3/26/2017 Why 

do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty? | Atlas Obscura

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Why do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves
Sound Like Royalty?
Blame Tolkien and time.
By Eric Grundhauser D E C E M B E R 0 7, 2 0 1 6

In the game Hearthstone, when the dwarven Innkeeper greets players with a hearty, “WELCOME
to the Inn!” he sounds like he’s channeling some cartoonish ideal of the Scottish accent. And he’s
not alone. Standard fantasy dwarves speak with a Scottish or generally Northern European
brogue, but how can that be true when such a race never really existed? The same can be said for
the lofty English tone of the elves, or the working-class Cockney of many orcs and trolls.

While slight variations on these themes exist, fantasy races seem to have as much of a
stereotypical sound as any real-world dialect. And they tell us more about the characters than you
probably realize.

Long before elves, orcs, and dwarves populated the pages of Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks,
Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth film adaptations, and video games like World of Warcraft, they
developed out of mythology, fan imagination, and more than anywhere else, the works of J.R.R.
Tolkien. And even though his works were purely textual, the ways that common fantasy races
sound today have their roots in his vivid fantasy world.

The most commonly occurring pop fantasy races—elves, dwarves, trolls/orcs, even humans—
have their roots in European mythology. From the dwarves and elves of Nordic poetry to
Scandinavia’s trolls, the basic shape and cultural texture of many of these beings can be linked
directly to ancient folklore. But it wasn’t until Tolkien’s works, which were heavily inspired by
such myths, that the tropes we are familiar with today really fell into place.

“Elves wouldn’t even really be a thing, at least not in the way they currently are, if it weren’t for
Tolkien,” says Corey Olsen, noted Tolkien scholar and creator of The Tolkien Professor podcast.
“Dwarves are another thing. A lot of the things that we associate with dwarves, we owe a lot of
that to Tolkien.”

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
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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.

For the dwarves, who were meant to have evolved from an entirely separate lineage, he took
inspiration from Semitic languages for their speech, resulting in dwarven place names like
Khazad-dûm and Moria.

“When dwarves actually talk, they don’t sound Scottish at all,” says Olsen. “They sound like
Arabic or Hebrew.” Tolkien’s choice here was originally based solely on how different Semitic
languages sounded, although later he would admit to accidental similarities between dwarves and
Jewish people.

However, the dwarves of the Lord of the Rings movies don’t speak with an Israeli accent, and the
elves of Warcraft don’t have a Finnish inflection. This comes down to the differences between
how Tolkien portrayed his fantasy races and how he imagined they should talk, and the readers’
interpretation. 

As radio and film adaptations of Tolkien’s works were released in later decades, you can see the
slow evolution of the dwarven accent from the low British of 1977’s cartoon version of The Hobbit,
to the more stylized accents of the pair of dwarves in 1985’s Legend, to the Welsh-by-way-of-
Scotland grumblings of John Rhys Davies’ Gimli from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, right
into the aggressive rolled R’s of Hearthstone’s dwarven Innkeeper.

“What you get is a sense of Celticness,” says Dominic Watt, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Speech
Science at the University of York. Watt explains that many of the virtues associated with the
stereotypical fantasy dwarf are also associated with the Scottish accent. “Scottish accents tend to
be evaluated pretty positively,” he says. “Shrewdness, honesty, straight-forward speaking. Those
are the sorts of ideas that the accent tends to evoke.” Watt also says that there are similar cultural
stereotypes surrounding the drinking habits of dwarves and Scots.  

Tolkien’s elves similarly took on their own identity, as lofty, immortal progenitors of Middle
Earth. They were ethereal, distant, and wise beyond their youthful looks—but above all, above it
all. Their voices would come to take on this lofty nature as well.

From the first Lord of the Rings radio plays, elves were depicted speaking in a high-born English
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From the first Lord of the Rings radio plays, elves were depicted speaking in a high-born English
accent, owing both to the general Englishness of Tolkien’s texts and to their place in Middle
Earth. This vocal portrayal has rarely strayed since.

“The impression I’m always given when I hear elves speak in the English accent you always hear
in movies, which again, is very much a Tolkien thing, is that first of all, they are more culturally
sophisticated,” says Olsen. Be it the High Elves of Skyrim, Tom Baker’s peaceful elf healer in the
Dungeons & Dragons movie, or Cate Blanchett’s ethereal Galadriel, the typical elves of today sound
like they were inspired by English royalty.

“If you want people to seem like they are the wisest and they surpass the races of men, and
they’re immortal, I can imagine that […] they are not going to give them West Country accents
like they give hobbits,” says Watt.

Maybe the fantasy accent that can be most directly tied to Tolkien’s text is the working-class
Cockney accent so often given to orcs and other sentient brutes in modern fantasy. Here we can
look directly at the depiction of the trio of trolls in The Hobbit, which are written in a strangely
modern dialect—a technique Tolkien rarely used, and later regretted. “In particular, he regretted
making their language so recognizably modern. They wouldn’t say words like ‘blimey,’ for
instance,” says Olsen.

In the later Lord of the Rings books, Tolkien’s orcs would speak in harsh, but basically correct
common parlance, but in the larger view of the fantasy genre, the damage was done. Echoes of
that Cockney speech can be found in a number of versions of fantasy bruisers, most notably in
the orcs of the Lord of the Rings films and the Warhammer universe.

There isn’t any one instance in which dwarves first sounded like dwarves or orcs first sounded
like orcs, and given the breadth and imagination of modern fantasy, it’s not inconceivable that
our accepted versions of fantasy dialect will come to change in the near future. For the time
being, the accents we take for granted in our fantasy stories are here to stay, still informed, like
almost all of the genre, by Tolkien’s influence. 
# FA N TA SY #VIDEO GAMES # L I T E R AT U R E #FILM

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