Blimey, if it don't look like mutton again tomorrer
December 10, 2016 7:54 PM   Subscribe

 
Elves are royalty.

Elves are terrific.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:00 PM on December 10, 2016 [20 favorites]


"The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad."
posted by Countess Elena at 8:09 PM on December 10, 2016 [22 favorites]


For serious though, I really am interested in how Tolkien's comfortable prejudices shaped an entire genre for readers who would be bored by the actual history and philology behind them. (I say that with all affection; I reread LOTR at least once a year.)
posted by Countess Elena at 8:14 PM on December 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


Elves are also the loyal servants of the Big Guy in the Red Suit (Santa, not Satan, although it is interesting that they went for the same color). Including the not-very-incognito spies sitting on shelves. And except for that one guy who wanted to be a dentist, and the other who wanted to be Will Ferrell. There's nothing in Santa's elves that seem like Royalty to me. They're just rather less "ethnic" oompa-loompas.
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:25 PM on December 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


Hmmm. I wonder... Is it the accent that makes Legolas so OP, then? Maybe it's the CGI.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 8:35 PM on December 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


Actually, the fucked up thing is that Orcs always sound like they're either from the region roughly between Middlesbrough and Newcastle, or from the east end of London.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:51 PM on December 10, 2016 [17 favorites]


I love this topic so much and have spent many a pub night with fellow linguists engrossed in conversations about language and stereotypes in fictional worlds. So I was super chuffed to see my former PhD supervisor Dom Watt quoted throughout!

One thing that I tend to ask people about — both in the UK and the US — is their perceptions of street performers' accents. Especially medieval or old-timey characterisations. I live in York, so ghost tours are A Thing. And being an American, I can't easily tell if the accents of the tour guides or other street performers are affected in some way. Which accent do they choose? Do they exaggerate it? Do locals hear their voices as performative? It's endlessly interesting to me, I think mainly because it's this characterisation of a make-believe world which relies on markers and stereotypes of the one we currently inhabit. When it's craftily done, it can be seemless in that we can know things about the culture that is being depicted without that being made explicit. It's a weird form of reappropriation that I've seen at times being clever and effective, but at other times inappropriate and hateful. Without some care and artistry, it's easy to get it really wrong.

Going back to Tolkien, I once heard a fascinating talk at a linguistics conference several years back about the internal consistency of the LoTR language worlds. One aspect of this focused on how the letters (and their related sounds), names, and languages across the various lands were believable because they were well-developed and true to their grammatical rules, histories and sound systems. For example, Bilbo Baggins, with it's b's and double g's was clearly a Hobbiton name, with sound symbolism hinting at friendliness, diminuitives, simpleness. Conversely, the Elven languages (and Elvish names), with their long vowels, copious use of liquids (r's, l's, etc.) and other continuant sounds, reinforce a fluidity, litheness, etherealness of the elves. Then you have, say, Aragorn, who goes by several names, each relative to the history and relationship he's had with various people across the lands but none of them 'out of character' or anachronistic.

Anyways, I'll never be able to explain that internal consistency idea as accurately or even 1/100th as clearly as the person who gave that amazing talk, but it sparked this whole fascinating and wonder that I've carried with me for many years now. Especially where cultural references skating the thin line into stereotype territory are concerned. Elder Scrolls and WoW come to mind (and not in a great way, although sometimes it works too).
posted by iamkimiam at 8:54 PM on December 10, 2016 [48 favorites]


My favorite accent in the Fellowship of the Ring film is bartender in Bree who accidentally slips into a Texan accent. "He's one of them rangers..."
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 9:02 PM on December 10, 2016 [17 favorites]


Elves are also the loyal servants of the Big Guy in the Red Suit

I think this is where the "f" vs. "v" distinction (which Tolkien discussed), in the plural of elf, comes in handy. Elfs are short, wear little green suits, and sing-song in teeny voices while making toys all day. Elves are an ancient race, immortal & beautiful, who sing in lush harmonies, and who never make toys since they're busy writing epic poems about some very ancient jewelry. Or fighting dark lords of eternal darkness. Whichever comes first.

What I'd love to see is Saint Nicolas (the one of legend: the pimp-buster and accomplished homicide detective) teaming up with some elves who haven't made the trip to Valinor yet. Throw in some talking reindeer who wandered into this world from Narnia via someone's old wardrobe. Together, they somehow decide to build a fortress in the wild frozen wastes of the north, and use it as a base to deliver toys.
posted by honestcoyote at 9:15 PM on December 10, 2016 [20 favorites]


Probably wouldn't happen, since the wild frozen wastes of the north were where Morgoth built Angband beneath Thangorodrim, and the elves are still pretty unhappy about all that.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:20 PM on December 10, 2016 [12 favorites]


Dwarves = Sid James
Elves = Kenneth Williams
Orcs = Hattie Jacques

#carryonaccents
posted by fallingbadgers at 10:38 PM on December 10, 2016 [12 favorites]


I appreciate the discernment made in the article between what Tolkien imagined his characters sounded like and the lazy portrayal of them in film. I mean, it seems pretty universal (unfortunately) for a British low ball 'bad guy' to be portrayed with Cockney or Liverpool, etc. accent, while royalty in Rome or anywhere else mysteriously ends up speaking like Queen Elizabeth, regardless of their country of origin. Kind of like how actors Shakespeare plays speak like they are hanging out in Westminster during their spare time, though the plays and sonnets were written with an accent that has little to do with that, and some of the rhymes (and puns) don't work at all with that accent. It just caters to people's subconscious prejudices, frustratingly so. I do love.Peter Jackson's LOTR, but it always bothered me how, when otherwise he paid so much attention to the details in the LOTR world, he was lazy with the accents and aligned them in such a predictable way.
posted by branravenraven at 11:22 PM on December 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


It just caters to people's subconscious prejudices, frustratingly so.

A lot of that is just built in to these kinds of fantasy worlds with all their races and their inborn characteristics affecting everything from innate abilities to attitudes and desires, even though they are all capable of cross breeding with other races, are intelligent and interact with a complex set of differing races and values. It does carry an analogic value set to and from the real world, one more of xenophobic non-integration unfortunately, due to the strong tendency to show all or almost all of a race being nearly identical. It's also something that carried over into popular science fiction with their narrowly defined races and cultures. It isn't a great thing, though that isn't a knock of Tolkein's care with language, something that does carry at least geographic differences. It's just not all that easy to separate out those reasonable things from the less reasonable in how fantasy and sci-fi often deals with the subjects.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:47 PM on December 10, 2016 [6 favorites]


Early Tolkien did some imitations, followings, of William Morris' poems and novels; and Morris' work has linguistic patterns but they aren't the ones "extruded fantasy product" has settled into. Perhaps movie fantasy/Tolkien is reusing sociolinguistics that adventure stories got from Kipling; dwarves are engineers and doughty fighters, but the gracile horse-riders are in charge. (What happened to Kipling's Irish? They're off with all the women, I guess.)

William Morris' novels, of which I liked best The Well at the World's End and The Sundering Flood. The Pilgrims of Hope and Chants for Socialists might be timely (Warning! poetry.)
posted by clew at 11:55 PM on December 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yeah, I think this is part of why I never dug Tolkien. He transmutes and calcifies the English class system into the unalterable characteristics of a species. A Hobbit could never rule Middle Earth, it's just not in their nature. Fated to be cheerful little bumpkins whose wholesome naïveté provides endless nostalgic amusement for their betters. Give me the cosmopolitan, acid and urbane any day.

(Has anyone ever done a fan fiction mashup of Hobbits and Evelyn Waugh? Bright young hobbitses....)
posted by Diablevert at 2:09 AM on December 11, 2016 [5 favorites]


Actually, the fucked up thing is that Orcs always sound like they're either from the region roughly between Middlesbrough and Newcastle, or from the east end of London.

The trolls in The Hobbit have Cockney accents. I don't think this relationship between bad subhuman guys and working class accents from factory workers is totally unrelated to Tolkien's regular beef against the industrial revolution.

(Peninsular Spanish translation conventions usually obliterate accents and many eyelects, and English language movies and series are usually dubbed into standard Castillian so for the most part our Ancient Romans talk like our Wild West gunslingers)
posted by sukeban at 2:20 AM on December 11, 2016 [3 favorites]


Santa, not Satan, although it is interesting that they went for the same color

Not to mention the same set of letters.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:53 AM on December 11, 2016


Tolkien's dwarves wouldn't have an Israeli accent just because their language is derived from Arabic and Hebrew. LOTR was written between 1937 and 1949, and Israel was founded in 1948.

On the other hand, the project of reviving Hebrew began in the late 19th century, but which accent would Tolkien have heard, if any? I have no idea. I don't have any idea what sort of Arabic Tolkien might have heard, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:01 AM on December 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Israeli accent is derived from the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew, which has been in daily use at synagogues for a millennia. However, if Tolkien heard Hebrew, he was more likely to heard the Ashkenazi pronunciation of European Jews. I can definitely imagine dwarves talking like that.
posted by maxsparber at 6:26 AM on December 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


A Hobbit could never rule Middle Earth, it's just not in their nature. Fated to be cheerful little bumpkins whose wholesome naïveté provides endless nostalgic amusement for their betters

(Sam as gardener king would have been the best timeline.)

I think I get what you're saying, but the books seem to clearly say there's something worthy of respect under all that bumpkinism, and their "betters" underestimate hobbits at their own fucking peril. The truest wise man and the truest king both respect that part of the Shire. The false wizards and kings, the evil ones, are the ones who look down on hobbits in ways like how you describe. They think the Shire is just any other place that would never generate a hero, or is reducible to an export or an amusing song.

Perhaps a hobbit never could rule Middle Earth, which is why they're the heroes of a big story about how no one should—not even your magical faves. Aragorn might be worthy, but the world has to be diminished/reborn in the process.
posted by fleacircus at 7:09 AM on December 11, 2016 [14 favorites]


I don't find this argument about Tolkien and Dwarf Scottish very convincing. The usual attribution for Dwarf Scottish is Poul Anderson's 1961 novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, based on a 1953 novella. He wrote his dwarf dialog in a Scottish accent.
posted by Nelson at 8:03 AM on December 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


Because Scots and Northerners can still safely be othered without threat of legal action. You need to fix that.
posted by scruss at 8:23 AM on December 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


More on the Semitic connection: Are Tolkein's Dwarves an Allegory for the Jews?
posted by Mchelly at 8:46 AM on December 11, 2016


Yeah, I'm with Diablevert. I guess I fit the headmap of what people think a LOTR fan is so precisely that I've had people at work come up to me speaking in like Orcish or something in some gigs.

And lord knows I've tried, and tried, and tried again. I'll take my hat off for the guy giving it 100 % on linguistic depth and mythosmaking. But it's so very much 'This is precisely what an effete English professor thought about other races Ca. 1930' that it becomes unreadable/unwatchable/unplayable for me' without massive quantities of nearby salt. Same thing as HP Lovecraft.

It's completely unfair to judge a man by the standards of today, and I fully acknowledge the fault is within me, etc. But it has been utterly creepy to see LOTR become a full-fledged US phenomenon when one of it's embedded premises about class is 'Other demihuman races are either aetherial and gifted or subhuman beasts.' That's your spectrum.
posted by mrdaneri at 8:56 AM on December 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
posted by SPrintF at 9:49 AM on December 11, 2016 [18 favorites]


Tolkien may have been an English professor but given his military service I don't think effete is an accurate description.
posted by Ber at 12:14 PM on December 11, 2016 [3 favorites]


> "... if Tolkien heard Hebrew, he was more likely to heard the Ashkenazi pronunciation of European Jews. I can definitely imagine dwarves talking like that."

"I am Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror King under the Mountain!"
"All right. Don't mention your mother. It's fine."
"Oh, hi Ma. Um. Listen, I'm sorry --"
"No, no, don't be sorry. What's to be sorry about? You go ahead and make your speech."
"All right --"
"It's just, I thought maybe you were going to say something and forgot. About your mother."
"I'll put something in --"
"No, no. There's no need. After all, I bore you for ten long months and then gave birth to you after a hundred and thirty seven hours of labor. On a rock. As is the dwarven way. After that? Being ignored and forgotten is nothing."
"... Oy."
posted by kyrademon at 12:48 PM on December 11, 2016 [16 favorites]


Then there's the Lion King...
posted by gottabefunky at 12:59 PM on December 11, 2016


All of which reminds me somewhat of William Shatner's odd relationship with Esperanto pronunciation. He was the lead in a most peculiar art-house horror flick called Incubus, made just before he enKirkified, and which was shot entirely in that language for reasons I've never even slightly understood.

Anyway, Shatner had absolutely no idea about what Esperanto sounded like and nobody could be bothered to find out, so chose to play it in what was apparently a rather nasal Quebecois accent. At the premiere, this annoyed the hell out of the Esperantists who watched it (and led to the legend of the film being cursed by an Esperantist hippy).

However, as most Esperanto fans of the time rarely heard the language spoken - back then you learned by correspondence courses and from books - but a lot of them were very keen to see the movie, Shatner's pronunciation actually caught on.

Or so I understand. It can be very hard to untangle myth from reality where Shatner is involved, let alone in virulently obscure horror from the mid-60s.
posted by Devonian at 3:28 PM on December 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


mrdaneri: " But it has been utterly creepy to see LOTR become a full-fledged US phenomenon when one of it's embedded premises about class is 'Other demihuman races are either aetherial and gifted or subhuman beasts.'"

Worth noting that Middle-earth became a US phenomenon in the 60s ("Frodo Lives!", etc.), it's not anything very new.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:42 PM on December 11, 2016


I began plying questions as soon as I knew that I was talking to a man who had been at Oxford as a classmate of Ronald Tolkien's. He was a history teacher, Allen Barnett. He had never read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, he was astonished and pleased to know that his friend of so many years ago had made a name for himself as a writer.

"Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that."

And out the window I could see tobacco barns. The charming anachronism of the hobbits' pipes suddenly made sense in a new way....

Practically all the names of Tolkien’s hobbits are listed in my Lexington phone book, and those that aren’t can be found over in Shelbyville. Like as not, they grow and cure pipe-weed for a living. Talk with them, and their turns of phrase are pure hobbit: "I hear tell," "right agin," "so Mr. Frodo is his first and second cousin, once removed either way," "this very month as is." These are English locutions, of course, but ones that are heard oftener now in Kentucky than in England.

I despaired of trying to tell Barnett what his talk of Kentucky folk became in Tolkien’s imagination. I urged him to read The Lord of the Rings but as our paths have never crossed again, I don’t know that he did. Nor if he knew that he created by an Oxford fire and in walks along the Cherwell and Isis the Bagginses, Boffins, Tooks, Brandybucks, Grubbs, Burrowses, Goodbodies, and Proudfoots (or Proudfeet, as a branch of the family will have it) who were, we are told, the special study of Gandalf the Grey, the only wizard who was interested in their bashful and countrified ways.

Guy Davenport, "Hobbitry"
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:49 AM on December 12, 2016 [12 favorites]


And being an American, I can't easily tell if the accents of the tour guides or other street performers are affected in some way. Which accent do they choose? Do they exaggerate it? Do locals hear their voices as performative?

I used to live in York and work and drink near where the ghost tours started, and from what I can tell the performers mostly use something based on their own accents, but amped up a little to be clearer, more theatrical and dramatic. They're definitely performative, and often seem to be tilting towards the sort of accents you'd hear in Hammer Horror films, a sort of ahistorical old-timiness not totally different from Frodo's voice in the Lord of The Rings films.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 4:45 PM on December 12, 2016 [1 favorite]


One point I'm not seeing here on dwarves specifically: they're clannish (in many derivative works, if not exactly in Tolkien) and they live in the mountains. While there are clearly many cultures that could fit that, Scottish is *right there* for Anglo-Americans, which reinforces the hard-drinking, hard-fighting, greedy-or-at-least-painfully-frugal associations.
posted by Four Ds at 8:38 AM on December 13, 2016


Interesting discussion. I've noted before how common it is for fantasy and sci-fi authors in general to lean heavily on signifiers of real-world cultures as shorthand to flesh out their imagined ones. So you get the Nordic-but-not-really culture, the Mongolian-but-not-really culture, the Roman-but-not-really culture...

It's such an effective device that it's, apparently, all but impossible to resist. And it's also, of course, hella tricky (perhaps impossible) to do without becoming problematic. Especially in fantasy - a genre which relies so heavily on heroes and villains, good and evil as absolute cosmic forces, etc. - it is very easy for those *-but-not-really cultures to tip over from mere flavor and window dressing to essentializing, even if unintended.

This can be mitigated by portraying the members of each culture as diverse in temperament, opinion, occupation, intellect, etc. - not a monolith defined by their ethnicity. And writers should be doing that anyway, merely for the sake of good storytelling.

But, how often does that happen? Half of the point of fantasy races, it seems, is to serve as shorthand for a stock set of character traits. You see a dwarf; you know he's gonna be dour and skeptical of ivory-tower intellectualism. You see a Khajiit; you know she's a semi-shady merchant eager to smooth-talk you into parting with a few coins. Even when this is subverted (say, with an erudite, well-spoken orc), the subversion still relies on the stereotype to work. Many works, including Tolkien and most games, just straight-up tell you, directly and plainly, "this race has these character traits".

Even if you somehow manage to avoid associating your stereotypically defined fantasy culture with a real-world culture, this still encourages an essentialist way of thinking about ethnicity.

Anyway, them's just some words I wrote while pooping.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:37 AM on December 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


I once took a university course on Tolkien taught by a man from Birmingham. He briefly touched on Tolkien's upbringing in Birmingham. In my teacher's opinion, all bad guys in Tolkien books talked in a Brummie accent because that was the worst accent. Furthermore, all description of hellish landscapes were actually description of Birmingham and its environs because it was the most blighted spot in the British Isles. Oddly, the professor was otherwise bouncy and cheerful but this cloud came over him when speaking of Birmingham. Since then I've always heard Orcs in my head something like this.
posted by Kattullus at 3:13 PM on December 14, 2016


very easy for those *-but-not-really cultures to tip over from mere flavor and window dressing to essentializing, even if unintended

I don't see why sentients with different development and constraints than Homo sap. wouldn't have essential differences. It takes more worldbuilding, presumably with some anthropology and philosophy and biology and game theory, so it's not surprising that it isn't done often, and doing it without arid expository plains is rarer yet.

For a short funny example, I recommend A Brother's Price; and all the characters in it are Homo sap. sap. like us. (There's a solid current-science explanation, I suspect, but have never seen anything by the author confirming it.)
posted by clew at 4:07 PM on December 14, 2016


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