When
parents tell stories to their children, we get an image of fantasy
creatures that's all our own. Later we become more attuned to the pop
culture depictions of them, like the
elves from
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the
dwarves (or dwarfs) from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But in 2016, mentions of these characters are most likely to make us think of
Lord of the Rings. The movie version, where hobbits, orcs, elves, dwarves, and men all have their distinctive accents.
Throughout
The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the reams of related
histories Tolkien wrote about Middle Earth, he established whole
societies, histories, and languages for a handful of races that still
inform how they are depicted today. Elves are ancient, beautiful, and
have pointy ears; dwarves are short, tough, and love to use axes; orcs
are filthy brutes who live for destruction.
Of course the
original readers couldn’t hear what Tolkien’s creatures sounded like,
but the intense focus he placed on developing their languages gave
people a pretty good idea. “Tolkien was a philologist,” says Olsen.“This
is what he did. He studied language and the history of language and the
changing of language over time.”
Tolkien would create languages
first, then write cultures and histories to speak them, often taking
inspiration from the sound of an existing language. In the case of the
ever-present Elvish languages in his works, Tolkien took inspiration
from Finnish and Welsh. As the race of men and hobbits got their
language from the elves in Tolkien’s universe, their language was
portrayed as similarly Euro-centric in flavor.
Tolkien
was only partially responsible for the accents of his creations. He did
establish that they sounded different from each other, but what those
languages sound like changed over time as various interpreters added
their own ideas. Did you know that Tolkien imagined dwarves sounding
like Israelis? Read about
the evolution of fantasy characters and how they speak at Atlas Obscura.
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