The War of the Beard

Long before the first man raised a shrine to Sigmar, the two great civilizations of the elder world went to war, and The War of the Beard (the War of Vengeance, as the elves would name it) ended their golden alliance forever. Once the dwarfs and the high elves had traded freely and fought side by side; then pride and misunderstanding poisoned everything between them.

The spark was an insult: dwarf traders shamed by arrogant elven colonists, and an ambassador sent to demand redress returned with his beard shorn: a mortal offense to a people who reckon honour in grudges. Word of the outrage passed from hold to hold along the underway, and every dwarf king took it as a wound to his own honour. When the High King's envoy was murdered, the dwarfs marched, and the elves of the Old World answered with fire and sorcery.

The war ground on for centuries, siege answering siege. Mountains were undermined and forests burned; the dwarfs lost kings and the elves lost mages, and neither side could find a road back to peace. At the last the dwarfs stormed the elven colonies one by one, and the elves, beset also by civil war in their distant homeland, withdrew across the sea. Both peoples were left broken by the effort, their empires diminished and their friendship replaced by cold and lasting suspicion.

The War of the Beard is the great tragedy of the Old World's dawn, a self-inflicted wound that weakened elf and dwarf alike and left the way open for younger, hungrier powers. Every grievance later inked into the dwarfs' Book of Grudges traces its bitterness back to this first great betrayal.