So if Elves are better smiths than Dwarves, what is the Dwarven niche? Mining?

elves are meant to harrying, hit and run tactics. Dwarven smithing intends for getting in the thick of it with an inch of steel around every limb

And heaven help any man fighting someone who's equipped with armor and weaponry that and elf and a dwarf worked together to craft.

Please read the Silmarillion.

>Dwarf gear by contrast may be ugly, even inferior in terms of its magic.
Making something really well is magic. If it doesn't have good magic, it's not good at all.

Not killing each other over trees.

It's a niche where an Elf won't fit.

Aren't they just shorter elves with beards?

Fantasy races don't need niches. The idea that they do smells so much of cheap American entertainment that I feel a little bit like puking just from thinking about it.

Incorruptibility.

They were designed to be incredibly resilient to Morgoth's influence, after all. And even the Rings could not corrupt them fully, merely exaggerate their greed for gold. Also, it was the dwarves that made what were essentially dragon-fighting armor.

off to /tgesg/ with you

>Incorruptibility

But user, what about GOLD SICKNESS(TM)? You know the thing that made Thorin go ebil, because he was a pure and faultless hero that couldn't have been recklessly greedy because it was a character fault but because of GOLD SICKNESS(TM)

Mining, to be sure, but there's also something to be said about their smithing techniques. See, an Elvenwork sword is undoubtedly better, able to kill a hundred orcs without need for sharpening. A dwarven sword might look a tad plainer, and might need sharpening after, say, 90 or 95 orcs, but the secret is dwarves are total bros about selling, offer reasonable rates for honest dealers, and you didn't need to pay to elven asshole a mountain of gems or make some thousand-year oath of friendship to get one freaking sword. Buy Dwarven, Steal Elven.

>Muh thousand folded elven blade

Traditional lore makes elven magic unable to work with iron, henceforth they are regarded as copper or bronze-age civilization smiths. On the other hand I think dwarfs can cast iron with ease.

Dwarven Cast Iron for Days
>Iron for Days?
Iron for days.

>Traditional lore
You are in the wrong thread, buddy.

Bit of an over exaggeration there

Ok so..... specificallly Tolkein, then?
...
Masonry, gemcutting (not so much gem-making), and magic resistance.

>gemcutting
lmao Feanor shits on anything dwarfs ever created

At least gold sickness forces dwarves to protect what they love, instead of fleeing away from darkness just to remain immortal.

Feanor, you took a chunk of light and made some gems full-out. Nobody's denying that. But there's a difference between taking a raw gem from the earth and sculppting your way down to a beautiful facet, and your Magic Easy-Bake Gem oven.

You're a decent baker, not a sculptor.

The dwarven niche is irrelevance.

They were not supposed to exist. They are not part of the plan. They were only allowed into the universe out of pity for the sadsack god that made them, and the condition of their inclusion is that tge song of creation wont be changed overmuch by their presence.

Nothing IMPORTANT cares whether the dwarves are there or not. No key moment of history has its outcome changed by the participation of dwarves. They are a race of NPCs.

Gem making.

Pic is a dwarf makes a sapphire after eating nothing but carbon and trace metals.

What the fuck? They are not fleeing darkness, they were the ones actually bringing the fight to darkness, dying in a land that was never supposed to be theres to begin with. They simply can't sustain themselves after the magic is fading from the world and would end up on the other end of the ocean anyway.

Dirty fucking elves and their god damn tree decrees. Get out of my fort reee always pull the lever

Elves dont do suicidal charges because their lives are worth more than that. But any man that thinks he can beat an elf with something as trivial as 5 to 1 odds in his favor is goung to discover what color their innards are.

Tolkien magic crafting is just being really fucking good at your craft. Feanor was just that fucking good. Hell noldor taught dwarves half of what they know about gemcutting, smithing, masonry, etc. They're hyped up on glowy god tree juice man, they were just plain awesome at everything.

Might need some polishing though

I doubt that you have actually read that part. The fact that he was able to capture something like the light of the trees was part of his awesome crafting skills. Nobody was able to that like he did.

Not refusing payment to an army you hired and then have your king killed in retaliation

To a dwarf with gold sickness, sustenance is worthless.

Elves aren't better smiths, they're better enchanters, which leads to better overall equipment because it is enchanted

Not really a hard economic niche. Elves and dwarves are both excellent but different.

If you're talking Tolkien, you're comparing the greatest elvish smiths that ever existed with good-in-current-year dwarves. Not just Noldor, or even just Feanoreans, but Feanor's master craftsman grandson, born and raised in Valinor and trained by Aulë. And yet even he learned a lot from trading knowledge with the Dwarves.

In that light, Dwarves come off as pretty fucking impressive.

You overestimate enchantments.
When the dragons came, elves burned despite their spells and ran in terror. Dwarves stood fast and were able to retreat in orderly fashion.

>See, an Elvenwork sword is undoubtedly better,
Nah. Two of the most awesome blades in Tolkien's legendarium were forged by a dwarf.

>two

sorry, forgot to mention the layer of asbestos for fighting dragons

The only cool thing the dwarves ever did in that book. Then they spend the rest of the time being petty assholes.

Silma is an actual material Feanor synthesized and used in his gemsmithing, and it was actually the impossible internal geometries of the Silmarils as well as their material that allowed them to catch and hold the light of the trees, much like how the palantir really are just balls of translucent crystal engineered to funnel light around in totally insane ways.

Why is everyone talking about lotr when op is setting agnostic?

You see elf fags, this is why we keep rapeing your women

But when they were landed, Maedhros the eldest of his sons, and on a time the friend of Fingon ere Morgoth’s lies came between, spoke to Feanor, saying: “Now what ships and rowers will you spare to return, and whom shall they bear hither first? Fingon the valiant?"

Then Feanor laughed as one fey, and he cried: "None and none! What I have left behind I count now no loss; needless baggage on the road it has proved. Let those that cursed my name, curse me still, and whine their way back to the cages of the Valar! Let the ships burn!” Then Maedhros alone stood aside, but Feanor caused fire to be set to the white ships of the Teleri.

Because OP isn't?

...

yeah, because of their specific and distinct connection to Aule the Dwarves can just keep chugging along well into the later verses of the song, and while they lack the true divine freedom and agency of men they are pretty well off when it comes to their potential destined paths.

Dwarves are just easier to deal with. They can be petty or greedy, but even the otherwise-irredeemable original Norse Dwarves were honest with what they wanted, even if the price they demanded was almost always exorbitant. They're just as dickish as elves, but they will be open with their opinions, and you can negotiate with them in good faith, if also in poor spirits.
Elves are both wily enough to deceive you and prideful enough to see it as entirely morally acceptable to trick or swindle lesser races.

Elf-haters please fuck off and masturbate somewhere else. You are not contributing anything of worth.

Nothing in the text mentioned the setting being lotr, is the image from lotr?

mostly because the dwarves are insular and most of their best weapons stayed with them, and were dwarvish in style, not fine swords. The swords in question could be dropped on a length of iron and cut through it, and in later ages still carved armor apart.

Stock elves are boring Mary-sues though, they deserve the hate

You could simply search the guys name. Also everyone recognized that Tolkiens universe is one of the few if not only were elves are better smiths, at least in first ages, and understood what this thread was supposed to be about.

why was something so terrible allowed?

You are a brainlet and don't belong here. Read the Silmarillion and then come back.

Are you trolling or something?

Same with dwarfs. Same with orcs. Same with humans. Same with you.

sapphires aren't made out of carbon if that's what you're implying

You know, you could have mentioned all the awesome two, maybe three great dwarfen weapons, but sure, they are "somewhere".

>Making something really well is magic.
this. Tolkien pretty much equates any form of excellence with magic or power; kinda the same way the Greeks equated excellence (arete) with virtue.

Name 3 settings where the dwarves are bigger Mary Sues than elves.

Are you really that upset that some rando doesn't like elves?

I mean I'm sure there were other awesome weapons, but the point was that dwarves were not outclassed in the weapon smithing department.

>u mad
Just read it.

Because its awesome

I'm not even that user, you just seem upset, he wasn't even talking about lotr elves

I was just about to bring up the Halls of Thingol, Menegroth, but I just looked it up, and they were carved by the Dwarves of Belegost on commission of Thingol.
tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Menegroth

...sauce?

Honestly, I think you are pretty upset by getting called out, while trying to act as a different user. Have fun trying to disprove that.
>u mad is bad form in any conversation
Basing your posts around how you think the user behind the screen is feeling right now is one of the most common fallacies around here
Read it

Considering that elves can still be killed, they should probably have much shorter average lifespans since the probability of you surviving for thousands of years is really low

I could give you a screen cap but you would just say it's photoshopped. You're ignoring that he wasn't talking about lotr by the way

Asking seriously, what are the downsides of being an elf?

See, while the elf smith has folded the steel a thousand times, has gilded the pommel, engraved the fuller and carved a gemstone,
and the dwarven smith has crafted a sword according to ancient geometries handed down and refined for generations by his ancestors,
the humans have cranked out equipment for two dozens people. It may be ugly and crude, worse then something an apprentice of either of the other races would scolded over, but it is metal, and it is sharp and pointy, good enough to cut and bash an orc to death.

>but you would just say it's photoshopped
Sure, you don't even need to photoshop it, just clear your cookies.
>You're ignoring that he wasn't talking about lotr by the way
Yes, he isn't. Still, this thread largely talks about Tolkien and I accused him of not being able to contribute anything to this thread. Also reading the Silmarillion really helps with this mary sue meme.

Depends on the setting, but there is little. The same with being dwarves, just minus being pretty.

>incorruptibility
lmao. It's heavily implied that most if not all of the dwarves of the Eastern lands were corrupted and enslaved to the dark powers.
Plus, the Dwarves of Nogrod murdered King Thingol, who had invited them into his home, and then sacked Menegroth, all because they were corrupted and coveted the Silmaril. Dwarves are as corruptible as Elves.
Plus as this user points out, dwarves were corrupted by the rings of power, just in a different way.

No offense but you just come across as a pretentious ass, you willfully ignored the intent of the post (which wasn't honestly that great, but still) to say something smug. More people should read Tolkien though , especially since it gives a better alternative to the generic elf that you see in copy and paste DnD settings

being depressed that the glory days are over and the knowledge that not even death will spare you from the world

public works projects.

In Tolkien? The Middle Earth actively rejects you on a metaphysical level. You tolerate psychological trauma worse than men do. A couple of millennia of existence usually leaves you depressed and wishing you could die. Your fate is already charted and there's nothing you can do about it.

Basically, there aren't. Gygax had a hard-on for Tolkien and doomed the rest of fantasy for it. Functionally, elves are humans, but better. RP-wise, elves are humans, but wiser, and also immortal.

There's never been any mention of dwarves serving Sauron or Morgoth.

>Gygax had a hard-on for Tolkien
I though he hadn't and didn't want to include them at all in the first place.

holy crap how did Feanor become so evil

Depends on the settings. Most of the times they have lower birth rate and population and physically fragile

Breeding

Elves are better at mining too, they just have better uses for their talents. Better to let the spuds do it and feel like they're accomplishing something.

>from my point of view the valar are evil!

Please don't give that guy >57826653 any (You)'s, I'm tired of seeing this exact page everywhere.

the red book of westmarch is based off of Bilbo and Frodo's travels, Elrond's library, and the records of fourth age Gondor, none of which had a detailed catalogue of legendary dwarven weapons, because the dwarves are reclusive, didn't share their records, and wrote those records in a language they didn't share with outsiders.

Aule really is the closest Valar to Melkor. Everything he meddles with has an even chance of turning evil and insane, and his big creation endorsed by god is a decidedly mixed bag.

This

In Tolkien's mythology Elves are better than any other mortal race in every way. They are stronger, smarter, faster and more skilled. They are truly immortal, not just long lived. Even if they are killed by violence they kinda bug the system and just wait in Eru's house for the end of times.

They are closer to the demigods and angels in the scenario than humans, dwarves and hobbits are close to them

If I'm not mistaken, in the Akallabeth it says that in the Dagorlad, there were present on both sides of the battle members of every race, save the Elves who fought only as enemies of Sauron. This could be interpreted to mean that there were, if even only a small amount, Dwarves that fought on the side of Sauron.