Rings of Power’s deployment of Oirishness
So I watched the first four episodes of Amazon’s Rings of Power.
I do not think this is a good show and the culture war racist nonsense has lifted it up in a sense - the rush to defend the actors being attacked because they're not the colour of a slice of ham has generated a lot of good will.
And publicity for an Amazon product (that unbelievably has a storyline about Numenorean unions keeping a good man down!).
Ed Power wrote a great piece on how the show deploys blarney and Paddywhackery with the legally distinct Hobbit characters https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio/2022/08/31/rings-of-power-the-new-hobbits-are-filthy-hungry-simpletons-with-stage-irish-accents-thats-1bn-well-spent/
I still wasn't prepared for the Australian cast essaying accents that traced a line down the east coast of my homeland with each sentence spoken. Lenny Henry too, I thought he'd know better given his alternative comedy era in the 80s.
The 'harfoots' are very difficult for me to watch. It's that same twee crap that's been used from Darby O'Gill and the Little People to Wild Mountain Thyme and Pixie most recently (which has Alec Baldwin doing his Irish accent bit from 30 Rock, but for real).
It's a trope that reinforces the idea of the indigenous conquered people with being 'closer to nature' (deployed most destructively in America and Australia) as compensation for colonisation. It's crap, it's always been crap, and we deserve better.
Tolkien was probably what I'd call 'an Anglo-Saxon nationalist', in that he was not simply 'a man of his time' with all that entails with the English - he went out of his way to create, and he felt restore, English mythology. That's the Lord of the Rings, a corpus of language and myth. The Hobbits I guess are his vision of what is most admirable in the English, a humble love of the land and simple pleasures.
There are also heroic warrior kings descended from angelic beings (Elves/Aragorn), so don't worry - the world conquering empire is catered to as well.
Portraying the Ur-hobbits as Irish is senseless, with the actors doing bad accents that can be traced back to a racist theatrical tradition, and somehow manages to miss whatever point Tolkien was trying to make with his invented English 'legendarium' that centres simple moral goodness as national traits.
I’m currently re-reading The Two Towers and I am enjoying it. Tolkien’s interests and biases are embedded in the text, a fascinating grist to the feeling it produces in the reader.
I agree that any adaptation should reflect the time it is produced in - and indeed Tolkien’s work itself did the same, with all that entails.
Cast ethnically diverse actors, absolutely - the strangest fantasy in Fantasy fiction is how white it is! It’s the product of history written by the victors designed to exclude the experiences of peoples who were colonised or vilified by empire.
If you really want Irish accents, cast Irish performers - of every ethnicity once again (we’re a small island, but we’re not Little England).
And don’t even get me started on the depiction of unions on Rings of Power, jaysis!
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