Voices: There’s something very sinister about the accents in The Rings of Power
The accents, the accents, the accents. Arrggh. The accents. It hurts. MAKE THEM GO AWAY.
Sorry, let’s start at the beginning. Amazon’s The Rings of Power is pure eye candy, as you might expect from the world’s first $1bn TV show. But a big budget, of course, doesn’t guarantee quality. Just ask the creators of the DC extended cinematic universe. Or the people who unleashed Chaos Walking on an unsuspecting (and largely uninterested) world (even Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley couldn’t save that one).
Rings has, fortunately, so far mostly lived up to expectations. It’s like a luxury spa on screen, with the hot tub laid out and ready for you to fall into at the end of a hard week (new shows are released on Friday).
It has been a particular joy for those of us who grew up with the source material: Look! That’s Númenor! For real (almost). Wait, so if we’re meeting Durin when do we see his bane? And (shudder) is Sauron next?
There’s something for everyone. And (yay!), it also sticks it to the (racist), so-called “purists” who cope fine with the concept of elves and hobbits, but completely lose their minds at the idea of some of them being Black.
The Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings film trilogy was a mighty cinematic achievement. But having recently re-watched The Fellowship of the Ring, the monochrome casting is jarring.
So why, why, why did the creators of The Rings of Power have to go and spoil it all with such stupid and stereotyped accents? It’s tantamount to tipping sulphur into that lovely on-screen hot tub.
The harfoots (proto hobbits) are the worst. These are not the (mostly) friendly farming folk – trying to live under the radar while indulging in fine food, pipe smoking and good booze – that we know from Jackson’s films (and the books).
No, in this adaptation the harfoots are child-like migratory fairy folk who yomp around in rags when they’re not getting blackberry juice all over themselves. And they all speak with cod-Irish accents – even though none of the actors playing the main parts are actually Irish (and, no, I’m not either). But the accents they put on sound cliched to say the least.
“I bet this means the dwarves will be Scottish,” I said to myself, upon registering that. Ding ding ding ding ding! Because that’s the Scots, eh? They’re basically decent folk, but they’re a bit surly, and they’re hella thrifty. Please. Suddenly we’ve jumped back to the social attitudes of the English toffs who ran the BBC in the 1950s.
The hard-scrabble, working class humans who once dallied with defeated big bad Morgoth in the Southlands? They’re northerners. Of course they are. Beware of going north of the Watford Gap: here be dragons and other scary things! Just as in the, erm, south of Middle-earth.
Naturally, the elves, beautiful, and immortal and upstanding and moral and as uptight as a Tory delegation to Brussels, must talk proper. So it’s received pronunciation (RP) for them. Can’t have an Elrond with a glottal stop or a Welsh-sounding Galadriel.
Which is a real shame because it would have been rather refreshing to hear the luminous Morfydd Clark, who plays the closest thing the show has to a leading character, speak on screen as she does in real life. A Welsh accent might have added something to the character, too.
But alas – it’s RP for the men and women of Númenor, as well; perhaps unsurprising when you consider that in the Rings mythos, they were granted a fancy piece of island real estate within spitting distance of the elves’ paradise in the West. The Queen Regent must have her elocution lessons.
I suspect the show’s handling of accents might have something to do with the creators’ narrative choices. They chucked us into four or five different parts of Middle-earth at the outset, rather than grounding us in one and introducing the others more slowly (which is what Game of Thrones, the show to which this one will always be compared, successfully did).
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At this point, we probably ought to issue a calmative to all those right-wingers who have been losing the pointy bits from their elven ears while reading this. So, here’s your chill pill: I’m not calling for Rings to be cancelled. I’m really not. No boycott plea here. The awful accents aren’t show-killers.
It’s just that, having spent $1bn of Jeff Bezos’s money on creating a global cultural event like this – something that has the potential to touch TV perfection and has otherwise embraced diversity – it’s damnably frustrating that its creators felt the need to resort to silly linguistic cliches that ought to have been shuffled off this mortal coil a long time ago.
We get it. We’re with the harfoots on screen now. They’re vertically challenged, like I am. They’re trying to stay hidden. But we don’t need the cod-Irish accents to ground us in their world. This is fantasy.
So tell you what: how about you slowly dial the accents down and then jettison them in favour of something more sensible, so we can enjoy the Friday hot tub in peace without all that icky sulphur getting up our noses?
