Culture Clash

Har’ili knew that Father was at his wit’s end. She had always been the ‘safe’ daughter in his mind, she knew. The eldest, with the most sense—the daughter with the most Dwarf in her, going wholly unnoticed through her teens by the Men of the city of King Ellassar. Dwilly’s flirtations during those years had occupied the First Steward’s mind far more often than her own interests in metalsmithing (while her mother lamented that she was choosing the working of metal over stone, but her mother had always had a preference for stony things). Her younger sisters, Lanny and Essy, acted like a hive-mind of strategy—they gave Father no troubles, rather serving as his helpers as well as his Dwarven heirs. The instant he’d realized that they enjoyed strategy and understood it as well as he did, Father had declared to the King in Erebor that the heirs of his line were to be his two youngest daughters. 

Father had never had to worry about any of his womenfolk, really—other than Dwilly, really, but that was more in fun in recent years. Yes, he had been worry free. Boromir the Second, son of Denethor, the First Steward to the King of Gondor, didn’t worry until Har’ili was thirty—the marriageable age for Dwarven women. 

Every ten years, King Durin VI sent envoys of stone and metalsmiths to aid King Ellassar in the upkeep of the city. Har’ili was always among the party which greeted them, introduced by her beaming parents as their eldest daughter. She would speak in halting Dwarven, having learned only a little from Mother who preferred to only speak it when yelling at Father for having rocks in his head, and then escape to her smithy. 

But this year, Har’ili was allowed to braid her beard as a recognized adult woman. The individual braids had a few glittering rubies woven into them—her mother’s house was the Ruby of Durin, after-all—and they caught the light like fire within her bright auburn hair. She had never cut it, as was the custom of her mother, never even trimmed it. Once, a decade ago, a man had asked that she shave it—she and Father had only just barely kept Mother from meeting her axe to his head. 

She wondered if once again they would have to do that, only this time for Father. Some of the men sent from Erebor began to court her, which had Father’s eyes nearly popping out of his head in surprise—he had been completely flanked in his battle to protect his daughters from those evil-menfolk. Mostly it was with innocent to medium-level flirtations—some of which her father missed and some of which he didn’t. It was the things he didn’t miss that had him suddenly making up father-daughter-no-other-Dwarves-around-field-trips, most of them to visit Uncle deep within Ithilien. 

And he had to deal with Mother in this matter as well. Mother had married quite late in life compared to most women from Erebor, but she was quite interested in having her daughters—all four of them!—married off as soon as they were ready for it. Dwilly, with her thin scraggle of a mustache, had adjusted to life much more on the scale of Men—she was being seriously courted by one of Uncle’s young lieutenants. Lannie and Essie looked a little farther ahead than Dwilly—their Numenorian and Dwarf blood showing strongly already, meaning they would likely marry Dwarves if they married at all. But Har’ili was Mother’s eldest, and Mother was inclined to allow her almost anything. 

That meant that Mother entertained many of the visitors from Erebor in her smithy, while also inviting Har’ili to help her with making this door or that cornice or anything she could invent as an excuse to throw young Dwarves together. 

Father, already headed down the road of a gray head, was likely accelerating on towards becoming as white as Grandfather. He had never felt the need to worry about Har’ili, until now. Dwarf courting rituals were a little foreign to him, since his romance with Mother had been ramshackle at best—conducted on the long road of an even longer adventure, marked with fear and fighting, the only thing Father had done properly was obtain Grandfather’s acknowledgment. 

Har’ili took pity on him eventually, as the year drew to a close she had found a Dwarf she felt she couldn’t live without—maybe. A young man only a few years older than her named Duerdak, a Dwarf with a frizzed head of jet black hair and eyes. Mother criticized his hammer-handling, but couldn’t object to the fact that he made Har’ili happy. She introduced him to Father once she was sure Mother wouldn’t cleave anyone’s heads in, and Duerdak brought with him compliment beads—a white one for wisdom, a pink quartz one for family friendship. 

Father didn’t know much about beard adornments, and mistook them for something they most definitely were not: engagement beads. Luckily Har’ili had seen the cogs turning in his head before he could gently rebuff Duerdak’s offer, trying to quickly explain to her parent what exactly the little beads meant.

And they were little. Because Father’s beard was tiny, and wouldn’t be able to support the regular size of beads given to fathers. She blushed as red as her beard as she told him that Duerdak was asking to court her—and then she had to pray to Durin that his ears didn’t fall off when she informed him that she’d already accepted Duerdak’s suit weeks ago, that he could give only a blessing and never permission. That Dwarf women were the masters of their own destinies. 

He stood in shocked silence for a good few minutes before taking the beads from Duerdak and turning them over in his hands for a little while. He nodded absently to himself, clenching his fist around the stones as he answered that yes, if Duerdak son of Moghdil was his daughter’s chosen, then he would abide by it. And then he’d retired, dazed and likely more than a little confused. 

“Where is he going—I have to—“ Duerdak was perplexed, he was supposed to symbolically tie the two beads into Father’s beard and then they would embrace one another by their left elbows and recite their commitment to Har’ili’s right of choice. 

“He’s going to Mother, probably to ask her what he just agreed to. It will be okay, Dak, she’ll make sure he’s set right.”

And indeed, the First Steward was set right. The next day he appeared at the King’s Council, his beard divided into two short prongs, intricately braided with a pink bead on the right and a white one on the left.

Five years later, his eldest daughter became Har’ili son of Boromir, the Lady of the Glittering Caves after her marriage to Duerdak son of Moghdil of Erebor.