Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
BTW, Corey Olsen is dead wrong; Tolkien absolutely, positively did write that Dwarf-women were bearded. War of the Jewels, p. 205.
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Note that means that Dwarf kids have beards too!
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By the same token (or should I say, "by the same Tolkien?"), he absolutely, positively... left the door open.
Nature of Middle-earth, p.187:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
When I come to think of it, in my own imagination, beards were not found among Hobbits (as stated in the text); nor among the Eldar (not stated). All male Dwarves had them. The wizards had them, though Radagast (not stated) had only short, curling, light brown hair on his chin. Men normally had them when full-grown, hence Eomer, Theoden and all others named. But not Denethor, Boromir, Faramir, Aragorn, Isildur, or other Númenórean chieftains.
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The emphasis, if we trust Hostetter, on
male Dwarves is there in Tolkien's text (and I think this forum can generally be trusted to trust the editors!).
Does Tolkien specifying that
male Dwarves are bearded equal a syllogism that excludes female Dwarves from being bearded? Absolutely not, but it would be very odd, in a footnote where Tolkien goes out of his way to tell us the bearded status of nearly every male character of importance, that he would tell us that
male dwarves are bearded and not simply say "all Dwarves are bearded" unless he meant by implication that NOT all female Dwarves are bearded.
Of course, if you think Tolkien was a pure, logic-driven machine, then the two statements are easily reconcilable: all Dwarves have beards, all male Dwarves are a subset of all Dwarves, therefore, all male Dwarves have beards.
(I don't mean "you" to be
William Cloud Hicklin here specifically, though I suppose I am arguing against your post, so much as a rhetorical "you.")
I think it should be clear to anyone who's read the HoME that Tolkien tended to forget ideas he'd jotted down before, and also that he was quite willing to revise previous ideas--his main constraint was that he considered things that had appeared in print to be "canon" (see: the Problem of Ros), except that even here he was totally willing to revise what was in print (see: the 2nd Edition)!
All of which is to say... any adaptation of Tolkien is going to involve judgement calls simply to fill in the gaps, but there's the FURTHER--and even more fraught--judgement calls where Tolkien said more than one thing!
(As an aside on Dwarven female beardedness, I think the pro-beardians have the better textual authority: besides
WCH's quite definitive quote above, there's the
published text of Appendix A, which has usually been interpreted this way, which is two texts against NoME's one. And, to cast a little extra aspersion toward Amazon, I doubt they could have read NoME early enough in their creative process to have considered it.
As an aside to my aside: I wish we WERE seeing bearded dwarf-women, if only because the
Aganzir-sect of this forum have inclined me to expect them and because I think it would be an interestingly canonical subversion of expected appearances. Amazon hieing away from this is actually a case counter to the dominant story of Amazon being "oh so woke"--at least if I can make the assumption that "bearded Dwarf women" would likely have been seized on, had they gone that way, as somehow transgressive and thus woke.)
Ultimately, I expect the series to fail to live up to Tolkien because that has been my unshakeable instinct as the ultimate fate of all adaptations since I first saw the animated Rankin-Bass
Hobbit in about 1999. No adaptation has yet proven me wrong, but that doesn't mean there haven't been good things in the adapations--gold amidst the dross. And just because I don't expect to much enjoy it myself doesn't mean that others have to share my exact level of apathy or the reasons for it.