Editing Discworld (section)

===[[Dwarf]]s===

Discworld dwarfs (and yes, they use the same plural as [[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]) are of the standard model: short, bearded, work in mines, enjoy booze and if you upset them they'll chop your knees off. Dwarf culture is... complicated, to say the least. Many fantasy authors have allegedly taken inspiration, good or bad, from Jewish culture/religion/stereotypes for their dwarfs; Terry Pratchett seems to have done something similar but unique. Their religious views can be summed up by a common saying about their god: "Tak does not require that you think of him, only that you think." They believe Tak got things started, creating life and so on, and then set out a few rules and let things go from there in the assurance that things will go right. In any case, Tak is more a character in a few myths and part of Dwarfish philosophical thinking more than a god in the sense of other Discworld gods. The thing dwarfs revere the way other races revere their gods is Tradition. The Way We Used To Do It, How It Was In The Old Days, The Real Dwarfish Life, etc. Dwarfs will often deny being religious, but they're as superstitious and observant of the things they would call holy as anyone else. Take their holy men, for example. Knockermen are dwarfs who venture alone into the dark to blow up firedamp (methane) in coal mines, alone in the dark in heavy leather clothing with the constant possibility of a cave-in, considered dead in the eyes of families that were nonetheless extremely proud of them. Knockermen became something apart but extremely important to dwarfish society, seen as communing with the darkness in mines where no one else dared to go. Kings (a title that translates literally as something like "chief mining engineer") and grags, the "rabbi" class of dwarfs, traditionally were successful knockermen, and the most traditionalist grags always wear the layers of protective leather clothing that keep knockermen safe from the heat of burning gases. A few years before the present of the setting, a dwarf living in Ankh-Morkpork invented a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_lamp safety lamp] that burns blue in the presence of gas, rendering the profession obsolete and preventing potentially thousands of deaths. Not everyone happy about this, to put it mildly. There was a full-scale underground war up in the mountains, in fact, a prelude to the massive culture shock that came up from the plains as a generation of dwarfs raised outside of the deep caverns began to question parts of the old tradition.

[[File:Dwarf sex life.jpg|thumb|400px|left|A pretty accurate summery of Dwarfen courtship]]
Another quirk about them, the result of a fantasy trope being taken completely seriously and its implications on society being considered, is that dwarfs have two sexes but one gender. Everyone looks the same, there's only one set of Dwarfish pronouns, and once the kids are off breastfeeding there's no such thing as "women's work" among dwarfs. Letting anyone else know what's in your heavily armored pants is incredibly discouraged in dwarf society, which means that dwarf courtship rituals are all about finding out whether that dwarf you fancy actually has bits compatible with yours. However, through the influences of Ankh-Morpork a small but growing number of dwarfs want to "come out" as being female and embrace this new and exciting gender. While many city-born dwarfs see no problem with this, the older generations and the conservative dwarfs who live deeper underground see this as an abomination upon their culture, decrying the female dwarfs as ''ha'ak'' (exact meaning unknown, roughly translated as "not real dwarfs" and used in the same way 4chan uses "you will never be a woman").

The phenomenon of ''mine signs'' is another outward manifestation of traditional Dwarfish conceptions of society and justice. These are drawn for a variety of reasons- a simple glyphic marker, a form of protest, an outlet for stress, even a curse- and are what happens when a mine goes bad instead of riots. Dwarf mines can be somewhat like living in a submarine- everyone is in darkness, there's lots of complicated machinery around, nobody has any real privacy, and if something is going on, there's no way to keep it secret for long. On top of this, everyone is carrying sharp objects and various inflammable materials. Mine sign can be noticed by good chief engineers and used as an indicator for when action needs to be taken. In some of the rarer signs, certain conditions can give mine signs real power. These are discussed quietly and carefully if ever.

It is also interesting to note that Sir Terry very clearly based his dwarfs on those of Tolkien (specifically the depiction of a proud Norse warrior race with Welsh or Northern English overtones, much like how those areas were taken over by the Vikings in real life). This shows another strength of the series: taking established clichés and conventions from genres and making them into something new simply by taking what's there to an endpoint that is both logical and humourous, bringing in other media as he does it. After all, if the dwarfs are miners, give them Welsh or Northern English accents, and if they've got Welsh accents, chuck in a stereotype about men's choirs, which makes them good for singing Hi-Ho songs, but that's a stereotype imposed by humans, see you, boyo... and so on. Incidentally, there is an urban legend that the Welsh are the lost 13th tribe of Israel... Terry was well-read, in short.

As a minor point, there are two main Dwarfish foodstuffs that get attention. The first is Dwarf Bread, which is made with gravel, hard as rock, keeps forever, is horribly sustaining and can be used as a deadly weapon. The second is Rat, which is the primary protein in Hole Food, so much so that many dwarfs have hang ups about eating chicken or beef. If the [[Skaven]] somehow ended up on the Disc, they would not hear battle cries of "They have Wronged Us" but rather "Pass the Ketchup".