I think that's a totally valid way of approaching the Silver Hand, btw. Oof, Blizzard! Be more consistent!

However, when a level one human paladin delivers the Consecrated Letter to Brother Sammuel in Northshire Abbey, he or she is addressed as "Knight of the Silver Hand." Likewise, a brand-new dwarf paladin is informed, "You're a Knight of the Silver Hand now, be ready to play the part." So clearly, even if the Order of the Silver Hand is officially defunct after the Third War, there are still a lot of paladins (including the ones who train new paladins!) who consider themselves to be a part of it still even before Fordring declares the Order "reborn."

I've always played it as the Order continuing to exist through its surviving members and the young paladins they train, but being fairly disorganized and leaderless until Fordring comes out of exile and steps up to the plate as Highlord.

No, that works for me! My frustration has been a lack of solid information. I can work with the idea that there were no armored-battletank-Light-users in Azeroth before the creation of the Silver Hand. I can work with the idea that there were. But being stuck in the middle with unclear statements was driving me batty, much like my inability to figure out whether or not dwarves revered the Light before they met humans and joined up with the Alliance. I keep running across things that say "dwarves and elves used to follow the Light in droves, but they don't anymore", but does "used to" mean "during a time before they had a lot of contact with humans", or does it mean "after the Alliance got started, dwarves and elves investigated the Light, and have since moved on"?

Because, really, in terms of in-game settings, there is no overt presence of the Church of the Holy Light for dwarves and elves, both of whom seem to draw on separate sources for their beliefs (in the case of the dwarves, the Makers/Titans, and in the case of the elves, Elune). There's no Cathedral in Ironforge, unlike in Stormwind, say. Sure, there are priest and paladin trainers there, but nobody's a bishop, nobody wears super-fancy Church of the Holy Light clothes, and so on — it simply doesn't seem to be an organized practice for the dwarves. (And if you have any more solid information on this than I've been able to turn up, I'd be very happy to hear it. >_>)

As for where this all came from, it's all related to trying to figure out Nancie's backstory (and although I keep thinking for sure I saw something that said the dwarves had no knowledge of the Light before the Alliance was formed, I just cannot find it at all now, argh). When I was first playing WoW, I thought Nancie was a priest before Ovi was a priest, but really digging into Nancie's personality, she is much more "battle" than "medic". XD

Obviously, there's no difficulty in making her a mountaineer pre-First War, and certainly she could have medic training and physician training (unless we're going to give humans the credit for dwarves learning about medicine ALTOGETHER, in which case, screw that noise, that's just stupid — er, don't mind me, I'm just bitter about the written language thing. What else? BEER?! FIRE!?! THE WHEEL??! ANVILS?!?!). If the Light is a philosophy they've heard about but haven't really dug into deeply, she could even have an interest in it, something she doesn't talk to with most people for fear of being snorted at. Otherwise, she could be a dwarf who just has an inner belief that there's some kind of higher power out there guiding her from time to time, and when she runs into humans, the pieces kinda fit together, and she becomes a devotee of the Light. But I do see her as being an armored, mounted warrior long before she's ever got a deep inner connection to the Light, or becomes a paladin altogether.

I'm also a little unclear about things like — okay, the Silver Hand had Exclusive Rights to the Registered Paladin Trademark for the duration of the Second and Third Wars (and before that?), but then Uther's killed and Arthas goes crazy and the Order of the Silver Hand just falls apart. But in the meantime, there are still paladins. The Silver Hand doesn't get reformed until Tirion Fordring comes back, right? But there are paladins happening all the time between Arthas and Tirion. Clearly there's a way to be a paladin, if not a Paladin(tm), without Archbishop Faol himself running you through the ceremony and ritual.

Also, while the Scarlet Crusade is full of former Silver Hand paladins, I imagine that they've been broken off from Northshire and Stormwind quite long enough so that their new shiny Scarlet paladins are blessed by somebody, but it ain't anyone in Northshire or Stormwind. (Or, I dunno, maybe there are a bunch of infiltrators who stay in Northshire just long enough to get their paladin training complete, and then they run off to be part of the Scarlet Crusade, and the priests and bishops at Northshire all kind of go, "Crap! That's the third fake paladin we've lost this week! HEY YOU GET BACK HERE AND BRING THAT HORSE WITH YOU." But I doubt it.)

Ultimately, I'm sort of picturing the difference between paladins of the original Silver Hand, and more recent paladins, being a bit like the difference between being Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi Knight, who was raised from infancy/childhood and was apprenticed to a Jedi Knight and passed the trials and is a Jedi Knight(tm), and Luke Skywalker, who has a genetic affinity for the Force and finds a couple of guys to train him and doesn't even actually complete his training but is told, "Okay, good enough. Now triumph over your dark side and stuff." and goes on proclaiming I Am A Jedi Knight for the rest of the series, and no one really has the ability to say otherwise, because he's all they've got left anyway.

And like I said on Twitter, don't apologize for wall-of-text; I really appreciate your knowledge and willingness to share it with me. ^_^ You are definitely the first person I think of when I think about people who would know lore in general, and paladin lore in specific. So thank you for commenting!

Anyway, if I recall correctly from the novelization of WarCraft 2 (and I know I do, since I pulled out the book to reference the scene this occurred in), the entire Holy Warrior concept was revolutionary in Azeroth at the time, and arose from the decimation of the ranks of the clerics of Northshire Abbey who (like the rest of the clergy of the Church of the Holy Light at the time) were just too fragile to withstand the onslaught of the Horde. After hearing the fate of the Northsire clerics, Archbishop Faol had the idea to combine the martial prowess of knights and warriors with the faith of his priests to create a new branch of the Church—the Paladins.

This leads me to believe (and I've seen no evidence to the contrary) that prior to the creation of the Silver Hand, the "other Light-infused warriors" you refer to simply did not exist in Azeroth. If you can provide a concrete example, then I can see where your dilemma arises from, but as it stands I think the lore is pretty solid in this regard. I guess you could argue that there were knights and warriors who believed in the Light prior to the creation of the Silver Hand (which is true) or that there were priests with some martial ability (which is also true, since martial prowess was one of the criterion by which Archbishop Faol chose his first Paladin candidates—the other being piety), but you can't really argue that warriors were infused with Light-given powers nor that the priests could combine their martial prowess and Holy powers into a cohesive style, and so they were Fauxadins at best. =P

Out of curiosity, what exactly brought on this conversation in the first place? Did you read something in the lore somewhere that brought this into question, or did you just envision Nancie as a "battle medic" or somesuch before the creation of the Order of the Silver Hand?

I don't see why these have to be the only choices. When the first human Paladins were ordained, they came from different walks of life—the only thing that really tied them together was devotion to the Holy Light and enough sense of duty to respond to Archbishop Faol's/Uther's call to arms.

I see nothing that says that dwarven Paladins couldn't have arisen the same way. It's quite likely that some of them were fighters/guards/warriors/gladiators/mercenaries/etc. who had fighting skills and took up faith as an additional tool in their arsenal, just like it's likely that some were religious devotees who felt the need to pick up weapons and fight for their beliefs. But that doesn't negate the chance that it's equally possible that there were peasants and miners and artisans and hunters and whatnot who embraced the Light and were taught their current skills by the Silver Hand. Sure, some were probably young, but it's just as possible some were pretty old, too.

It's not too much of a stretch to imagine a grizzled old hunter hanging up his boomstick and picking up a libram when he finds that wielding the Holy Light takes the ache out of his bones and gives him a sense of fulfillment that no hunt ever could.

Now, if you're insisting on a Paladin-like dwarf character that existed before the Second War, then perhaps you should look at shamanism. I believe shamanism existed in dwarven society prior to the introduction of the Holy Light. It could have been something of a dying system of beliefs that was simply replaced by worship of the Light (and is being revived in Cataclysm due to strengthened ties between the Bronzebeard and Wildhammer Clans). A dwarf shaman who converts to the Light amidst a crisis of faith and/or in an attempt to remain relevant in a rapidly changing society (and then potentially returns to shamanism in Cataclysm) sounds like a plausible story to me.