The inimitable Terry Pratchett on dwarves:
"You appear to be of the dwarf persuasion."
Cheery didn't bother to answer. There was no use denying it. Somehow, people could tell if you were a dwarf just by looking at you.
"I thought dwarfs hardly recognized the difference between male and female, anyway. Half the dwarfs we bring in here on a No. 23 are female, I know that, and they're the ones that are hardest to subdue..."
"What's a No. 23?"
"'Running Screaming At People While Drunk and Trying to Cut Their Knees off'," said Angua.
"I'm scared of fights! I think songs about gold are stupid! I hate beer! I can't even drink dwarfishly! When I try to quaff I drown the dwarf behind me!"
By now, if it had been a dwarf bar, the floor would be sticky with beer, the air would be full of flying quaff, and people would be singing. They'd probably be singing the latest dwarf tune, Gold, Gold, Gold, or one of the old favourites, like Gold, Gold, Gold, or the all-time biggie, Gold, Gold, Gold.
"I thought dwarfs loved gold," said Angua.
"They just say that to get it into bed."
There's a dwarfish saying: "All trees are felled at ground-level" -- although this is said to be an excessively bowdlerized translation for a saw which more literally means, "When his hands are higher than your head, his groin is level with your teeth."
...many dwarf battle cries didn't bother with words. They went straight for emotions in sonic form.
Angua: "What did she yell?"
Carrot: "It's the most menacing dwarf battle cry there is! Once it's been shouted someone has to be killed!"
Angua: "What's it mean?"
Carrot: "Today Is A Good Day For Someone Else To Die!"
The dwarf halls rang to the sound of hammers, although mainly for effect. Dwarves found it hard to think without the sound of hammers, which they found soothing, so well-off dwarves in the clerical professions paid goblins to hit small ceremonial anvils, just to maintain the correct dwarvish image.
When you spend a large part of your life underground, you develop a very literal mind. Dwarfs have no use for metaphor and simile. Rocks are hard, the darkness is dark. Start messing around with descriptions like that and you're in big trouble, is their motto.
"I shall write to their king."
"I don't think they have a king there," said Varneshi. "Just some man who tells them what to do."
The king of the dwarfs took this calmly. This seemed to be about ninety-seven per cent of the definition of kingship, as far as he was concerned.
All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink, to rush at enemies screaming "Arrrrrrgh!" and axing their legs off at the knee.
No-one knows why dwarfs, who at home in the mountains lead quiet, orderly lives, forget it all when they move to the big city. Something comes over even the most blameless iron-ore miner and prompts him to wear chain-mail all the time, carry an axe, change his name to something like Grabthroat Shinkicker and drink himself into surly oblivion.
After all, probably the first thing a young dwarf wants to do when he hits the big city after seventy years of working for his father at the bottom of a pit is have a big drink and then hit someone.
Dwarfs are very attached to gold. Any highwayman demanding "Your money or your life" had better bring a folding chair and packed lunch and a book to read while the debate goes on.
There were such things as dwarf gods. Dwarfs were not a naturally religious species, but in a world where pit props could crack without warning and pockets of fire damp could suddenly explode they'd seen the need for gods as the sort of supernatural equivalent of a hard hat. Besides, when you hit your thumb with an eight-pound hammer it's nice to be able to blaspheme. It takes a very special and strong-minded kind of atheist to jump up and down with their hand clasped under their other armpit and shout, "Oh, random-fluctuations-in-the-space-time-continuum!" or "Aaargh, primitive-and-outmoded-concept on a crutch!"
Dibbler: "[People] want dancing girls! They want frills! They want elephants! They want people falling off roofs! They want dreams! The world is full of little people with big dreams!"
Victor: "What, you mean like dwarfs and gnomes and so on?"
"I want to make this absolutely clear, right? One more, and I really mean it, one more, right? just one more Hihohiho out of you bloody lawn ornaments and it's double-headed axe time, okay? We're dwarfs, godsdammit. So act like them. And that includes you, Dozy!"
Poons passed goblin delicatessens and dwarf bars, from which came the sounds of singing and fighting, which dwarfs traditionally did at the same time.
Whereas Gloria was banned from Sport because of her tendency to use her ax in a threatening manner. Miss Butts had suggested that an ax wasn't a ladylike weapon, even for a dwarf, but Gloria had pointed out that, on the contrary, it had been left to her by her grandmother, who had owned it all her life and polished it every Saturday, even if she hadn't used it at all that week.
There was an old dwarf legend about the famous Horn of Furgle, which sounded itself when danger was near and also in the presence, for some reason, of horseradish.
Gortlick and Hammerjug were songwriters ... They wrote dwarf songs for all occassions.
Some people say this is not hard to do so long as you can remember how to spell "Gold," but this is a little bit cynical. Many dwarf songs are on the lines of "Gold, gold, gold" but it's all in the inflection.
(Footnote: All right -- all dwarf songs. Except the one about hiho.)
Dwarfs have thousands of words for "gold" but will use any of them in an emergency, such as when they see some gold that doesn't belong to them.
"It's the gold, isn't it?" said Asphalt. "Admit it. You're holding onto the gold."
"Idiot dwarf!" shouted Cliff. "Let it go or we're going to die!"
"Letting go of five thousand dollars is dying," said Glod.
"Er, I think you can assume, sir, that any dwarf who rises sufficiently in dwarf society to even be considered as a candidate for the kingship did not get there by singing the hi-ho song and bandaging wounded animals in the forest."
Vimes: "I don't get it, Cheery. There's all this fuss about a female dwarf trying to act like, like--"
Cheery: "A lady, sir?"
Vimes: "Right, and yet no one says anything about Carrot being called a dwarf, but he's a human--"
Cheery: "No, sir. Like he says, he's a dwarf. He was adopted by the dwarfs, he's performed the Y'grad, he observes the j'kargra insofar as that's possible in a city. He's a dwarf."
Vimes: "He's six foot high!"
Cheery: "He's a tall dwarf, sir. We don't mind if he wants to be a human as well."
There were plenty of dwarfs around now who had been born in Ankh-Morpork. Their kids went around with their helmets on back to front and spoke dwarfish only at home. Many of them wouldn't know a pick-axe if you hit them with it. (Footnote: At least, if you hit them hard enough.)
"I mean, he's been a copper longer than anyone in the Watch," said Nobby.
One of the dwarfs said something in dwarfish. There were a few smiles from the shorter Watchmen.
"What was that?" said Nobby.
"Well, roughly translated," said Stronginthearm, "'My bum has been a bum for a very long time but I don't have to listen to anything it says.'"
A couple of what Vimes thought of as the heavy dwarfs stepped through and gave everyone the official, professional look which said that for your comfort and convenience we have decided not to kill you right at this very moment.
"Carrot! I've got to know something."
"Yes?"
"That might happen to me. Have you ever thought about that? He was my brother, after all. Being two things at the same time, and never quite being one ... we're not the most stable of creatures."
"Gold and muck come out of the same shaft."
"That's just a dwarf saying!"
"It's true, though."
No one can look harder than a dwarf. Perhaps it's because there is only quite a small amount of face between the statutory round iron helmet and the beard. Dwarf expressions are more concentrated.
"You didn't tell me about the dwarfs!"
"Do you mind?"
"Oh, no. Dwarfs are very law-abiding and respectable, in my experience."
William now realized that he was talking to a girl who had never been in certain streets when the bars were closing.
It was dwarfish swearing, and it meant that the swearer was not only alive but angry too.
It was a traditional dwarf ax. One side was a pickax, for the extraction of interesting minerals, and the other side was a war ax, because the people who own the land with the valuable minerals in it can be so unreasonable sometimes.
It was said of the dwarfs that they cared more about things like iron and gold than they did about people, because there was only a limited supply of iron and gold in the world whereas there seemed to be more and more people everywhere you looked.
[Dwarfs] have no word for rock, in the same way that fish have no words for water. They do have words for igneous rock, sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, rock underfoot, rock dropping on your helmet from above, and rock which looked interesting and which they could have sworn they left here yesterday. But what they don't have is a word meaning "rock." Show a dwarf a rock and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphite of barytes.
Pratchett's dwarves are a whole lot more interesting than Tolkein's.