| The harfoots’ accents in The Rings of Power aren’t just deeply inappropriate – they’re awful. But Amazon’s drama isn’t the first fantasy show to struggle with dialect … ‘What is this, famine cosplay?” asked Ed Power in the Irish Times after glimpsing the harfoots wandering around Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. In the weeks since then, he has been far from the only person to object to these “simpleton proto-hobbits”, who, Power wrote, were “rosy of cheek, slathered in muck, wearing twigs in their hair and speaking in stage-Irish accents that make the cast of Wild Mountain Thyme sound like Daniel Day-Lewis”. Indeed, Amazon’s multimillion-dollar series has upset just about everybody since it debuted on the streaming platform. You have the Tolkien scholars who say it’s not Tolkien; the anti-Amazon folk who object to the company as a whole and the vast money spent on the series; and those who see the harfoots’ accents as, at worst, clumsy, tone-deaf cultural appropriation and a reinforcement of negative stereotypes. Far less legitimately and more malevolently, you have the uproar about actors of colour being cast in the series. But, considering Amazon’s commitment to that welcome diversification of Middle-earth, the fact that no one in production stopped to consider that Irish people might be upset by the harfoots is especially baffling. Continue reading... |
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