‘Irish people have faced centuries of discrimination’: why are Lord of the Rings’ accents so offensively bad? | Television | The Guardian

42 comments

  4. It’s funny how, in every production of Tolkien’s work, the noble elves speak in posh English accents, when their story is blatantly based on the Tuatha de Dannan.

  5. As a massive LOTR nerd I read this interview with the dialect coach in June.

    >For example: The Harfoots, ancestors to the Hobbits, appear in The Rings of Power with “an Irish base to their accent,” but they do not speak as though they’ve walked out of a “particular cross street in Dublin.”

    I was terrified when I heard they had Irish accents and said if they’re doing it they need to pick one regional accent and get it right. When I read that I kind of understood what they were going for but was still worried. It’s not supposed to be an Irish accent it’s based off one.

    The end result has been a disaster. It’s real Darby O’Gill and the little people shite. Hollywood really can’t do Irish accents, mainly because they try do a generic Irish accent that doesn’t exist, instead of picking one of the dozens of regional accents.

  6. Did people from the West Country of England feel the same way when the original movies came out?

  7. >the fact that no one in production stopped to consider that Irish people might be upset by the harfoots is especially baffling.

    Love people who get offended on our behalf.

    Angry for the sake of being angry here. It’s pretty simple the whole accent thing really, simple farmer accent for simple farmer life folk, hard grunty accent for hard working dwarfs, middle of the ground for human and posh prick for the elves. If everyone spoke in a similar accent then it wouldn’t work showing that there is a vast difference between the cultures and races of the show.

    It’s literally there to show what these people are like in an easy to understand manner. You know the elves are all high and mighty because they speak like they are too good to even spit on you if you were on fire. You could watch the whole show with your eyes closed and tell what race was talking. Same thing happened in LOTR movies.

  8. I don’t think I get easily offended in general, but the honor hobbit accents did raise a gigantic WTF from me. They’re not even real accents. Nobody talks like that.

  9. I would love to see this if they had D4 accents!

    “Oh my Gawd! Dermo, I just found a homeless Mon in a meteor!

    Will I get him some truffles from Donnybrook Fair?”

  10. If the elves sound English, the dwarves sound Scottish and the hobbits are “oirish” then clearly the humans should all be Welsh.

  12. It’s pretty telling that the middle class SJWs at the Guardian are offended on our behalf but didn’t notice that *orcs* have Cockney accents.

  14. One of the main reasons I stopped watching the show was down to them poxy Irish accents, just take you right out of it hearing them absolutely butcher our accents, just get Irish actors to play the parts like actual Irish people who speak in the accents naturally.

  15. Its amusing to no end that Amazon was making big sponsored posts on facebook claiming that people only hated the show because of its cultural diversity and that if you don’t like the show then you are an edgelord keyboard warrior that fights supposed ‘woke’ culture. Yet the depiction of the harfoots is the most offensively stereotypically Irish thing they could have come up with.

  16. In my opinion this story is utter shite. I’m happily watching the show and couldn’t give a fuck. Its not Ireland, they’re not Irish and any similarity being drawn here because they might sound a little Irish is just lazy racism so like why would I take offense.

    Every bad guy on TV has a British accent, every Vampire I saw in the movies sounded either posh British or vaguely Romanian, again, were the Brits or Romanians complaining about getting painted as vampires?

    The top bad guys in the empire in Star Wars also sound British, why no outcry.

    I would actually question if the commentators or writers of this piece were more annoyed about inclusion, that the British accent was being undercut by having a non cannon British accent being used in such a high profile tv show.

  17. I posted that article in r/lotr and was deeply amused to see the queue of Brits and Yanks arrive to speak for people and say the accents aren’t offensive and no one should be complaining about them.

    Some ge uinely said with a straight face that because there’s no Ireland in Middle Earth that these aren’t Irish accents so there’s no issue.

  22. People should be a lot more offended at the utterly dreadful writing and overall direction of the show than any accents ffs

  23. The accents would be fine if the rest of the story wasn’t total shite . Ive watched a few episodes then stopped watching I couldnt find one single thing to keep me interested . I don’t think you could make it worse if you tried

  25. Jesus. Yeah they have naff Irish accents and it’s a bit cringe.

    Being offended about it though? Fuck me, grow up

  27. I see a lot of posts here trying to make out Tolkien to be anti Irish and Ireland. The only solid opinion we have is that he did not like the Irish language and I don’t think we can judge him on that considering our own people’s disdain for the language.

    He spent a lot of time in Ireland and we have one quote describing the land as evil which fits in with our own narrative about Ireland.

    Tolkien was mega Catholic and stories we have been told growing up is that Ireland was savage and evil but we drove it out of the country with Christianity.

    “He described Ireland as a country naturally evil. He said he could feel evil coming from the earth, from the peat bogs, from the clumps of trees, even from the cliffs, and this evil was only held in check by the great devotion of the southern Irish to their religion.”

    By modern standards he would be considered a conservative but his time’s standards the man was very open minded to other cultures.

    He was very proud of his Englishness but held open disdain for imperialism and trying to force Britishness on other cultures.

    Like I said above he was a mega Catholic so I very much doubt he “hated” a very Catholic nation like Ireland.

    The only thing I could hold against him was forcing his wife to convert and being really upset that his friend converted from Athiest to Protestantism instead of converting to Catholic.

    The UK could solve their energy crisis and maybe Europe’s by digging up Tolkien and his son and attach them to a turbine because thanks to Rings of power I imagine both of their corpses are spinning at a incredible rate.

  30. Tried raising this on the r/fantasy sub weeks ago but it was deleted by a mod.

    The issue isn’t the terrible accents on their own – it’s the combination of them with the costume. The characters’ design is lifted from a racist depiction of Irish immigrants to England and the USA from the 19th century. Twigs in the hair, dirty semi humans with an Irish brogue.

    I’m part Scottish no one gets offended by Scottish accented dwarves or the ~~Yorkshire~~ Southwest of England Hobbits from LOTR because the depiction has ZERO to do with the West country or Scotland.

    This depiction however does have echoes of racism against the Irish – specifically American racism against Irish immigrants. I mean Amazon have invented that Harfoots were nomads. Invented that they have this look and accent. They deliberately designed them to look like a 19th century racist cartoon of Irish travelers.

  31. I’m more perplexed by the inconsistencies of the accents from the Harfoots. Some of them are fine using the Irish accent as a base, I don’t find them particularly distracting the more I watch.

    But then there’s a few who sound like they should be in a modern Dublin TV show and then there’s the fiddle da dee stereotype accents dialled up from the older ones like Lenny Henry.

    Either way I’m finding the show middling, not as bad as some make out but it’s definitely missing something. The human side of the story is immensely boring and they’ve spent far too much time with them, constantly cutting from more interesting stories to this blandness of an angsty Galadriel trying to convince them to mobilise ships.

    I fully click in when we’re spending time with Elrond and Durin though, these should’ve been the bigger focus as I’m liking their parts the best.

    I think if they’ve any clue to what the issues are they’ll be able to steer the show onto a good course from season 2 onwards.

  33. I wonder if this is a thing you only notice with your own native accents. I feel like the result would be just as sloppy if the hobbits were french for example except no one here would be complaining because we wouldn’t be able to hear how awful they are.

    Any large group of people trying to do a particular foreign accent would be atrocious imo.

    In that regard I don’t think it’s fair to take it as an attack on the Irish. However it does beg the question; why didn’t they just cast Irish people?

  34. The part that is most annoying is that if anyone should have an Irish accent, it should be the Elves, given how heavily they are based on Irish folklore. The angry, drunk Dwarfs are also quite offensive in having Scottish accents. The accents are based on offensive English stereotypes and that is the real issue, not how good the accents are.

  35. Tbh I get a bit sick of that portrayal of Irish people and culture. It is offensive and it speaks of an old colonial / imperial mentality and probably even of sectarianism and all sorts of stuff.

    I know we are supposedly great craic and self-deprecating, but at times I feel like when we do that, it’s a bit like the person who’s been the focus of long term bullying turning it into a joke as a defence mechanism.
    We are perfectly entitled to find obnoxious portrayals of Irish culture offensive.

    It crops up in older American productions, even the odd time in productions like Star Trek TNG where they all went off to the *diddly Irish planet of the noble simpletons*

    Tolkien’s very much of his era – one that was bathed in class, race, empire and endlessly focusing on putting people into categories.

    I wouldn’t get overly caught up in it other than to see it in the context and time it was written. It’s fiction, but it’s basically a reflection of late Victorian and Edwardian British culture.

    This modern off shoot however, is utter drivel!

  37. I couldn’t give a flying f*ck about LOTR accents. And nobody I know does tbh. Why would we? We won. England is a failing power on the periphery of a European Union it has no voice in, a second rate military empire without an… empire. So…

    They can have their fake accents. And we will have an Easter celebration in 2023 that they can SEE FROM FUCKING SPACE!

    Gwan to fuck. 😂😂😂😂

  38. I’m not offended 😂 but it’s hard to listen to at times. The accents are atrocious😂😂😂

  39. I don’t mind at all sure. What bothers me more is that all the Harfoots don’t have a consistently similar accent, which they definitely should have considering how isolated they are.

  40. If only I had £‎3.33 for every time I’d heard an English racist utter the words ‘three, thirty three’.

  41. Some American executive wants little people to sound Irish. Growing up on stereotypes leprechauns and on a diet of lucky charms 🍀 🌈

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