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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38240 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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My attention has been brought to this article by the Irish Times, about how "Rings of Power: The new hobbits are filthy, hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents. That’s $1bn well spent".

It points out that the fake-Irish Harfoots align fairly well with the kind of 19th century British caricatures of the Irish:

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video, streaming from Friday, September 2nd) takes place centuries before the original Lord of the Rings, and the harfoots are ancestors of the hobbits. If they don’t quite keep livestock in the livingroom, they are otherwise a laundry list of 19th-century Hibernophobic caricatures.

The accents embark on a wild journey from Donegal to Kerry and then stop off in inner-city Dublin. The harfoots themselves are twee and guileless and say things like: “Put yer backs into it, lads.” One is portrayed by Lenny Henry, a great comedian and actor who deserves better than having to deliver lines such as “De both of ye, dis does not bode will” (in an appalling Irish accent). Scouring the internet, there is no evidence of any Irish actors having been involved.

Why do these primitive itinerant hobbits sound like something from the dodgy-Irish-builders episode of Fawlty Towers? According to the show’s Australian dialect coach, the accents are intended to be “familiar but different” – and the harfoots are meant to have an “Irish base to their accent”, but they do not speak as though they’ve walked out of a “particular cross street in Dublin”.

The portrayal of “Irish” characters as pre-industrial and childlike – simpletons, really – threads neatly into the Anglosphere’s rich tapestry of disdain for Celtic peoples. It brings us all the way back to the 70s – the 1870s. There’s an early scene in which we see the harfoots, wearing filthy rags, scrabble in the ground for food. What is this, Famine cosplay?

The best sting in the tail is this conclusion:

Still, if you desperately want to return to Middle-earth, then, yes, the showrunners have done a fantastic job combining the grandeur of Tolkien with the grit of Game of Thrones. If anything, it feels more like vintage Thrones than the new Westeros prequel, House of the Dragon, as we cut between multiple characters across Middle-earth – each alerted, in varying ways, to the return of the villainous Sauron.

They also managed to score an interview with Payne and McKay, the showrunners, about "Why are the harfoots hungry simpletons with stage-Irish accents? We ask the showrunners" but it's behind a paywall, so I'll excerpt some plums where our heroes manage to offend a hefty chunk of the entire British Isles because yes, they are that dumb, no they didn't do it on purpose, which makes it even funnier.

First, they pull the classic 'plastic paddy' defence: sure and begorrah, didn't my own family come from the Ould Country?

“My gosh — I hope not,” says McKay. “My family is from Ireland. I’ve been there many times. My wife has family from Donegal. I feel such strong roots there. And love it there so much. Part of the joy of imagining this world was trying to come up with regional accents across the different worlds.

Next, why the walking, talking stereotypes of the Scottish Jock type are not really Scottish, even though we made them sound Scottish and gave them red hair and a love of drinking, fighting, and money:

“We adopted a version of the Scottish burr for the dwarfs. That’s certainly not intended to reference Scottish people. It is literally just trying to take a particular dialect and hopefully do our Middle-earth spin on it."

Having the not unreasonable question of "if you describe stereotypes, isn't that a problem?" put to them, they manage to keep digging that hole even deeper as they characterise what their version of Manchester is like:

But if you give the harfoots stage-Irish accents and portray them as filthy and dressed in rags — particularly if you then give officer-class English accents to the series’ noble elves — what else can it be but stereotyping?

“That’s really not where we’re coming from,” says Payne. “There is another world, the Southlands, where we’re doing a version of a northern-England accent, like Manchester. The way they live — in medieval huts in some cases, with mud and grime and chickens in the yard — is in no way meant to reference real people, certainly not the folks in Manchester. The same with the harfoots and a travelling community. We were inspired by Tolkien’s imagination and are not in any way attempting to capture the Irish people.”

Clearly they are unaware of the - shall we say - more problematic elements of talking about a travelling community in connection with barefoot, dirty, stage-Irish types. Maybe it's because I'm not on the same level of intellect as our two stars here, but I don't quite get what the subtle difference is between "So we're basing it on Manchester but it's not meant to be Manchester but our reference point was Manchester".

In conclusion, the reporter comes down on the side of "Watch House of the Dragon instead":

For an Irish person, particularly an Irish Tolkien fan, watching The Rings of Power can be like riding a very wonky roller coaster. You want to applaud the casting and luxuriate in the thrill of returning to Middle-earth. But then along come the harfoots, like escapees from Darby O’Gill and the Little People or that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation featuring “Irish”-like aliens, and suddenly everything is flipped and we’re dangling upside down, the object of the joke. Are we to grin and bear it? Or perhaps just watch House of the Dragon instead? Forget about the whereabouts of the Dark Lord Sauron or the forging of the One Ring. This is the conundrum that Irish Tolkien devotees must wrestle with in the weeks ahead.

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