Nick Kyme

No, not a blog post about various colourful carnival players, but rather a nice linky to an even longer version of the Honourkeeper review I posted about previously on Amazon.com.

Check out the rather excellent Red Rook Review blog for more…

Not only does it contain the full review (amongst others, incidentally – my good friend Steve Parker’s Gunheads is also reviewed on the site), but it also has some fascinating discourse of fantasy dwarf culture and literature. Impressive and interesting.

I have to say, my initial experience of the doughty dwarf race in fiction was probably The Hobbitby Tolkien, whose interpretation is most strongly echoed in the Warhammer World dwarfs which I’ve written about. I also have fond memories of the character of Flint in the Dragonlance Chronicles by Weiss and Hickman, though I’ve not read the books in a while, so they might have been a product of their time and best viewed through nostalgia-tinted glasses. One Dragonlance book devoted to the dwarfs of Krynn (the world in which Dragonlance is based) that I do recall with some fondness was Stormblade, which I believe had a dwarf civil war (between hill and mountain dwarfs, if memory serves) as its central conceit. I think I still have it somewhere – I shall have to dig it out.

Of course, Warhammer dwarfs followed for me. I think it was Combat Cards initially and then a packet of lead hammerers and longbeards (made by Marauder Miniatures back then) that got me hooked. Twenty years later, and here I am writing about the little blighters.

It’s interesting to note that dwarfs came from a very different place in traditional myth. Dwarfs were evil, greedy creatures, more akin to beasts than a civilised, honourable culture. I won’t embarrass myself by going further down this road as my knowledge is kind of restricted to the fantasy material I’ve read. But check out the blog site I mention above for more thorough and less off-the-cuff research – fascinating stuff.