Dwarves: The Costumes of Middle Earth

hi I'm Jess part-time Hobbit and I'm here to talk to you about Tolkien though they may not be as cool as humans as flashy as elves or as endearing as Hobbits tolkien's dwarves are one of his most unique creations and they presented an exceptional challenge to Peter Jackson when it came to adaptation but I am so excited to get into it because there are a lot of things to learn in what he got right and the things he got pretty wrong today we're going to be talking about both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit since this would be a pretty short video if I only talked about Gimli and unfortunately in The Lord of the Rings Kimberly is pretty much the only dwarf that we meet dwarf culture in The Lord of the Rings is just generally pretty underrepresented and considering the way that Peter Jackson and his team liked to build out entire cultures and people from the ground up the dwarves must have seemed particularly daunting as per usual Tolkien gave them precious little dork from in fact the only physical description of a dwarf that we get in Fellowship is of glowing he writes on his right set a dwarf of important appearance richly dressed his beard very long and forked was white nearly as white as the snow white cloth of his garments he wore a silver belt and round his neck hung a chain of silver and diamonds so from that we can determine that glowing had a beard wore white and wore jewelry again it's just not a lot to go off of but as always Peter Jackson and his team did what they could to begin constructing a culture that could inform other visuals however unlike the other races of Middle Earth there was no obvious historical period that they should draw from they reference using Scandinavian or Teutonic influence but to be honest that could be said of pretty much all medieval fantasy instead their most distinct design inspiration came from the one visual cue that Tolkien did give them the language the dwarf spoke a secret language called kuzdu and the runic written form of this language was called kirth the runes that Tolkien created are sharp and structural and create this kind of grandiose feeling of long-lost history and from these basic elements Peter Jackson and his team were able to extrapolate an entire culture the designers described the dwarves as big people at heart and they manifested this in the architectural design with strong sturdy yet incredibly vast architectural structures these are people that were faced with the jagged precipices and countless dangers and challenges of a mountain and chose to make it their home dwarves are stubborn insular and Larger than Life and every aspect of their design evokes this idea then the challenge was taking these vast architectural ideas and translating them onto a much smaller canvas for the costume of Gimli and the basic structural form of the costume was incredibly important dwarves are meant to be short the problem is that if you just take a regular guy and Shrink him down to a Dwarven height he looks a little bit more like a hobbit they wanted the dwarves to be these tanks small but incredibly strong and mighty and to do this they had to readjust the proportions of the actor's bodies this involved a wider head larger Limbs and a much lower groin and center of gravity much of this work was pulled off by gimli's costume it was bulky and Incredibly literally heavy coming in at over 70 pounds from his massive clunky boots to the weighty helmet that kind of closes in and caps down all of his fiery energy the very shape of gimli's costume seems to get across this big guy in a short body that they wanted to get across as always though they didn't dare skimp on the details everything is imbued with these highly geometric patterns that would have taken a good deal of precision and skill to pull off the patterns are tight sharp and interlocking like the crystalline structure of stone itself even the design of his chainmail is special While most of the other characters have a pretty traditional European chainmail gimlis is different drawing instead from Japanese inspiration rather than woven Loops his armor is made from flat washers that have been tied together with copper wire this serves a dual purpose this type of mail provides much less flexibility than a traditional male there's no flow or drape at all really which serves to emphasize the inflexibility and rigidity of the dwarves it also shows a particular dedication and skill of crafting the dwarves have developed completely unique methods of metal working and armor making that the rest of the world is not privy to it reinforces both their skill and their secretive nature of course there's more to creating a dwarf than costume alone and Prosthetics played a huge role in establishing the look of the dwarves and unfortunately this was one of the hardest parts to pull off especially in The Lord of the Rings genres Davies the actor for Gimli turned out to be allergic to the Prosthetics that they used something that was only made much worse by the amount of his face that was covered by them the Prosthetics encompassed almost his entire face including his under eyes which is already a very sensitive area without an allergy after going through the grueling five hour makeup application process he would be left with irritated swollen eyes that he could barely see out of that he would then have to deal with for the rest of the long filming day and this is where Brett Beatty comes in coming on to the set of The Lord of the Rings he'd had virtually no acting experience but he had a lot of other skills and attributes that made him invaluable to production he was a martial artist a horseback rider he lived in New Zealand and he was only four foot ten this made him the perfect stunt double for a movie like The Lord of the Rings and he was originally hired to be gimli's stunt double having someone short to step into this role was especially important considering that John Reese Davies was actually the tallest member out of the fellowship cast standing at six foot one this meant that in any long shot or group shot a scale double would have to be brought in Beatty was already going to be getting a lot of screen time but once it became clear that John Rhys Davies wouldn't be able to withstand the makeup very often he ended up being brought in a lot more than anticipated he ended up spending 189 days in the role and when it came time for the fellowship to all receive matching tattoos together he was approached by Elijah Wood to receive the tattoo as the ninth member of the fellowship it was nothing against John Rhys-Davies it was just that he had ended up spending a lot more time with the rest of the cast than John Reese Davies and because of all of this we have this just amazing picture of Orlando Bloom holding his hand while he got his tattoo it looks like a piece of like Renaissance Art and I am such a big fan alright that drifted a little bit off topic but I love Brett Beatty and it does emphasize the importance of gimli's costume design in a lot of ways it was all about the costume that is what you saw more so than the actor's face or performance you see his helmet or his boots or his silhouette and you immediately know it's him no matter who's wearing the cost costume I see gimli's costume as kind of a foundational work it may not have allowed for a full and total examination of Dwarven culture but it started taking steps in that direction now after the Lord of the Rings we have its prequel The Hobbit and for now we're gonna try and set aside observations and criticisms for the movies as a whole but for the record to establish my own personal bias I understand the movies had problems but I still deeply enjoyed some aspects of it sometimes in spite of its flaws and sometimes because of them I will have a full video on The Hobbit someday but for now let's just talk about the dwarves now luckily in this case Tolkien does give us something to work off of he describes each of their physical appearances even if it is in kind of like a character customization way like he lists generally their beard color the beard style and the color of the hoods they wore in his defense for A Book Like The Hobbit this was all you needed you could differentiate them in art if you wanted to and if they tended to blend together other a bit as a group well that was kind of the point however this was never gonna cut it in a movie version especially if you're trying to stretch out one children's book into three massive dramatic Blockbusters Peter Jackson knew that a troop of um identical men wearing different colored hoodies and beards would have been a little bit weird and sought to establish different characters for each of the dwarves and all of this began with the face at first the designers just played around in Photoshop using pictures of each other and editing them in order to begin establishing the essential facial attributes and hair attributes of the Dwarven race then once they had cast the actors they were able to use pictures of their actual faces to start building out the appearance of the characters because they were using Photoshop they had a great deal of creative freedom to try out as many ideas as they want some that pushed the envelope and some that were a little bit more basic they had Peter Jackson in the studio daily to help refine the looks of the dwarves before anything physical was created but when it came to physically creating these looks the makeup process was no joke each of the actors had multiple face pieces that were glued on each day as well as full silicon gloves to increase the size of their hands each of these pieces was only single use and they ended up going through thousands of Prosthetics throughout the year-long filming process they also put cowls on the dwarves heads in order to increase the size of their skulls which apparently not only looked ridiculous but also greatly reduced your ability to hear they say it was akin to having your head in a fish bowl then on tops of the cowls and these facial Prosthetics or massive Yak hair wigs and beards which had to be painstakingly applied and restyled every day they also used over a hundred kilos of hair which man there must have been a lot of bald Yaks running around and it wasn't just the shapes of their faces that were changed one of the key ideas that Peter Jackson leaned on was that of silhouette he wanted 13 characters that could be picked out of a lineup not only because of their face and hair differences but also by the very shape of their bodies this meant custom bodysuits sewn for each actor made to pad them out and make the scale look more reasonable as well as to build character for some this meant fairly basic muscle suits but for others well it was a little more dramatic nothing comes without a price though and these suits under the costumes compounded with masses of facial Prosthetics and wigs made being a dwarf just insanely a hot business and by hot I don't mean sexy I mean literally sweaty they had to keep a staff permanently on hand to wipe away sweat and fix hair and makeup between cuts and they had to innovate some pretty exciting dwarf cooling systems it started with tubes of air conditioning that could be directed at will and then went to a cooling tent where they could go between scenes that would be filled with air conditioning and fans their final bet was special suits made for race car drivers originally that would pump ice water underneath their costumes needless to say as much as I would probably kill anybody to be a part of these movies I don't think you could pay me enough to be in one of their trailers after a long day of filming the final piece of the puzzle was the costumes themselves because they had so many dwarves to work with they were really able to play with the idea of a Dwarven costume exploring different levels of income different occupations and different personal Styles they use the colors of the costumes to both set the characters apart and to group together members of the same family but now that you know the general criteria I am going to talk about each individual dwarf in his much detail as I can so that'll be it for buffer bumper dwelling Ballin oin gloin um Nori Dori Ori Thorin Keeley Feely not in that order but I did get it on the first try I keep my Brita on hand before I get into it I cannot emphasize enough that any criticisms that I may level towards these characters their costumes or their development are in no way directed at the actors that play them I truly truly believe that all of them came into this process with a genuine love for Middle Earth and a desire to play Within the world but if writers and producers didn't necessarily allow that to happen that is not their fault but anyway let's start with biffer now you may remember this one because he has an ax in his head this particular design Choice was a specific request from Peter Jackson which is pretty unsurprising because it's a very Peter Jackson thing of him to do they explained that they wanted one of the dwarves to have some kind of a freaky battle wound and well uh biffer drew that straw side note there is a scene in the extended edition of the Battle of the Five Armies where he headbutts an orc which gets um his head ax stuck in the the other guy's head and then they play tug of war with the ax that is May I remind you embedded in both of their skulls I believe until he pushes the orc off of a cliff or something which pops the ax out of biffer's head and renders him once again able to speak English I really hope that's a real scene and not just something that I imagine because wow um what would that say about me foreign overall his look is pretty unkempt fitting into this kind of wild card character that they've built he also has this fun kind of zebra stripe gray pattern in his beard which I think is pretty dashing he and his brothers bofer and bomber are meant to be the poorest dwarves in the group and you see this represented in their costumes through kind of coarse textural Fabrics I don't costume was bad per se but it does start out a trend that we're gonna see a lot they picked a seemingly random design choice and allowed that to become the entire character but you know biffer is the one who has an ax in his head and it made him crazy and I I I guess the costume expresses that now for his brother bofer he doesn't have any you know skull weapons unless you count his exceedingly fabulous hat Beaufort is meant to be you know the the funny one he's just a he's just a funny little guy so they gave him a funny little hat they ended up adjusting beaufort's Prosthetics a lot in the development stage reducing them more and more because he was meant to be a sillier character they didn't want to lose any of the sparkle in the actor James nesbitt's eyes they gave him a relatively understated forehead and nose combo but really let his gophiness shine through in the funky hair and hat his costume is once again a bit rough but set aside from biffers by being a little bit more light brown the character is pretty fun but unfortunately the costume does get a little bit one note next up the third brother bomber now bomber he's the fat one and this I will say especially when you look at the original actor is a B impressive feat of costuming and makeup the belly they gave him alone is almost 2 meters or six feet in circumference and my God doesn't look great on camera they definitely made him the fat one Stephen Hunter the actor also had to wear the most facial Prosthetics out of any of the Dwarven actors including a massive double chin piece there was actually a self-imposed rule by Peter Jackson that they wouldn't give any of the actors any lower face Prosthetics because of what had happened to John Reese Davies and his under eyes but they did break this rule for bomber his chin was so significant that Stephen Hunter could keep his BlackBerry tucked up under the ledge of it for easy access one of the early drafts of his design integrated these tiny food containers that would be braided into his beard this was the Dwarven equivalent of wearing like tupperwares or snack baggies of food as fashion and I still so wish that this had made the cut I know I know it probably wouldn't have carried very well on screen and that's why they didn't do it but I still think it would have been neat instead they gave bomber this great big rounded braided beard which was meant to add one more Circle to his well already circular form in terms of the Wardrobe I actually really like the Fabrics that they chose the roughness of the material really reads on screen even with the weird definition and color grade that they used in the movies and I think out of the three brothers his costume is the one that best reads as a rough spun in writing this script I think I've realized that I have a soft spot for bomber maybe it's just because he got pinned with some of the most utterly insane moments in the film but for me he kind of crosses the line between like underdeveloped attempt into like full-on camp and I can kind of respect that there are really no words to express just the Delight that fills me when I watch the barrel scene foreign but my love for him aside this costume gets the point across with a decent amount of Whimsy next up we have oin and truthfully I I did have to just Google this one he made zero impression on me but he's the one with the ear horn he's dressed uh more elegantly than biffer buffer and bomber but really this costume is frightfully ambiguous oin was supposed to be the healer of the group and apparently he coined the term ointment which is just a wild proposition but I just don't really see this roll through the costume I know it would have been like cheesy and two on the nose to have like a stethoscope or herbs or something hanging off of him but as is he may be the most basic of the dwarves so far unfortunately this next one may be even more basic and that is gloin the father of Gimli and he's uh basically Gimli light or no I mean I guess Gimli would be glowing light so he would be Gimli heavy I'll Workshop that glowing is in a cool dark red color which is a nice note to gimli's color in The Lord of the Rings and we see other elements such as the detailing on his sleeves matching gimlies he has a pretty cool beard but unfortunately I am gonna have to mark this one as almost as boring as his brother but let's move on to somebody who has a hint of Personality Ori the soft boy I think he would have like dominated 2014 tumblr you just give him like a flower crown and Ed Sheeran lyrics his haircut is this just staggering combination of we'll say a bowl cut and a five-year-old cutting their own hair with craft scissors and it really does get across this youthful somewhat incompetent character they also swallowed him up in a ton of knitted goods and this soft lilac color palette he also wears fairly minimal Prosthetics but for how young the character is supposed to be it makes sense is it once again a little one note yes but does it tell a story also yes now to his brother Nori the kleptomaniac the only character we get from Nori is that he steals stuff and has weird hair which I'm gonna point out neither of those are personality traits they describe his hair as the starfish which while kind of cool gotta be honest seems pretty unrelated to the character they did do this rad thing where they braided his eyebrows up into his hair which is you know I guess pretty Innovative but again doesn't really contribute to the development of his character side note though his actor Jed Brophy is an absolute Legend he also appeared in The Lord of the Rings as a couple of different Orcs And this is kind of the first time we got to see his most of his actual face and he just does a fantastic job I have nothing but respect but this costume very little respect moving on now Dory is meant to be the fussy one the stuck up one I only know and remember this because I've seen the behind the scenes for these movies more than the actual movies and the actor Mark hadlow is really just quite the guy oh look at me could get labs for another five minutes please but appearance wise for the character you can kind of see this uptight High Strung character come through he definitely has the most high maintenance hairstyle that we've seen so far with all of these intricate braids woven together he's also in a rich purple velvet which definitely indicates that he cares a lot about his appearance his costume expresses the character I guess I'm just confused as to what the character is like supposed to be is it just like Mark hadlow with a big nose is that it anyway dwallen I have a soft spot for Grim McTavish a mile wide has this video just become me uh praising or criticizing the dwarves based off of how much I like the actors that play them dwallen is meant to be the Rough and Tumble Warrior of the group and that reads fairly well he's the only bald dwarf which means we get to see all of these delightful head tattoos which were meant to read as symbols and images of all of the battles that he's fought button I wish his costume had a little less fur and a little more armor as I can't really see a super serious Warrior sacrificing the chainmail for mink but I do understand this kind of fantasy Berserker look that they were going for my favorite detail about the costume is probably the fake forearms Grand MacTavish apparently didn't have strong enough forearms for the roll so they armed him with elbow length gloves to fix this apparently these were a huge trap for sweat which would mix with the talcum powder that they had used to squeeze him in there and create this sort of liquid that would pool in his hands and eventually just start oozing through the silicone skin throughout the day and if that wasn't viscerally horrifying enough for you at the end of the day someone had to come over and rip these arms off of him inevitably being fully sprayed in the face by dual and milk for the record the phrase dual and milk is from the behind the scenes I didn't come up with it and I I don't think I would for the sake of you guys but because it was used I have to present the facts as they are I don't mind this costume but I do wish that they had leaned a little harder into the cultural realities of a Dwarven Warrior rather than just relying on Old medieval fantasy standards but it does speak to his character while helping him stand out from the others next up is his brother dwallen who is a jolly little dwarf with a big belly he wears bright red and has a long white beard and yes they did have to make sure that he didn't look like Santa Claus they did this primarily by giving him a heavily forked beard that flicked up at the ends this is a nice nod to the original Canon where Tolkien talked about forked beards and also created a motif that could be carried into other elements of his costume such as his flicked up boot toes Fallen is meant to be a close friend to Thorin and the material of his costume is wealthy enough to reflect that it kind of sacrificed all of his more warrior-like traits but were left with a dwarf who fits the role of advisor to the king well enough finally getting into the main three we have Philly the nephew of Thorin in some ways Felix felika comes across as like the younger version of dwallen with all of the fur accents that he has but he is kind of meant to be the warrior Prince type so I guess it does make sense the Simplicity of his costume allows the runes and symbols engraved into it to shine through which is a nice nod to how he's sort of more Linked In to Dwarven culture than some of the others in the group his facial Prosthetics were fairly minimal including I believe a small forehead and nose piece and a fake beaded mustache but apparently the goatee on his chin was actually his goatee that he grew which is nice I guess feely definitely starts slipping into the category of looking less like a dwarf and more like a hot man which is something that I will address with the next two but he is probably the most like dwarf looking out of the royal three I really don't mind this costume again I wish that they had ditched the fur in order to see some really cool dwarvish armor but they integrated some symbols in there and his hair is real pretty so I guess who am I to complained now Keely yeah he doesn't look like a dwarf now they did address this in the behind the scenes explaining that yeah they made him look less like a dwarf because they wanted him to be hot now really I'm torn here because yes I think that the actor Aiden Turner is a beautiful man but could he have also made a relatively attractive dwarf with a little bit of elbow grease yeah absolutely his costume is fine to me he's kind of like a cool toned version of feely with slightly less bulk he's less war-like than his brother and this reads through a Slimmer profile and these black and blue tone colors he's you know the emo brother but he's wearing practically no Prosthetics and he doesn't have a beard and it's just the thing they should have given him a beard he could have looked hot with a beard he could have looked young with a beard in fact Aiden Turner came into the production with a fully grown beard that looked great and they made him shave it off I can't like hate this costume because like have you seen Aiden Turner but I think it was a serious mistake to just give up on any attempt at dwarvenness and this brings us to Thorin and to be honest my main complaint is why didn't they give him eyebrows am I like the only person who's noticed this because this has been bugging me for the past like 10 years and nobody talks about it and I just he has like no eyebrows at all he has dark hair all of the other dwarves have strong eyebrows he is like meant to be a strong imposing character so why did they make him look like Voldemort please can we just get this man a brow pencil so some powder some Pomade browse aside it's a it's a it's fine design we see some fun little armor details as well as a very strong profile I also like the color this kind of muted dark blue which suits the severity and coolness of the character but I do wish we had seen a little more beard on him especially since he's meant to be the Ultra Dwarf who has a beard that like sweeps on the floor now the actor Richard Armitage did come up with some reasoning for it he explains that when the dwarves fled Erebor and Smaug they all came out with singed beards so he says that Thorin keeps his beard short in order to pay homage to those dwarves I definitely respect the actor for coming up with ways to justify it because that's what you do as an actor but the impression I get from the behind the scenes is that they kept it short because they wanted to make him hot wasn't sexy that was the issue well not just hot they were afraid that a big beard would draw attention away from the intricate facial performance of Richard Armitage but that still feels kind of like a cop-out to me say what you will about the movies but I think Richard Armitage just killed that role and he definitely could have done it with a full beard that being said his hair is actually my own personal hair goal I mean the silver the wave definition the volume wow I mean it would have like fallen in his face pretty immediately so he probably should have had like a headband or a little man bun or something but yeah you guys have heard me complain enough about that overall I think thorin's design was just a bit misguided if anything I think that Thorin and his nephews should have leaned further into the Dwarven tropes not away they are the leaders of this civilization and they should have been the examples the encompassing of Dwarven culture rather than the outliers but really here's the thing I talked a lot of crap about these costumes especially saying that they are you know one note but the fact is that as much as I can identify that problem I do not have a solution I don't know if there was a way to differentiate this massive group of dwarves without it becoming one note even with the extended [Music] extended screen time that we get in Peter Jackson's trilogy there just isn't the time or space for 13 well-rounded well-developed characters in this plot I think you will inevitably end up choosing one appearance detail and making that the majority of the character's personality or just making the characters personality and their appearance completely unrelated in the behind the scenes they talk about how Peter Jackson wanted to establish the iconic culture and appearance for the dwarves in the same way that Tolkien overhauled the mental image of elves in public imagination they wanted to take these iconic characters from myth and legend that had been infantilized and made Silly by modern media and returned them to something more serious and defined did The Hobbit movies succeed in this maybe unfortunately I I just I don't think the Hobbit movies were the right place to try and accomplish this goal the fact is that the book is not called the dwarves it's called The Hobbit it was never about the dwarves so efforts to centralize them and make them more memorable were only ever going to complicate the plot if anything I think The Hobbit movies and the dwarves presented in it exemplify the fact that no matter how much money you have and how many skilled hands and Minds you can throw at it if you try and turn a story into something that it's not it's not gonna go very well for you because costumes and wigs and Prosthetics and makeup without a story are just accessories and that brings us to the end of this video which is going to be the second to last video in this series and I know there are a lot of small groups of costumes or individual costumes that I haven't gotten to explore yet but none of those really seem to be enough to like fill out a whole video and thesis I would like to talk about them someday and it is currently my plan to get around to them I'm just not exactly sure what format that's going to be in but since I've covered all the major groups for the last video in this series I thought it would be fun to rank some or maybe if I'm feeling Reckless all of the costumes in Lord of the Rings this would allow me to talk about some of the ones that weren't contained in this series and I think it would be a lot of fun so you let me know what you think of that idea and uh look out for that one in the upcoming weeks if you couldn't tell I had a lot of fun writing and producing this video The Hobbit movies hold a very specific spot in my heart so getting to address them was very daunting but very very satisfying I would love it if you took a second to like this video and if you'd like to catch each and every one of my weekly videos make sure that you subscribe and hit the notification Bell make sure you comment with thoughts ideas or critiques because talking to you guys is my favorite part of the week thank you all so much for listening to me ramble and I hope that you all have a very happy holiday [Music] s

Channel: Jess of the Shire

Views: 53,335

Keywords: Lord of the Rings, Video Essay, Rings of Power, The Hobbit, LotR, Tolkien, Costumes, Costube, Costume History

Id: EpDsTx-3Ai4

Length: 33min 48sec (2028 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2023