Or, you know, the dwarfs (lead by the High King's own son) torched a city of innocents beforehand and then turned up demanding weregild for their own dead and no retribution for the burned city. That's the most recent version, though I'm not sure if the quest is using that over the older "ambassador drew his weapon on the Phoenix King" take.
OK, slow down, I missed the post mentioning this last time. Suffice to say...
The War Of Vengeance books change things so the ambassador doesn't threaten the Phoenix King, but did make it so the Dwarfs (lead by Snorri, the High King's son) raze an elf city and slaughter the inhabitants before the ambassador reached Ulthuan.
In the first version, I find both sides to be pretty bad (the Ambassador should 100% not have tried to threaten the PK, but the PK should probably have just thrown out the ambassador rather than shave him). In the second and more recent version, the dwarfs are...almost entirely in the wrong after having murdered a city and I can pretty easily see why Caledor thought the Dwarfs were just mocking him with the ambassador demanding recompense for the dead and a cessation of hostilities right after an elf city was torched, and that the War was already on.
Eh, if you accept that version of the narrative, sure... but that sounds like a version of the narrative specifically crafted to make the dwarves the villains of the piece, just as the earlier version makes the elves closer to the villains.
The procedure described for "how dwarves respond to a grudge" would not include sacking an elven city in retaliation
before negotiating with the Phoenix King, though it might include sacking a city
after the first demand for recompense has been rebuffed as a "we seriously mean business" thing, I don't know.
So I cannot reconcile the process Boney describes for dwarven conflict resolution with the sequence described in the War of Vengeance books... unsurprisingly, because the entire point of the sequence described in those books is to write the dwarves as having no concept of conflict resolution short of war in the first place!
Going and demanding someone pay you recompense for something they haven't done, especially a king was never going to end well. Like, it's never said they presented evidence or asked for an investigation, it was just "give me money for these crimes you've committed". Caledor II was an arse, but it wasn't exactly a great way to start negotiations with a peer power.
I do not dispute that the dwarves were rude.
The point is, there's a difference between "being rude" (especially given cultural differences) and "not making a good faith effort at peaceful conflict resolution." Especially since, as far as the dwarves then knew, the elves were united under the Phoenix King so that any elven raiders were necessarily his subjects.
Personally, I've always attributed some of how it went down to internal politics. The High King had to go immediately ask for recompense because his subordinates were pushing for it, Caledor II had to dismiss it, because the Phoenix King can't be seen to just give in to whatever demands people make of him (although a better king would have taken the Dwarfen ambassador aside for a quiet discussion about this afterwards).
Also, the Dwarfs didn't declare a grudge over the ambassador's shaving. They wanted recompense for the attacks, the beard was the ambassador's problem (although it was seen as an insult, if the Phoenix King had shaven the Dwarf ambassador without everything else, there wouldn't have been a war. There'd have been consequences, but not a war).
What I'm getting at is that shaving the ambassador
as part of the general tone of refusal changes the message.
Just saying "no" and sending the ambassador back signals "no, we refuse to repay."
Doing so and shaving the ambassador signals "no, we refuse to pay, we refuse to talk about it, and fuck you."
Honestly given the terrible consequences for the whole world following the War of the Beard/War of Vengeance, including sliding ever closer to falling into hell, I think it is safe to say everyone involved was an idiot. They may have been more or less idiotic, they may have had culturally appropriate reasons for it, but the stupidity was universal.
To be sure. I am mainly describing how,
if we subtract any dwarven destruction of cities from the narrative as an event that may or may not have happened... The sequence of events matches the sequence that the dwarves might normally pursue, under
Boney's narrative, when seeking to resolve a Grudge peacefully only for talks to break down.
