Posted: June 13, 1999 at 22:49:13: by Michael Martinez
: If a requirement for British accents is not in line with what
: Tolkien envisioned, a smattering of random accents isn't
: either. Arbitrarily assigning accents is just going to make
: this a bad movie. Mixing in a wooden American or German or
: Chinese or Indian or Albanian or Croation accent when trying to
: read some of the archaic English will just take away
: from the beauty of the English which Tolkien wrote. You're right that "a smattering of random accents" won't be faithful to Tolkien, either. We cannot accurately represent the accents of the speakers of his languages because we don't have any idea of how they would have sounded. Tolkien did compare genuine Northman to Germanic in some ways but not so as to identify them completely. Nonetheless, the use of multiple accents, lack of, or requirement for a specific accent isn't going to make or break the movie. Most people will probably be mildly interested in them. The recent controversy over accents in "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" hasn't damaged the movie's profitability in the least. Of course, the accents are not easily identifiable, and people cannot agree on what accents were used.
: The Lord of the Rings is much more than an escapist fantasy
: tale. It's a literary masterpiece of the English language. To
: alter the language would be a crime, I feel.
But "The Iliad" is a literary masterpiece of ancient Greek. We are being no more faithful to it's original version (or, the oldest version we have available) than Jackson will be to THE LORD OF THE RINGS. The same is true of, say, any English-language movie adapted from the Bible, which was written in Hebrew and Greek. And what about movies based on history where people speak in modern English. Should "Alfred the Great" have used dialog written only in Old English and Old Norse? It would have been more faithful to the real events, but it would equally have been unintelligible (and therefore unejoyable) to a majority of its intended audience. The enjoyability of the movie should outweigh its faithfulness to the original source. People have long appreciated "Gone With the Wind" but it still made some compromises with the book (and talk about horrible Southern accents -- the book was written by a Southern writer and the movie tried to be faithful to her romantic ideas, but the South just doesn't sound like that).
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