Because I really need an answer to this burning question. (Placed in this forum as I thought it was rather a frivolous query.) It has been bugging me for decades, well… years anyway.
Why didn’t Tarzan ever have a beard?
Now, I’ve never read the books but in all the movies and tv shows, even the animated version, he is always clean shaven. But who taught him to do that if he was raised by the apes?
I would appreciate it mightily if some kindly soul could help me strike this one from my gargantuan list of Unanswered Questions[sup]®[/sup].
As I recall, he started to shave as a part of his realisation that he wasn’t like the other apes. Not long after his first encounter with another human being, he began emulating their appearance (started wearing a loincloth, shaving, etc.) in recognition that he was human. Apes had hair on their faces. Men did not.
To expand on Dijon’s answer, in the book “Tarzan of the Apes” the young tarzan saw a picture book, found in the wreckage of his birth parent’s cabin, showing pictures of humans, all without hairy faces. He wanted to look like them, not like the apes who raised him. So he shaved.
“The young Lord Greystoke was indeed a strange and warlike figure, his mass of black hair falling to his shoulders behind and cut with his hunting knife to a rude bang upon his forhead, that it might not fall before his eyes.”
“His straight and perfect figure, muscled as the best of the ancient Roman gladiators must have been muscled, yet with the soft and sinuous curves of a Greek god, told at a glance the wondrous combination of enormous strength and suppleness and speed.”
Get to the point Al. OK, OK…
“Was not hair commencing to grow upon his face? All the apes had hair upon theirs, but the black men were entirely hairless with very few exceptions.
True, he had seen pictures in his books of men with great masses of hair upon lip and cheek and chin, but, nevertheless, Tarzan was afraid. Almost daily he whetted his keen knife and scraped and whittled at his young beard to eradicate this degrading emblem of apehood.”
Thanks all, it makes a lot more sense now.
I do wonder though, having seen my brother’s attempts to shave his head with a safety razor, how Tarzan avoided some nasty scars. Exquisite control I guess.
Al,
I really appreciated your added bonus description.
Good grief, Tars Tarkas, you’ve already got four arms and TUSKS! Now you want a beard, too? Cheez-it, there’s no pleasing some people!
(And just for the record, when I picture the various Barsoomian peoples/creatures, I’m picturing them as Michael Whelan painted them on the covers of the Del Rey editions.)
Aaaand, to head off the “where’d he get the knife” questions, Tarzan found it among his parents’ belongings, which they’d salvaged from the shipwreck before they themselves died. The knife was Tarzan’s great equalizer for life among the powerful apes.
