Carrot isn’t hirsute, his girlfriend has enough hair for the both of them (5 days a month).
Wasn’t Carrot shaving in the moonlight the first time he realised Angua … changed.
And I agree, Carrot is respected by the Ank Morpork dwarves, being a dwarf and tall and earnest and all, but he would only be who he truly is to the humans of Ank Morpork. Remember, everyone likes Carrot.
Si
Carrot is the natural king of the city of A-M, sure, and it has a lot of dwarfs, but that wasn’t what you initially said. He’d be their King if he was King of A-M, sure, but he would not be “their” King, the way Mr Shine is King of the trolls. Like I said, that king-shaped hole in dwarf heads is filled by the Low King.
Remember, these are people whose word for King actually better translates as “senior engineer of the mine”
Um, yes, that’s what I meant. If there is a rule in the book that says “Watch officers must be clean shaven”, nobody would bother to bug Nobby about it, because Nobby has a dozen other problems with him being a copper. It’s like polishing the armor - the other officers are required to, but Nobby simply emits a field of scruffiness that rusts armor in less than one hour, so nobody bothers. Vimes ignores Nobby’s casual stealing of the tea money, but would come down hard on anybody else trying this.
Don’t forget that being a dwarf isn’t about height or beards (though almost all dwarfs would consider a beard nearly essential). His own father kept Carrot’s hair close cropped (for Reasons of Hygiene).
Carrot can ha’lk his g’rakha correctly. And knows the secrets of h’ragna. And such. Though Thud! was about how some of the more traditional Uberwald dwarfs didn’t think this was enough (though they also thought the Ankh-Morpork dwarfs were also nearly non-dwarfs).
And since they’re relatively anarchistic, it’s not like the Low King is much of a King, for most purposes. Dwarfs apparently like arguing amongst themselves and apparently really only need a Low King to deal with issues between dwarf clans or with other species.
I’m sure one of the novels mentions that the Watch rule book requires all officers to be clean-shaven. Carrot knows the rule book off by heart and follows it to the letter – but no-one else bothers, because the rules are centuries out of date.
I’ve always assumed that some of that “and such” does concern beards, and that we just can’t tell because we don’t know what “ha’lk”, “g’rakha”, and “h’ragna” mean.
And the way the Low King is described, he’s really more of a Supreme Court than a King. Each dwarf’s authority is absolute, within his own mine; the overall lowerarchy (culminating in the Low King) is just for settling questions like just whose mine a tunnel is part of, and other things that transcend individual mines.
Or perhaps Lowgiene. 