Dwarven Weapons

"A dwarven adventurer? Sure, I know him! His name's Thurin, he's over there at the bar getting rat-arsed drunk. See that axe of his? Almost as big as him, right? Amazing craftsmanship, sharper than anything you've ever seen. He slew the silverscale serpent with it two weeks ago. Went into the forest with his companions and chopped its head clean off!"

Most of what you know about dwarven weapons and warfare is wrong. You have been sold an erroneous stereotype that was formed by observing criminals and outcasts.

Tunnel Fighting

A warrior's equipment will be influenced by his environment. Vast open plains? Horse archers. Lightly armoured infantry? Curved swords. Big, stone castles? Trebuchets.

If dwarves live in fortresses carved or built into the living rock, and their enemies are the orcs, goblins, and other subterranean nasties that are after their shiny stuff, then the dwarves will be doing a lot of fighting in some cramped spaces.

The dwarves are often outnumbered by their enemies; couple this with the difficulty of digging through solid rock and you have no reason to build broad, tall chambers with vaulted ceilings where your warriors can be overwhelmed. I'm not saying that dwarf sites won't have impressive artificial caverns and galleries, but they were not designed as the staging areas of the dwarf military.

Corridors, tunnels, bridges, and bottlenecks, those are the sort of place a dwarf wants to meet the invaders. These spaces deny the enemy their weight of numbers. Consequently, these are terrible places to try and swing an axe.

Spears

The rigid corridors of a subterranean fortress are the perfect environment for a formation of speardwarves.

A small unit of dwarf warriors armed with spears and shields could hold a corridor against a huge number of goblin invaders. Speardwarves can be arranged shoulder-to-shoulder and stacked behind one-another, forming a phalanx. This is even more effective underground than it is on the surface, as a phalanx in a corridor cannot be flanked.

Shortswords

Things don't always go to plan, of course. The formation could be broken by a lucky arrow or javelin; a troll might crush a speardwarf as it falls; an orc might go berserk and flail its way into the line despite normally-fatal wounds. That's why the dwarves carry shortswords.


A dwarven shortsword is a straight steel blade designed for stabbing and thrusting. The cross-guard doesn't need long quillions for parrying, so it probably looks similar to a Roman gladius. If the phalanx needs to advance for any reason, the third or fourth rank can also draw their shortswords to finish off any wounded enemies they pass.

Despite being stabbing weapons, the edges of dwarven shortswords are often quite sharp. It is sometimes necessary to hack bits off monsters found underground; such as the tendril of a cave clam or the vines of a karkeela plant.

Expedition Parties

Dwarves who leave the corridors of their home to explore the caves and caverns beyond would have to leave their shields and spears behind. Anyone who has been caving can tell you that natural subterranean passages are difficult and awkward to move through. One of the last things you want to carry around with you is something like a spear that will get stuck on corners and ledges, or a shield that will make letterboxes and shafts more difficult than they already are.

Exiles and Axes

But despite all this, if you meet a dwarven warrior abroad in human lands, he will probably have an axe rather than a spear or shortsword. Why is that? Well that dwarf, Thurin, has two dirty secrets.

First, Thurin is an exile.

Dwarf society is very strict, and there is very little leniency in their punishments. Those who endanger the community are cast out, essentially excommunicated from dwarf society. These pariahs might choose to wander the surface or the underground, but they are rarely permitted weapons or armour when they leave - it's all too valuable to be left in the hands of an outcast.

Most of these dwarves die, expiring of hunger or thirst in the wilderness, being poisoned by an unknown plant or fungus that they were desperate enough to eat, or they wander into goblin territory and never make it back out.

Thurin's second secret is that his axe is not of dwarven craftsmanship. It was made by an orc.

Thurin is one of the lucky few exiles who leave the mountainhomes and survive the wilderness long enough to reach lands settled by humans. That's not because he didn’t see any orcs, goblins, or giant eagles that were trying to eat him, it's because he's a survivor and he was willing to improvise.

During his journey down from the mountains, Thurin was fortunate enough to spot a patrol of goblins before they spotted him. He hid amongst some rocks or under a scraggly tree and waited until they passed, then he followed the goblins at a discreet distance until they made camp on a relatively flat ledge by a scree slope. The goblins posted a sentry but Thurin was careful not to be detected. He found some good-sized boulders and rolled them off the slope and into the camp while the goblins slept. He slid down the scree in the confusion, grabbed the first weapon he spotted amongst the rubble, and used it to kill any goblin that refused to flee.

That weapon? It was an axe, made by an orc a couple of years ago and lost in a skirmish or hunting expedition, later found by one of the goblins and treasured as an artifact beyond the abilities of the finest goblin weaponsmith. Orcs are actually not terrible at forging metal weapons, and axes are perfect for their fighting style. The axe was much better than the goblin weapons, so Thurin kept it and used it to fight his way to human lands, where he told people that he was a famous troll slayer searching for gold, glory, and a good death.

Ranged Weapons

A dwarf's stocky build does not lend itself easily to a bow, and the potentially cramped conditions that a fighting dwarf might find themselves in means that a bow might not see a great deal of utility. They are also made primarily of wood, which is usually a semi-precious commodity underground (subterranean mushroom tree wood does not make good bow limbs).

Crossbows are a better alternative, and can be made partially or wholly out of steel. Metal crossbows tend to be narrower, allowing them to be carried more easily through tunnels and caves. They don't generally need to boast long effective ranges, as they will most likely be used to shoot retreating goblins, wound subterranean game, or kill/wound monsters that live underground.

Gunpowder

You may see depictions of dwarves adopting gunpowder weapons such as bombs or muskets. Dwarves are handy and industrious, why wouldn’t they come up with finely-crafted wheel-lock muskets, right?

Consider, again, the environment that dwarves tend to fight in. Gunfire or explosions in underground tunnels would be disastrous for anyone involved, not to mention any dwarves living nearby. The noise alone would be terrible, rendering anyone in the area deafened (most combatants would probably lose a degree of their hearing at least temporarily.) Explosions would be extremely dangerous, threatening to weaken or destroy the structural integrity of dwarven tunnels. And finally, black powder firearms create a lot of smoke. That smoke doesn't have anywhere to go underground, so a dwarf musketeer would probably end choking on the fumes from his own weapon, along with his comrades and, if the smoke built up or migrated to the fortress, potentially his family and friends back home.

A dwarven exile might, however, find they have a knack for adapting human muskets, or might develop rifling for black powder weapons created on the surface.

Conclusion

Axes are still fairly poor weapons for dwarves. Their shorter limbs mean that they have shorter levers to employ in swinging motions. I imagine most dwarves use saws to cut down trees and giant mushrooms, rather than lumber axes. There are still dwarves who use axes, hammers, and other unconventional weapons, of course; they may be outcasts, not welcome amongst civilised dwarves, but perhaps it's their unorthodox fighting styles that draws attention to them and makes the stories about them so much more interesting.