marillaraina
Nargothrond
Jul 21 2011, 8:47pm
Views: 48412
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What lifetime? If the average dwarf lives to be 260 or so...
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assuming nothing untoward happens to them, with some living up to 350 years, then a 77 year old dwarf is less than a third of the way through their lives lives. Kili is basically basically like the equivalent of 20 to 24 year old.(and it's not like there aren't some human guys who don't "come into their beards" until they are closer to 30, if ever,some always have a patchy, stringy looking beard--so maybe he's a late bloomer? Maybe not every dwarf is blessed with a beautiful beard, seems like looking at some of the other dwarves?)
Or hell maybe he lost it in a stupid, foolish bet? He wouldn't be the first young person to do something stupid.
To me it's a perfectly good reason and imo it's not something that is all that important to the story, either way.
The way I see it, PJ can choose what he wants to use or not use to a certain extent so long as it doesn't really make a major change to the events of the story. Aside from a few wisecracks and the occasional entanglement the beards don't play a big part of the story. They add a bit of "color" to the dwarven culture and they STILL do, imo, just in a different way because now there are likely reasons the dwarves have different styles of facial hair etc.
There is really no necessity for dwarves to be born with beards and, given dwarves are particularly long-lived, I have no problem with the idea that maybe their beards grow slowly, perhaps with growth speeding up as they age.
Fili and Kili are eight decades old. Are we really supposed to think that dwarves go around barefaced until they're 70 or so and then stubble starts to grow in? Heck, I'm not yet 30 and my own modest beard rivals Thorin's.
I refer you to my signature: replace "snouts" with "beards", "rhinoplasted" with "shaved", and "Truffles" with "Jewels" and you have the source itself for why dwarves ought to have full beards regardless of their age.
I'm willing to let it slide in the interests of artistic license and making each character unique, but I hold out hope that PJ invents a good reason in-universe for why some of these blokes have such short beards. All I need is for Bilbo to say something along the lines of: "I thought all dwarves had beards like you, Gandalf." A little wink and a shrug and I'd be satisfied.
(This post was edited by marillaraina on Jul 21 2011, 8:50pm)
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