Oxonmoot 2024

Hair. Most of us have it, and many of us style it, whether purely for personal grooming or as acts of self-expression. In artistic performance, hairstyling bears as much implicit meaning as costume or set design, revealing insights into a character’s personality, state of mind, occupation, and more. Expanding on a light-hearted viral Twitter thread by the author (discussing how hair design helped characterise the mental health of Elendil in 2022’s THE RINGS OF POWER Season 1), this paper dives deeper into hair design in adaptations of Tolkien's work, including THE LORD OF THE RINGS (2001-03) and THE RINGS OF POWER (2022-). Drawing on fields as diverse as theatre studies, trauma studies, and historical coiffure, this comparative work will situate design choices within the storytelling aims of each adaptation and evaluate their impact on audiences. It will also briefly touch on how these choices compare alongside Tolkien’s own treatment of hair as a descriptive tool in his own works.