The ridiculously successful The Lord of the Rings trilogy featured but one dwarf character – John Rhys Davies's indomitable, tossable Gimli – in its ensemble, but the prequel The Hobbit will feature many a dwarf across both films, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: There and Back Again.  A brand spanking new image from An Unexpected Journey showcases just four of these appetitive, bearded dwarfs.

With yesterday's release of a look at dwarf brothers Fili (Dean O'Gorman) and Kili (Aidan Turner), we here at IAR pondered a competition of cinematic dwarf beards in The Hobbit, Peter Jackson's epic, two-part prequel adaptation of JRR Tolkein's novel.  With a goatee and a smattering of stubble, respectively, neither Fili nor Kili could compete with the traditional beards of Oin (John Callen) and Gloin (Peter Hambleton) or the stylishly innovative face weasels worn by  Nori (Jed Brown), Ori (Adam Brown), and Dori (Mark Hadlow).  The beards of all seven previously-revealed dwarf journeymen have no been eclipsed, as the first image showing Bofur, Bombur, and Bifur shows without a reasonable doubt that Bofur has the finest, puffiest mustache-thing in Middle Earth.