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Originally Posted by Kuru
How did the Petty-Dwarves attack the Elves? What did they use? Fists? Teeth? I find it hard to believe that a race that “from the first days of their Fathers they had marvelous skill with metals” would not be using metal weapons in their attacks. Metal weapons=Higher intellectual capacity than beasts.
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The note in H-XI mentions that the Elves recognized the great Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost as Incarnates by their "skill in many crafts" and their ability to learn Elvish for "purposes of traffic". It might be inferred from this that the Petty-Dwarves were less skillful -- which squares with the idea (from the same source) that the Petty-Dwarves were the descendants of outcasts from mainstream Dwarven society: the "deformed or undersized, or slothful and rebellious". So they must have looked freakish even by Dwarf standards, where all the hot chicks wear beards. I imagine an Elf might feel compelled to put an arrow through one out of sheer aesthetic outrage.
Also, the Elves did not class the Petty-Dwarves as "Naugrim" even after discovering the relationship, so the quote you mentioned sorta doesn't cover them in the whole skilled-in-the-metallurgical-arts thing. Based on the evidence, we might suppose that the Petty-Dwarves lived in a considerably more primitive fashion than their slightly taller cousins.