influenced the D&D alignment system, birthed the paladin class, and gave us regenerating trolls, at least. And apparently scots dwarves.
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03-03-2019, 08:12 PM | #15 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
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Adding a separate axis for Good v. Evil is an AD&D thing (1e). 7D
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03-03-2019, 09:58 PM | #16 | |
Join Date: May 2005
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
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I'm not sure, but I think the Scots engineer goes back to the Clydeside shipbuilding industry and the fact that Scotland for religious reasons systematically taught poor kids to read and write.
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03-03-2019, 11:49 PM | #17 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
Three Hearts and Three Lions has the distinction between Law and Chaos as two contrasting forces. And didn't it come out before Moorcock started writing?
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03-04-2019, 02:44 AM | #18 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
A struggle between History and Chance (neither of which being forces which most wise people want to align with) is also in Gordon Dickinson's The Dragon and the George novels (first published 1976, so probably drawing on Anderson and Moorcock). I think that, and the version in Basic D&D, have more storytelling potential than the good vs. evil split with its "the Aztecs and the Conquistadors both thought they were good and pious" and "defining good and evil in a book marketed to argumentative teenagers will summon more hassle than money" and "its hard to see most people as aligned with pure ideological forces" problems.
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03-04-2019, 06:17 AM | #19 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
Anderson's Law and Chaos are the order of battle between human civilization, its allies, and the taming of the world on one side and the faery world and the old magic on the other. Simply by your lifestyle (e.g., being a farmer and practicing Christianity) you belong to one camp or the other.
Moorcock's Law, Neutrality, and Chaos are cosmic forces that shape the multiverse. Entire beings and planes of existence are dominated by these forces. Human beings aren't really concerned with cosmic forces. D&D's alignment started from Chainmail's order of battle. You've got a wargame with a whole bunch of fantasy creatures and characters, so you want to divide them up to know who will fight whom. So Chainmail borrowed from Anderson's idea of an order of battle, putting those who fight for Law (the "good guys") on one side, those who fight for Chaos (the "bad guys") on the other, and calling Neutral any who could fight for either side, or who won't fight for any side. As D&D developed, it adopted Chainmail's order of battle into alignments, and reinforced them with ideas from Moorcock: not only was there the same worldwide battle between Law and Chaos, but magic, magical beings, and planes of existence were governed by them. Entire social structures were established around them (alignment language). So it's not that D&D alignment comes from one or the other; it borrowed from both Anderson and Moorcock. As for dwarves being Scottish: the idea certainly existed long before Jackson. I remember seeing the first glimpses of Gimli in the first movie and rolling my eyes at the stereotypically "Scottish" dwarf. Although Three Hearts and Three Lions did feature a dwarf with a Scottish accent, I'm not convinced that the players of D&D who developed this trope were remembering that; I think Tolkien's own association of dwarves with runes and axes, and artists' common depiction of dwarves with horned helmets, along with a common mixing-up of Scottish and Norse characteristics, all boiled down to players thinking of dwarves as Scottish. |
03-04-2019, 07:03 AM | #20 | |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
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Re: Why are dwarves Scottish?
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I know John Rhys-Davies is Welsh; I remembered his voice well from other productions. He didn't strike me as Scottish. I've always pictured Dwarves as closer to Norse, drawing mainly on the Tolkien interpretation of the Scandinavian sources. Dwarves are known as mythological entities in several cultures, especially where actual human dwarves are ascribed various magical powers, but the "little folk" of the British Isles mostly seem to fall under the category of various fey in my mind. (Except for the game in which I pictured Dwarves as Russian -- the language fits pretty well -- but that came about because Planescape's Ring-Givers struck me as pretty Communist and I decided to run with it. :^D ) |
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