[edit] Female dwarves
A long standing source of interest (and humour) comes from the allusion of Tolkien to female dwarves having actual beards or simply disguising themselves as such. In addition to being rare creatures they are perhaps not often featured in many fantasy milieu for this reason. A more cynical suspicion is that female dwarves (unlike, say, female humans or elves) lack sex appeal and consequently are of little interest to fantasy fans. In Peter Jackson's The Two Towers film, Gimli and Éowyn have a conversation about them on their way to Helm's Deep. Gimli said: "it's true you don't see many dwarf women. And in fact, they're so alike us in voice and appearance that they're often mistaken for dwarf men." Tolkien comments further, paraphrased by Gimli in the movie, that "this has given rise to the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that dwarves 'grow out of stone' " (Gimli: "pop out of holes in the ground!... which is of course ridiculous"). In The Chronicles of Narnia, in fact, C. S. Lewis, who was a friend of Tolkien, described his Dwarfs [sic] as doing just this, and it is entirely possible that Tolkien was ribbing Lewis in making this point. Interestingly, though, Lewis' all-male Dwarfs are capable of mixing with humans to make half-Dwarfs, such as Doctor Cornelius, the tutor of Prince Caspian.
In the MMORPG RuneScape, female dwarves are as present in the game as the females of other races.
In Dungeons & Dragons, the status of beards on dwarven women varies by setting: In Greyhawk, dwarven women grow beards but generally shave; in Forgotten Realms they grow sideburns but not beards or mustaches; and in Eberron they do not grow beards at all.
In the Discworld novels, Terry Pratchett says that this is a major problem for dwarves, and states that the point of dwarvish relationships is to 'tactfully find out which sex the other one is '
In the RPG Castle Falkenstein, all dwarves are male. They marry with women from other Faerie races, such as Naiads or Selkies; their daughters are all members of their mother's race, and their sons are all dwarves. Given that the Naiads and Selkies are all female, this would appear to suggest that this is simply a marked example of sexual dimorphism.
In a notable departure from convention, dwarven females in the Korea-produced Lineage II MMORPG are very comely, young-looking women (almost girls, actually), a shocking contrast to the grizzled, old look of male dwarves.
