A reader’s choice addition to the beard-off, George MacDonald was an early master of the fantasy genre. While best known for “The Princess and the Goblin”, it was MacDonald’s “Phantastes” that led C.S. Lewis to remark that after reading the book “he knew he had crossed a great frontier.” Or was that after he had walked by MacDonald on the street… Look at that thing!

Miguel de Cervantes

Like Cervantes, Sigmund Freud is sporting a carefully trimmed affair. This makes one wonder though… It’s somewhat obsessively groomed, that beard. And what’s with posing with that cigar? No doubt it is clearly a manifestation of a deep… Never mind.

The neck beard is not for the Amish alone. The Telegraph’s beard collection celebrated (rightfully so) the charming neck-beard of Robert Browning, but certainly Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s goat-like visage has to be honored as well. A stubborn beard for a stubborn writer.

In 1913 Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature and if not for Confucius he would have been the first Asian on this increasingly precious list. Picking the era of beard for the Indian poet was not easy. The trim, etched form of his youth? Or this mystical number from his venerable years? We hope you’ll agree.

George R.R.

While GRRM hordes his capital, he yet loses out in a beard comparison with Karl Marx. This broom-shaped number is nearly as prolific as the word-count in “Das Kapital.” Nearly.

The beard that started it all… At the beginning of the Western Canon lives the bearded warriors that populate the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” From Ajax to Ucalegon, Homer fashioned some of the greatest bearded characters in all of fiction, and for that (and his own potentially fictional status) he earns the top billing.