In Peter Jackson’s second Rings film, The Two Towers, Gimli the dwarf (John Rhys-Davies) tells Éowyn (Miranda Potter) that there’s a rumor that there are “no dwarf women,” and that it’s impossible to tell the difference between male and female dwarves. Like the jokester we all know him to be, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) gestures to Éowyn, saying “it’s the beards” that cause the confusion.
Since then, as Gimli points out, it has led some to believe that Dwarf women don’t exist and that Dwarves sprout out of the ground, which, of course, is preposterous.
Prime Video’s new Lord Of The Rings series settles this debate once and for all. As played by Sophia Nomvete, Disa is the first dwarf woman in a live-action Lord Of The Ring adaptation. Furthermore, Nomvete says that she’s the first female dwarf in all of Tolkien.
“She’s so relatable in so many ways,” said Nomvete. “She’s a wife to Durin. She’s a force of nature, and a joy.”
Nomvete appeared on stage at Comic-Con’s Lord Of The Rings panel, where she stood like a Proudfoot, happy to carry the torch for Dwarf women everywhere. She was so proud that she auditioned for the role “two days away from giving birth.”
“I got the call that you will be flying the torch for this incredible character when my daughter was five days world,” she said. (The stitching on her costume unravels so that she could feed her daughter between takes.)
Of course, just because Disa doesn’t have a beard, that doesn’t mean that other female Dwarves can’t. We’re not here to tell the Dwarves how to express themselves.
But as Nomvete said, the Second Age was a time of great prosperity for the Dwarves, and every prosperous society has women. So she’s here for that.