Dwarves using axes as the main weapon is probably the dumbest trope in all of fantasy

From a realism standpoint, most serious war axes were either relativsly short hatchet-like affairs (like a hand axe I guess) or much larger two-handed ones.
The shorter kind would be a lousy weapon for someone with short reach for fairly obvious reasons, but the two-handed one would also have some downsides because without higher ground a shorter person might have difficulty applying the leverage necessary to really put a guy down.

That said this depends on the strength and exact definition of "short" here; John Rhys-Davies Gimli for instance was short but extremely broad and much taller then the book version of dwarves who weren't all that bigger then Hobbits were.

In all fairness, what most folk think Tolkien's universe looked like technologically was so far off from how it was described in the actual books that people tend to have largely misleading ideas of what it looked like.
They had technology significantly less advanced then your average D&D setting, looking something like the really early Dark Ages/Migration Period or early 11th century at best.

Metallurgy at that point kind of gives you three weapons to choose from in terms of effective weaponry; a broad, one-handed sword (like the Danish and romans used) a sharp metal head on a stick, or a shorter stabbing weapon.

>fiction cannot be critiqued

quality post, friend

No wonder they are going extinct.

Well, in Middle-earth the technology they used seemed to be sort of static.
Basically all they seemed to improve upon was crafting the same type of armor and weapons in a better fashion; the technology itself didn't advance and Middle-earth even back when Beleriand was around still used maille armor and early Medieval period weapons.

I think it's from the pickax. One end is a pick to mine out the gold, the other end is an ax to kill any motherfucker who would want to take it from you (also, cut down trees to build mineshafts).

Axes already have shorter reach. In hands of shorter people with shorter hands this is multiplied.

In addition they need space for a swing which makes them bad weapons for massed combat or underground combat.

In reality axes were only used in combat if you had no money for proper weapons.

We see Tolkien's dwarves wield three weapons; Thorin had an elven sword, Gimli had an axe, and the dwarves of the Iron Hills used mattocks as weapons.

Wouldn't mining require a lot of timber though? You would need it for supporting mine shafts, carpentry, fueling dozens of different types of machines. It would be reasonable to assume that the first thing a new dwarf stronghold does before construction is clearcut the surrounding forests. Once they've gotten enough to get started and can get sufficient lumber in through trade, the axes get repurposed for warfare.

In Hobbit movies most of them used swords. Usually the short and wide ones.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Something like a gladius would be perfect for fighting underground or in tight formations.

Becase Tolkiens dwarves needed lumber, and due to a lovers quarrel the nature goddess animated trees (ents) to keep them away from the lumber.

The rest is tradition and pig-headedness

>In addition they need space for a swing which makes them bad weapons for massed combat or underground combat.

I've always heard this argument, but fantasy underground spaces are usually HUGE. Dwarf strongholds in LotR, Warcraft, Warhammer, DnD, are colossal. Even natural places in the Underdark can be so big you could almost forget you're underground. I know places could get tight but that's true of areas on the surface as well.

>In reality axes were only used in combat if you had no money for proper weapons.

You were correct up until this point.
Axes were extremely effective weapons for a long damn period of time; your mistake is assuming that it's the time that most all D&D-style settings seemed to portray rather then the period say...between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Norman Invasions of England.
With maille as the heaviest armor (which was REALLY EXPENSIVE and REALLY TIME-CONSUMING to make) most people relied on shields and heavy gamebesons for protection, which an axe would seriously fuck a guy up right through and a solid swing would blow right through anything but the absolutel most impractically heavy shields, especially a big two-handed one.
They might not always penetrate proper maille armor, but the focused impact would fuck a guy up something fierce anyway and fracture or break bone.

I'm on the same boat at this guy. Mass combat and underground small spaces ... Pick one

I always imagined that dnd dwarves were really broad which gives them a medium size and for some reason, I always imagiend they had pretty long arms, almost monkey like when you compare them to the rest of their body.

Plus, they are dwarves. They don't give a fuck about it being less functional or not. They use axes and hammers in battle. It was like that since the begining of time.

The "short, broad blade" has some basis both history and the sort of technological level Middle-earth seemed stuck at too; full-sized swords were relatively uncommon (not rare like some morons would have you believe), but shorter stabbing weapons akin to the gladius or seax would work well, especially in close shield-fighting and against the lighter armor of the time period.

I've actually been trying to figure out where the hammer thing came from.
Not only do dwarves at no point use hammers in Tolkien, the only hammer is in fact used by Morgoth himself, though word here is apparently interchangeable with mace.

Penetrations is worthless when your weapon is slower and has much worse reach than a sword.

There is a reason why even Vikings preferred sword and shield by far.

Thorins cousin used one in that boar on a rock scene.

I'm gonna go with "it's a sturdy weapon that aesthetically looks like it's used with more emphasis on getting shti doen than looking pretty" and dwarves fit that.

Also, in newer age, Warcraft dwarves seem to like their hammers.

The sword was indeed more versatile, though to say that they NEVER used the Dane axe (which was literally named for them) is inaccurate. Also, a Dane axe is heavy, but hardly impossible to maneuver and was actually fairly well-balanced for (actually because of it in fact) how lengthy it usually was.
It's rather likely that axes were used as shock weapons; a bunch of guys moving up with big axes could blast apart shields and seriously injure their enemies but they'd be much more vulnerable to counter-attacks themselves.
That said it's a fairly proven military tactic that if you fuck up enough guys hard enough and messily enough early on an unhardened soldier or one with worse morale might get shaky and break, which is the entire point of shock troops of course; high-risk, high-reward guys who maybe you didn't mind it if they died so much.

Plus, there's the whole "smith" angle most dwarves in fantasy settings rock.

Also for WarCraft, Chris Metzen admitted once that he just really likes to draw warhammers, especially huge ones. Everything else he draws is huge and boxy already, so why not?

Y'know, now that I think about it, is it kinda strange that dwarves would pick a weapon that requires a large sweeping, arcing swing to operate? I mean, if you're in tight tunnels/hallways, or fighting in a sort a phalanx formation, as dwarves are sometimes purported to do, wouldn't you want a straight-thrusting type weapon instead?

Technically speaking, we hear descriptions of dwarves led by Dain Ironfoot carrying mattocks but get precisely zero descriptions of their massed warfare tactics, and many more of Gimli and Thorin fighting skirmishes against orcs and such.

The pickaxe guys might have been more shocktroopers than formation fighters. Goblins are a rather cowardly race so they likely scatter if the formation breaks.

Tolkien really only talked about battles in the abstract, didn't he?

At some point you're just gonna have to accept the stupid of fantasy, user. Might as well be with the Axe-wielding shorties

He fought in the Somme, one the single bloodiest and most pointless battles in human history and has lost all but one of his closest friends during the war.
He had a fairly justified reason to truly dislike wars of all kinds, and his early written works are HEAVY-handed shit (stuff like iron cauldrons belching forth violent and cruel goblins that fall upon poor helpless gnomes to slaughter them en-masse and the like) that was very clearly influenced by what must have been some fairly horrific experiences of his own.

He was also something of a Luddite, which was not particularly uncommon after the Great War; people at first were real excited about scientific progress and then they came back from all that shit and saw the OTHER thing science could do and a lot of people just noped out as hard as they could, Tolkien among them.

Honestly, they may be impractical, but damn it if they don't look cool as fuck.

>that looks cool

I miss being 12 :3

>:3

They're also good for plate armour, so are useful for busting the plate-armoured elites of other armies .
Which there is in both Warhammer and Warcraft, and also leads in to why hammers tend to be seen as the more high-end dwarven weapon.

It's not static. What happen is that the world is in utter ruin and has regressed significally since its golden ages.

Silmarillion didn't really have much different.

Wouldn't spears, short swords and crossbows be the best weapons for a heavily armoured race of defensive excavated-tunnel-fighters?

It is implied that the Númenor was outright steampunk.

That with fuck-off huge shields, yeah.

>Luddite
Its hard to praise the works of such a person, even if they weren't so long-winded and dry

Well they were rather isolated from everyone else

>I dislike this one facet of an individual therefore this invalidates their entire body of work

Except read the post.
It mentions more than one reason.

Axes are tools of woodcutting though. Refurbished mining tools like military picks make more sense if you want to create that connection. Or maybe warhammers for the connection to smithing. Kind of like how in real history a shitton of weapons are refurbished farming tools, because the grand majority of humans worked the land in the middle ages.

No, he said even if Tolkien were less long-winded, it would still be hard to praise him as, he was a Luddite. A notion I challenge as, his dislike of technological advancements was born of a desire to preserve the natural beauty and aesthetics of the countryside which technological progress and industrial development tended to ignore. This is a central theme in The Scouring of the Shire.

...

Dwarves are vikings. Vikings used axes (sometimes). Dwarves use axes.

There are plenty of accounts and depictions of knights using axes.

They'd use the same things heavily armored people fighting in close quarters actually used, poleaxes and longswords.

>Hacks your legs off at the knees

Dwarves have literally nothing in common with vikings. Like, you couldn't be farther off

They've been superficially modelled after them for years

It does have to be critiqued intelligently though, and this isn't one of those times.

Because fuck elves.

Because despite how they're usually depicted, dwarves always had longer arms, comparable to a human's

they're basically small trolls

Physically maybe, but their society could not be less alike

Not to derail the thread completely but has anyone ever used an accent that wasn't some form of Northern European when role playing as a dwarf?
I'm gonna make my group puke when my dwarven paladin come in with a Jamaican accent.

I've used african and italian accents for dwarves. Carribean accents are reserved for halflings in my group. But we're all black guys so it's nothing special to us

Not only abstract, but heavily glossed over with bias and deliberate nonsense. Remember, Tolkien is writing a fictional myth, not fictional "history" or whatever you want to call most modern fantasy where you're supposed to take it for granted that your third party narrator is being honest with you.

You also don't see detailed infantry tactics in the Iliad or the Elder Edda.

>Literally nothing in common
>Agrees their physically modeled

are we talking about a societal difference? I dont think axes are a matter of society or lack thereof.

I always thought of Scouring of the Shire as showing the differences between those that go to war and those that don't, and how it changes those that do.

Not at all, actually.
At most we hear descriptions of "steelbows", which probably isn't even a crossbow and is just an actual steel bow. Numenor was just one more great kingdom of old that was lost. Technological progress is in no way implied except for great architectural City-building and the usual "superhuman craftsmanship of the stuff we already had" thing Tolkien did.
I don't really judge him for what he thought.
I wasn't judging him.
I was just saying that I understood his reasons; not a lot of people lived through the Great War came back unchanged, and Tolkien himself nearly died if infected injuries.
I borrowed the Dragon Age thing for my group and made dwarves have fairly deep voices that used Canadian-English inflections.
It was easier then a Scottish burr and less silly.

Likely both are true.
The Shire and the Hobbits are rather clearly a gentle mockery of the folk of the English countryside that Tolkien grew up with who thought him "odd" after the war and who really had no idea of what it was like.

Yeah its been a whole year since, huh?

>he doesn't cut lanklets' legs off

Lmao what are you even doing elffags?

>talks about close, tight dwarven tunnels and the close, tight combat that ensues within
>in almost every fantasy story the Dwarves are described by getting BTFO'd by some huge-ass monster

Since we're talking about dwarven trope, can we talk about how annoying is the "declining civilisation living in the memories of ages past" trope is?
Can I have a thriving dwarf country for once?

...

If your dwarfs aren't Yorkshiremen, you've done something wrong.

Is that a lion?

Well...
IF Dwarves go above gound wouldn't it be to sell shit or get wood for structural supports?

Best get in the car to be safe

Sure, aren't there plenty of those... somewhere?

Wouldn't proper battle axes be effective to crush armor? Sure, the reach is shorter than a spear or poleaxe, but a battle axe or a warpick would be convenient tools converted to war for a dwarf, and could be quite effective against armored opponents

>Dwarves are vikings.
So... why aren't dwarves vikings? Think about it, other than the aesthetics, culture and use of axes as weapons, in many D&D versions they have extraordinary stability as a racial trait (making them hard to bullrush or otherwise push over). How the fuck didn't WotC realize that this trait might as well be called "sea legs"? Why aren't they tiny men on boats that raid the fuck out of everything?

>Dwarves using axes as the main weapon is probably the dumbest trope in all of fantasy.
How do you know that?
Are you a close combat expert?
How much experience do you have?
Where did you serve?

>They are literally the worst battlefield weapon for a race of short people.
According to who?
Your ass?
Does your ass have a Diploma in Single Combat?
Then how do you know?

>Where did this shit even came from? Is it really all because of Gimli?
Out of SOMEONES ASS, exactly just like your OPINION which makes it exactly as viable as yours.
Why do you think your opinion is viable when you don't know anything about the history of Single Combat in the first place?

>mfw Mike shills for Disney
Ep7 sucked man

You're not critiquing it though. You're bitching about something that doesn't matter.

Thr dwarves weren't vampires. They had to cut down trees to make a pickaxe handles, torches, etc. The question is how did they cut down that first tree.

I, too, watched those videos.

How about the fact that axe was considered an inferior weapon in every culture? Yes, even vikings.

Axes aren't that bad but a polearm or spear of some kind would be better because of their reach problem. But the worst weapons would be swords.
youtube.com/watch?v=seih9n2MuYc

>[citation needed]

The Iliad is basically the only source we have for actual Bronze Age infanry tactics we have.

Relatively heavily armoured warriors would travel in chariots driven by another dude up to the enemy. They'd get out of the chariot and chuck some javelins at the other guys, then go and fight close quarters. If they got in real trouble their chariot guy would come and pick them up

If we believe the Iliad is a more or less accurate description of the time period it depicts once you edite out the supernatural elements and supermen (a big if), you still don't get any real description of tactics for anything other than the leaders and people who have chariots to cart them around the battle.

You have infantry in the Iliad, but they're just kind of there, rarely even engaged by the heroes that are the focus of the poem. You certainly don't get any clear idea of how they fought. Similarly, you get some idea of "Third age tactics" from LoTR, but not really anything comprehensive.

Which cultures?
Inferior to what exactly?
When?

For fucks sakes, dwarfs are craftsman, and all their weapons are also tools. You'd have to be retarded to not see that.

I never understood this meme. To me dwarves always used hammers.

Is the axes meme really from Tolkien? Was he really a memeloving goose?

Warhammer has pick weapons for dwarves in units.
I don't see why you can't give the dwarves axes as well to go with them. They have to have chopped down some trees in their history and probably found the tool fitting for their physical build.

t. a casual

He's half right. Swords were the prestige weapon. Spears were the primary weapon of the shield wall.

Axes weren't despised though, and the Danish axe was a weapon of choice for some.

>I use an axe to make magic necklaces and mithril mail

Nice try, kiddo. Try not to spill your pudding.