Quote Originally Posted by Peelee View Post
Short hair you get cropped what, once a month? The entire rest of the time, you don't worry about it. Long hair gets in the way of work unless you put it up, and takes longer to clean. These are daily things. Compared to a monthly shearing, short hair is incredibly low-maintenance compared to long.
This depends. Very short hair you can have trimmed back once a month or so, but you have to keep on top of it or it grows out. Long hair is manageable because after a certain length its weight keeps it out of the way, or you can just tie it back if necessary. Mid-length hair is the most difficult to deal with.

In pre-modern cultures, too, long hair is somewhat safer. Cutting your hair - especially short - means running the risk of cutting yourself, which can lead to infection or tetanus, and that's bad. Aragorn probably isn't in danger of this because of his magic elf blood or whatever, but for people out on the road in general this would be a concern.

I'm sure there are barbers in Middle-Earth but that's still an expense unless you cut your hair yourself (easier to do if it's long). And barbers don't deal exclusively in short hair: women with long hair go to the hairdressers too, after all.

It's also worth noting that most of the characters in The Lord of the Rings are high-status individuals for whom any purported difficulty in maintaining long hair wouldn't be a serious worry. Frodo, Merry and Pippin are gentry. Legolas is a prince; Boromir is in all but name; Gimli is dwarven aristocracy. They're hanging out with kings and lords. Aside from Sam, we see relatively little, if anything, of "common" folk in the trilogy.

Ultimately though it's just a cultural thing. At the moment we're going through a phase for men to have short hair but that'll swing back round. As recently as the 70s, men with long hair wouldn't draw a second glance. There are some cultures where long hair is the norm for men. During the period(s) that LotR was aiming to invoke, both books and films, long hair among men was unremarkable, if not normative.