On the Supposed Lithic Origin of the Dwarves

There persists among antiquarians a particularly romantic notion that the Dwarves were not born in the ordinary manner at all, but were once “awakened” from living stone beneath the oldest mountains. The evidence offered is, predictably, poetic. Early Dwarven funerary inscriptions speak of the dead “returning to the mountain”; several creation hymns describe the first clans as “cut from the deep places”; and certain very old statues depict infants emerging from split geodes. From this, otherwise sober scholars have somehow constructed an ancestral epoch in which fully articulate Dwarves cracked themselves out of granite like chicks from eggs, while the Dwarves themselves, when asked, are usually sensible enough to point out that metaphor exists.

More seriously, every known feature of Dwarven reproduction is continuous with their present biology. Their embryos ossify unusually early, certainly, and their mineral requirements during gestation are remarkable, but there is nothing remotely geological about the process. Indeed, if Dwarves truly originated as animated stone, nature has since gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the fact by providing them with ovaries, placentas, umbilical cords, hereditary disorders, and mothers who complain about childbirth with exactly the same enthusiasm as everyone else’s. One should be cautious of any theory whose principal appeal is that it would make the statues more literal.