Ten of the best

The Three Witches

No wonder Macbeth is a little fazed by these "weird sisters" and their dark prophecies. His friend Banquo identifies what is oddest about their appearance. "You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so." Modern productions of the play do not usually follow this hint.

Gandalf

Wizards have beards, so of course the virtuous magus of Tolkien's tales of Middle Earth has a striking growth of facial hair. According to The Hobbit, it hangs down beneath his waist. In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf returns from the dead all dressed in white and with a "sweeping silver beard" to fight the bad – and equally beardy – wizard Saruman.

Riah

Dickens was mortified to be accused of antisemitism for his portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist. So in Our Mutual Friend, he created Riah, a noble Jew. Fagin's beard was sinister and unkempt; Riah's is the sign of his wisdom. He is "a venerable man", his "long grey hair flowing down . . . and mingling with his beard".

Bluebeard

The villain of Charles Perrault's 17th-century fairytale has a horrible blue beard which makes him an object of disgust, despite his wealth. He courts two sisters, neither of whom will have him. But he shows them a good time, and the younger "began to think that the man's beard was not so very blue after all". After marriage, she discovers there are things worse than his beard.

Captain Blifil

Beards were thought uncivilised in the 18th century, so in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Squire Allworthy should have known at once that Captain Blifil was a rogue. "So far was the skin on his cheeks from being cherry-coloured, that you could not discern what the natural colour of his cheeks was, they being totally overgrown by a black beard, which ascended to his eyes."

Gilbert Osmond

Isabel Archer in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady also should have known from a man's beard not to trust him. Osmond's beard is "cut in the manner of the portraits of the sixteenth century and surmounted by a fair moustache, of which the ends had a romantic upward flourish, gave its wearer a foreign, traditionary look and suggested that he was a gentleman who studied style".

Bertrand Welch

The most obnoxious character in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim is Professor Welch's son Bertrand. He is first encountered "wearing a lemon-yellow sports-coat, all three buttons of which were fastened, and displaying a large beard which came down further on one side than the other". Say no more.

Beppo

Byron's Venetian tale concerns Laura, whose husband Beppo is lost at sea. At a party she and her new boyfriend encounter a Turk, glowering at the lovers from behind a beard "of amazing growth". It is her long-lost husband. "Beppo! that beard of yours becomes you not; / It shall be shaved before you're a day older," cries Laura.

Roger Hamley

In Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, Molly Gibson loves sturdy Roger, a naturalist who goes to Africa to collect samples. Molly's father tells her that Roger has returned more masculine and "muscular", and sporting "a beard as fine and sweeping as my bay-mare's tail." "A beard!" exclaims Molly – shocked and thrilled by turns.

Mr Twit

One half of a nasty couple in Roald Dahl's The Twits, he has a yucky beard. "Things cling to hairs, especially food," so Mr Twit can always find "a tasty morsel" by "sticking out his tongue and curling it sideways to explore the hairy jungle around his mouth".