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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6519904" data-attributes="member: 4937">It doesn't matter how particularly you view them, but rather how they are not human.  If they are just humans with funny faces, I'm not really interested.Well, see, that's at least a start.   And see, that's weird.  One would not expect a human to set at a task until they died, nor would one expect to consider such a being 'all wise'.   But perhaps dwarves would see that as perfectly natural and wise, and think the fool in this story is Thor.   And that's not even to get into how a race would see the world if they turned into stone in sunlight.Which doesn't interest me at all.  When you set out to create a character, typically you tend to create an exaggerated character of a type anyway, so that they'll have memorable and easily recognizable traits.  So having a race be merely a caricature of an existing human mode of behavior isn't really adding much to a setting.But the dwarf himself would not only be able to express things in this way.  At the very least, in the sense of the word you meant, he might say in common, "When I became an adult."  But he would probably not assume that 'man' was the synonym of 'person' or 'adult male', because he himself would not be a human, and likely have his own way of expressing the idea of being an adult and responsible for oneself.  He might say, "When I left my father's forge...", or "When I had earned my shield...", or any number of things other than unconsciously referencing humanity.  He would just as likely say, "When I became a dwarf", and expect that a hearer would understand this to mean, "When I became an adult" rather than "I've changed my race."   Or it could be that maturity in dwarf society isn't linked to physical maturity, and that he doesn't believe he is an adult yet or conversely that as an orphan he's been an adult since he was orphaned and either way other dwarves would recognize this.  It could be that dwarves, prizing responsibility, never accepted the idea that youth was a barrier to having full responsibility and as such had no concept of adulthood.  Perhaps dwarfs differ from humans in that they pretty much can and are expected to be responsible and carry their share from the time they can walk and talk.  To a dwarf, it could be the phrase, "When I became a man", would be synonymous with "When I started using a chamber pot and wiping my own butt", and as such, something no one would ever say or qualify their statements with except to make a joke.   A dwarf hearing a person say, "When I became a man, I left home to seek my fortune...", would have as his first thoughts, "You must have been very bold, to venture out in the world when so young and untrained.  Surely your clan and family counseled against such a rash course?  Why did you choose not to listen?"Or even more extreme, it could be that dwarves are born as perfect little copies of their adult selves, or even more strangely aren't born at all but carved by their parents out of stone.  In either case, the dwarf may have no concept of either childhood or adulthood.   In the former case, trying to understand the phrase, "When I became a man...", would be interpreted as, "When I obtained my full size...", to be retorted with a jolly, "I am not yet a man, my belly gets rounder every year. Hahahaha", or else in the later case with a quizzical comment like, "What were you before?" The point being that you can still be very close to human in many ways, and yet be very far away emotionally and biologically.Tolkien's hobbits for example didn't mark adulthood until 33, and Merry and Pippin were regularly appalled if anyone mistook them for an adult despite the fact that they appear to have been old enough to make their own decisions and have their own income.  Compare with primitive human societies that often marked it at 13.  Tolkien's hobbits seem to expect that adulthood comes after having made something of oneself, and not merely becoming old enough to breed.  Which suggests that they have a whole different way of looking at the world.</blockquote>

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