With the recent controversy surrounding the Rings of Power’s presentation of Princess Disa, who many fans feel doesn't live up to Tolkien’s vision of what a dwarf should look like, people have been pointing out comparisons with Peter Jackson’s portrayal of the female dwarves. In the Hobbit trilogy, female dwarves are are seen in Dale, before Smaug the terrible sets the town alight. In the Lord of the Rings, Gimli famously describes the dwarven women as "so alike in voice and appearance that they’re often mistaken for dwarf men." He also claims that there some have recently posed the theory that there are no dwarf women at all, and "that dwarves just spring out of holes in the ground!" He also refers to them later on as “Little hairy women” in his drinking game with Legolas.

Disa has some of these attributes, including some hair around the edges of her chin. This detail is admittedly a little difficult to spot in the ‘first look’ photo of the character, as they could easily be mistaken for shadows under her jawline, but will hopefully be more prominent in the series itself. She also has gold dust permanently scattered over her fingertips, which many fans thought was a nice touch. It's symbolic of the dwarven greed for wealth and innumerable treasures like the Arkenstone, which makes them so prone to dragon sickness, and to the power of the One Ring. But Disa certainly doesn’t look as elaborate, or as hairy, as the dwarven women pictured in Dale, draped in all of their finery and their intricate hairstyles.

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In Peter Jackson and the design team’s portrayal of the thirteen dwarves, each one has a unique look, from their costumes and colors to the way they thread their beards. The dwarven women shown in Dale also have a very distinct look, with highly embellished clothes and extravagant beehive updo’s. But the most significant features of the female dwarves, as Gimli described, are their stature and their hairiness. The costume team at Weta Studio’s started out by "body-scaping" each female dwarf in The Hobbit films, giving them more stout and padded figures, just as they did the males. Each extra had to wear a cushioned suit according to the body type that the team wanted to portray. These usually involved broadening the shoulders and adding to the hips and rump, to give them a wider, more stocky feeling. They were then layered with rich clothes in regal purples and royal reds, to demonstrate the affluence of Erebor and the thriving market in Dale, where they would probably buy and trade clothes.

Princess-Disa-1

As for their hair, the Weta Digital team created several mock-ups on the faces of the female extras who would be portraying the dwarves, giving them different length beards, or mustaches braided into their side-burns. They also wore beads threaded through their coarse dwarven hair, to give them that masculine, almost warrior-like appearance that Gimli mentions in the Lord of the Rings. To what extent they could actually be mistaken as male dwarves is debatable, but they are certainly more hairy and uninviting looking than Princess Disa. Disa is beautiful and powerful looking, but may lack some of the masculine dwarven charm described in Tolkien’s works.

dwarf body in Erebor

Sadly, the representation of the female dwarves in The Hobbit trilogy is only brief. Tragedy strikes, and the vast majority of them are wiped out by Smaug, which is shown right at the beginning of the second film in a terrifying display of fire and destruction. The next time they are seen is inside the halls of Erebor, which has now essentially become their tomb. Thorin’s troupe and Bilbo enter the mountain, and come across a room full of the dead, their kin, who were burned alive when Smaug came. Among the bodies, there are female dwarves, some even still clutching babies and young children, to remind the audience of the true devastation that has befallen the dwarven people, and why it is so important for Thorin and the others to claim their home back, and start to rebuild the beauty that once thrived there.

Of course, this ends in tragedy itself, as Thorin is changed by the gold in the vast halls, and ends up losing his life to the battle against the servants of the enemy, but the mountain is reclaimed nevertheless. There is hope that more women will come to live back in Erebor, and more children will be born to fill the once great chambers with the joy and laughter that the dragon stole from them.

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