Carrot Ironfounderson is, by all accounts, a dwarf. This is not disputed, certainly not by the dwarfs themselves. And it is likewise not disputed that a dwarf must have a beard, and indeed is not truly a dwarf without one (even if a hapless dwarf should find himself unable to grow one, a false beard is to be expected).
And yet, I simply can’t picture Carrot with a beard. From a Google Image Search, apparently nobody else can picture him with a beard, either. Even Paul Kidby, whose illustrations in The Last Hero and elsewhere are officially condoned by Pterry himself, apparently can’t picture him with a beard, either.
But I can’t seem to recall anywhere in the books where this is explained. How, then, to reconcile this barefaced situation?
Thud! spoiler:Carrot is to dwarves what Mr. Shine is to trolls: Their natural king who is unlike most of them in some fundamental ways. I suppose if you’re going to have a Chosen One, it makes sense to make them as Chosen as possible
Totally disagree. He is in no way, shape or form … that thing you said. He is …that thing … for a different group. But not…what you said.
ETA - Carrot always struck me as the kind of man who couldn’t grow a beard even if he tried. Maybe some hair on the top lip, but that’s it.
If he is, and he is even if he officially isn’t, he would be for both groups, at least to a certain extent. Maybe more for one than the other.
He’s certainly a dwarf now that he’s successful. By which I mean likely fairly well-off, given how high he’s risen in the force. (Humans are the same way, but I can only imagine dwarves would be open about it.)
Pratchett has mentioned a few occasions recently that you can convert to being a dwarf. Some people in AM have done so for reasons of business opportunity.
Carrot joined the Watch at a fairly young age, and may not have been able to grow a beard yet. Maybe normal Watch regulations require officers to be clean-shaven and Carrot went along with that when he got older. It is clear that later dwarf officers do have beards, but that’s possibly an exception to normal rules for reasons of cultural sensitivity and promoting a more diverse Watch. But if forced to choose between following normal Watch rules and dwarfish tradition, I could believe that Carrot went with the former.
A beard certainly isn’t a sufficient condition for dwarfhood, but it appears to be a necessary one. Consider, for instance, when Cheery Littlebottom was introduced, and first started exploring her femininity. She wore dresses and ribbons and such, but kept her beard, because she was, after all, a dwarf. And in Unseen Academicals, the Low King comments on false beards being a great boon to dwarfs unable to grow one of their own.
Cassanunda perhaps isn’t the best counterexample, either, since it’s made pretty clear that other dwarfs do not, in fact, regard him as one of them. This is doubtless more due to his attitudes about sexuality, but the point remains.
Oh, and Carrot has, in fact, charged at someone with an axe (towards the end of Guards, Guards, when he was as yet ignorant of the multiple meanings of the word “charge”), and he does, in fact, sing about gold when in the company of other dwarfs.
I’m sure that in the Guards!Guards novel when we meet Carrot the first time, he’s mentioned as clean-shaven enough that he gleams (along with his brightly polished breast plate), because naive eagerness is part of his personality. So it’s not that Carrot is too young by Dwarf standards (Mitzi, whom he was interested in, was IIRC about 50 years old, since Dwarves live longer than humans), or as human unable to grow a beard (he’s by now at least 20 years or more), it’s most likely that somewhere in that thick book about rules and regulations of Ankh-Morpork it says that a copper should be clean shaven instead of scruffy.
In addition, the person he learned most of coppering from is Mr. Vimes, who shaves everday (with a concave mirror showing a lot of roof, because of the assassins). Nobby is an exception, and Dwarves have long beards for cultural reasons, but a human cop with a 3day growth just wouldn’t look right.
As far as dwarf rules - in one of the novels (5th elefant?), Vimes asks Carrot about how he’s getting along with the Dwarves, and Carrot mentions certain rituals he follows, some of which he isn’t allowed to talk about with non-Dwarves. But nothing about beards. Considering that to the Drudaks, going about in sunlight is already deviant, but most Dwarves don’t mind, I don’t see why lack of beard should be a problem.
