Cumbria is Cool, or "How the Dwarves Became Shepherds"

Woot! Back from my weekend up in Cumbria (Northwest England), and it was absolutely amazing. The mountains there are positively gorgeous, strangely reminiscent of the ones I'm used to in Colorado yet also completely and utterly different. It was a great place to be and a great place to get some ideas for my writing.

Most notably, I figured some things out about my dwarves (who are becoming less and less cookie-cutter as time goes on, which is great...by the time I'm done with them I might not even call them dwarves anymore, we'll see).

One of the things that always bothered me about dwarves and typical high fantasy dwarven civilizations in general was how they were supported. I grew up in the mountains. I know that you can't really farm there. The soil is usually bad and crops don't grow well on slopes. You could terrace your mountains like they do in some places in Asia, but terraces like that would make an impression on visitors and were never described when people came to dwarven cities for the first time in the books I grew up on. Dwarves just lived underneath mountains, and that there was enough food for everyone was taken for granted---maybe it was all imported?

That's one of the things I struggled with as I was creating my own dwarves---how did they manage to have these cities up in the mountains when it's really not practical to have cities in the mountains? Luckily the English have solved that problem for me: sheep.

There are sheep EVERYWHERE in Cumbria. Probably more sheep than people. You've all seen pictures of English fields---how they're all divided by walls and hedges, look the same shade of green, and have the same length of grass. They're kept that way by armies and armies of sheep, and the mountains are no different. Whereas the Rockies, where I grew up, are bare because trees can't grow that high, the mountains in Cumbria have been cleared (the guy I went hiking with said probably in the 1500s), divided up (there are stone walls that literally go straight up the sides of and over the tops of mountains---absolutely incredible feat of engineering if you ask me. I'll post pictures once I figure out how), and are continually being mowed by sheep.

So my dwarves became shepherds. It just fit for them, somehow. Most of their cities aren't underground and they were never meant to be Tolkien-esque, Norse-derived greedy diggers. They're more like short people with dreadlocks and a love for mountains and stone. Herding sheep all over their beloved mountains and building stone walls over their whole realm just fit perfectly for them.

I also gained some valuable experience for a particular scene in my book (which those of you who have read it will, I hope, remember) from my Gorge Scrambling expedition...but I'll let that wait until tomorrow.