Flighty Elves and Bearded Dwarven Ladies

The astute among my readers might have noticed that the Boot Hill advertisement I shared earlier today appeared in the August 1979 issue of Dragon, the same month that the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide was released. To mark this occasion, issue #28 includes an article in which TSR employees who had even a small hand in the completion of the DMG offer their opinions on the finished product. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the article, some of which might make good fodder for a future post. For the moment, though, I want to draw your attention to the comments offered by Jean Wells:

The section to which Wells refers is actually entitled "Player Character Racial Tendencies" and begins at the bottom of page 15 and continues on to page 16. Here's the section about elves that she so disliked:

It's pretty innocuous stuff in my opinion. Gygax explicitly calls his descriptions "guidelines" Moreover, he points out that many other factors, such as alignment, will have an impact on a character's personality. For myself, this description of elves is perfectly fine, if somewhat different than the one that was probably already common in 1979. The same holds for his description of dwarves: The question of whether female dwarves have beards in Dungeons & Dragons is much an ancient one, as evidenced by the last sentence of Wells's comments. In truth, I have no strong feelings about it myself, but I do find it fascinating the strong emotions, pro and con, that this rather esoteric dispute elicits in some corners of the hobby.