Girdlegard

Tungdil Goldhand was raised by a human magus and has never met another dwarf. He reads, which no dwarf should; he cannot fight the way they do; and when an errand sends him out across Girdlegard he finds his own people at the worst possible moment — the gates unguarded, the clans quarrelling over precedence, and orcs and worse pouring down from the north into the only country he has ever read about in books. Markus Heitz published The Dwarves in 2003 and kept going for two decades: The War of the Dwarves, The Revenge of the Dwarves, The Fate of the Dwarves, The Triumph of the Dwarves, and the two-volume Return of the Dwarves. Girdlegard is a walled continent, ringed by mountains and held at five gates, and the sequence keeps finding new ways for those gates to fail. The tone is German heroic fantasy at full volume — axes, oaths, tankards, siege engines and blunt humour — with a hero who is an outsider among his own kind and never entirely stops being one. It is a single continuous story with no convenient entry point later on. Begin with The Dwarves and read in publication order; the later books depend completely on what the earlier ones cost.