Thanks both for the opinion.
To Patric, what it says about Dwarves is that when parents gave birth to a child born a dwarf he had to be abandonned in the forest it is quoted as so ".... it is in the way that the parents first come to know that their infant child is a dwarf, and a creature of magic, who must be taken to the hills to live with others of his kind. This done, the parents give thanks to the gods and sacrifice some animals or other, for to give birth to a dwarf is accounted high good fortune." Apparently they were highly prized for their weapons and good crafting of metal. They were also regarded as soothsayer. Odd enough dwarves were also well respected in Egyptian culture.
To Cadarn, from what I have read, the Wendols had many features of the Neanderthal, they were described as very hairy and their skull had a different shape and could have been nomadic tribes that were spared by the rising Cro-Magnon specie. Hard to prove since very few bones have been recovered to prefectly reconstitute a Neanderthal skeleton. That would give a different meaning to the 30-40K years that are supposed to separate the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon. Some tribes could have survived in isolated regions of Scandinavia. But again was the storyteller trying to impress? he describes the vikings as giants, when in fact most were around 165-170cm heigh. It is hard to say who the "Wendols" really were, described by an arab he might have given his own personnal description and more. Remember that educated Europeans in late 1800 described Negroes as some bizarre mating of men and apes or even argued aloud if they should be considered human beings at all.
