With Its Dwarf Woman Nefi, Tales of the Shire Subverts the Typical Tolkien Adaptation

By Grace Benfell | July 31, 2025 | 12:17pm

Video Games Features tales of the shire

With Its Dwarf Woman Nefi, Tales of the Shire Subverts the Typical Tolkien Adaptation

Women have beards. That might sound a little glib, the kind of statement you might see in a YouTube thumbnail with a glowering man making a disgusted face. But it holds true. The boundaries between men and women, especially the most superficial ones, are enforced constantly. The hair removal industry exists to hold up a massive illusion of gendered differences. But all kinds of women around the world, cis and trans, have facial hair, even if they are plucking their eyebrows or dutifully attending laser treatment appointments. Of all the games to come out this year, I did not expect Tales of the Shire to speak to this. Furthermore, it does so with warmth and grace, even if it sidesteps any of the hard feelings that can come with the blurring of gender.

Tales of the Shire has one woman with a beard (though the player can in theory have one and still use she/her pronouns): the dwarf Nefi, who runs a blacksmith shop in Bywater, a little village on the edge of Hobbiton. She’s friendly but sullen, obtuse and blunt, unused to the social niceties that define the Shire. But she likes the player character. She’ll trade them meats and bacon grease for eggs. She greets them warmly, with a smile and a twirl of her hammer. In other words, she is just another one of the town’s friendly inhabitants.

Dwarven women are regulated to an off-hand joke in the films (exclusive to the extended cut of The Two Towers), but them having beards is a fact of canon. Other fantasy worlds with dwarves tend to make their women beardless (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld being a notable exception). So when Nefi appeared, it was a little surprising. Nefi represents a part of Tolkien’s lore that is not often commented on and even less frequently pulled from. It is a portion of his world that is most often turned into a cheap wisecrack.

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But Nefi is not a joke. None of the characters remark on her beard, at least in the 20 or so hours I played. She is a little bit of a misfit outsider, but Bywater’s hobbits mostly treat her with a mixture of kindness and bemusement. On one hand, this lends her a simple dignity. All the game’s principle characters treat her as a woman. There is no arc where they have to learn to accept her differences. Her place in the community is never in question. On the other hand, the game avoids the reality of the books, in which hobbits can be cruel and fractious just as often as they can be kindhearted cultivators of earth. The hobbits of Tolkien are perfectly capable of nastiness. There’s plenty of impoliteness and rivalry in Tales of the Shire, but nothing quite approaching the real bite Lord of the Rings has for rural English life.

Games and other media fixated on representation are eager to include all kinds of different people, but hesitate to speak to the issues they face. It is a world of gay marriages without homophobia, disability without discrimination, immigration without deportation. But these works also lack the utopian impulse those words imply. There is no positive affirmation of a better world, but instead the self-conscious exclusion of what might upset or offend.

Tales of the Shire fits this bill. The game’s character creator does not gender its character models. Its cast is racially diverse. While the game’s hobbits can be petty towards each other, and are sometimes silly and foolish, Tales of the Shire mostly obfuscates the region’s hostility towards outsiders. In the books, the Sachsville-Bagginses hate Bilbo in part because he left the Shire, returned with foreign wealth, and is visited by foreign friends. In short, they are xenophobes. Tales of the Shire maintains some of those frictions, but lets go of them when they have an explicitly political dimension.

Now, I am in no way saying that Tales of the Shire has an obligation to be a hard-hitting, political work. But it could have gone a little further than being nice. A little nastiness would fit Tales of the Shire‘s warm tone in part because Nefi would not be phased by it. She is unlike everyone else in Bywater, but she would never apologize for that or be frightened by the shenanigans of intolerant Sachsville-Bagginses. You don’t have to lose the game’s light-hearted, child-friendly tone to speak to some of the same issues as the books.

A model for this could be the wonderful graphic novel series Castle Waiting, which features a whole convent of bearded nuns. In some ways, the novels strike much the same tone as Tales of the Shire. The bearded women‘s femininity is never in question. Men are as attracted to them as they are to any other women. But there are people who are hostile and cruel to them. The convent’s haven is all the more meaningful for it being uncommon. It is the contrast between the sometimes awful world with the usually welcoming home that gives Castle Waiting its warm and beautiful tone.

Still, the un-pretentiousness of Nefi is moving. While I object to how the game avoids the Shire’s distaste for outsiders, it would also be a mistake to make her “abnormality“ a center of the story. In my day to day life, most people treat me as I would like to be treated. That is not always true, but when I am among my friends I forget that I am a rare and peculiar woman that legislators, preachers, and sycophants wish to remove from public life. I am who I am. When I see Nefi among her friends, smiling, I am reminded of that truth.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.