The Folklore of Discworld

she had made so much her own (see A Hatful of Sky ).
    One of us recalls a metalwork shop staffed by very old men. When one of them died, his personal tools were left on the bench where he’d put them, untouched, and were gradually buried under workshop debris. It does not need a fevered imagination to see that in the days when tools were an expensive lifetime investment, shaped over the years to their owner’s hand, there would be a certain unfocused distaste for handling them after a workmate’s death.
    *
    Outsiders often assume that because all dwarfs look, dress and behave alike, have masculine names, and refer to one another as ‘he’, they are in fact all male. This is completely untrue – the population, as with other humanoid races, is fifty per cent male and fifty per cent female. But very, very, very few dwarfs would ever admit this statistic in public. And (until very recently) none would let it be publicly known that they themselves belong to the female fifty per cent.
    Even when outsiders know about this, they underestimate the distress it can cause. When the dwarf Cheery Littlebottom joined the Ankh-Morpork Watch, the werewolf Angua guessed that ‘he’ was really ‘she’, but couldn’t understand why being spotted was so shattering:
    Cheery sagged on to a seat. ‘How could you tell? Even other dwarfs can’t tell! I’ve been so careful!’
    ‘I don’t know why you’re so upset,’ said Angua. ‘I thought dwarfs hardly recognized the difference between male and female, anyway. Look, there’s plenty of women in this town that’d love to do things the dwarf way. I mean, what are the choices they’ve got? Barmaid, seamstress, or somebody’s wife. While you can do anything the men do …’
    ‘Provided we do only what the men do,’ said Cheery.
    Angua paused. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see . Hah. Yes, I know that tune.’ [ Feet of Clay ]
    Encouraged by Angua, Cheery gradually yields to her suppressed longing for a bit of jewellery and a dab of lipstick; eventually and with much nervousness, she dons a mid-calf leather skirt (still keeping helmet, breastplate, and beard, naturally). Some other dwarf watchmen react with horror:
    ‘That’s … female clothes, isn’t it?’
    ‘Well?’ she quavered. ‘So what? I can if I want to.’
    ‘That’s … my mother never even … urgh … That’sdisgusting! In public too! What happens if kids come in? I can see your ankles !’
    As it turns out, other she-dwarfs in Ankh-Morpork soon follow Cheery’s lead and pluck up courage to ‘come out’. But when her duties take her to the old homelands in the mountains, she has to face traditionalists who think it an obscene abomination, a denial of all true dwarfishness, for a female even to admit her gender, let alone to flaunt it by her appearance. The fact that the relatively liberal King Rhys Rhysson accepts her presence, and actually shakes hands with her, is for them a major culture shock.
    It is fascinating to compare the way Discworld dwarfs view femininity with the rules, taboos and superstitions about women in many Earthly societies, past and present. At first glance, they seem to be opposites. Dwarfs expect females to conceal their gender, to dress exactly like males, to be warriors, miners, blacksmiths and so forth, just like males. On Earth, on the contrary, societies and religions which feel strongly on questions of gender abominate the idea of a woman dressing like a man. They expect her to wear distinctively female clothing, obeying rules as to what is or is not ‘modest’: the most important concerns usually being the length of the skirt and how much of the hair, head and face should be concealed. In extreme cases, women end up looking more like small perambulating tents than human beings. So, although their garb proclaims their gender, at the same time it hides it, as surely as that of a Discworld she-dwarf.
    As regards work practices, however, Discworld dwarfs are not hampered by the same taboos as Earth’s older traditional societies, where it would be out of the question for a woman to take up man’s work. Even in European countries in recent times, in some ultra-masculine occupations it was believed that the mere presence of a woman brought bad luck. Women were not allowed to go down mines or on board fishing boats – indeed, simply to meet a woman on the road down to the beach would make a fisherman give up his plans for the day and head back home.
    Behind this, rarely