I was thinking about Tolkien and accents today, and I really like this idea that even within the Fellowship, you’ve got this happy cacophony of different accents. Boromir speaking Sindarin with a distinctly Gondorian lilt, his Westron a functional thing cobbled-together from the slang of his men and what he learned in order to speak with traders, messengers, foreigners.
Aragorn, so widely-traveled, being an excellent mimic—he can speak Dalish like a man of Laketown or a Haradrim like trader from South Gondor, but in moments of sincerity or seriousness, he slips into the tones of Rivendell, with all the careful articulation of someone who was scoffed at for every slip into the harsher pronunciation of Arnor.
Legolas who speaks Sindarin as his mother-tongue cool and green and fine, but whose Westron is harshly-accented, borrowed from fishermen and dwarves.
Gimli who speaks Khuzdul with that particular Longbeard cadence, which not even growing up in the Iron Hills as part of the Erebor diaspora could shake from him. Exile from Erebor forced many of the dwarves to become, if not fluent, then at least conversant in the languages of Men, in order to trade and travel on soil not their own—Gimli is no exception. (It amuses him to no end to speak to Aragorn in Dalish, and have Legolas puff up, offended not to be part of the conversation.)
Merry and Frodo and Pippin and Sam speaking Westron like the country bumpkins they are, all rounded vowels and drawls, but happy to learn all the languages that fly about them, laughing with their fellows when they mangle even the simplest of Sindarin words.
All of them sitting around the fire, telling stories, laughing at Gandalf when he can’t remember the Westron word for the Sindarin word for the Quendian word for the Valarin, who protests that he is an old man and has known too many tongues, so stop laughing, Peregrin Took, you are spraying crumbs everywhere.
#oh noooo I’m gonna cry this is perfect #but Aragorn oh my god oh my //god//
#because imagine little tiny Estel in Rivendell trying to learn Elvish #and Elrond is so patient with him and doesn’t chide him for his accent #but the other elves are sometimes less kind #teasing the young human for sound so much like a man when he speaks! #we don’t need to hear your heavy footsteps to tell you’re mortal Estel we can hear it in your words! #so Aragorn trains himself to talk exactly like them #memorizes how their cadences change on certain words or how they string their words together #like one long line in a song or poem that doesn’t break until the end of the sentence #and eventually he loses whatever his original accent was #because it is so engrained in him to mimic others that that’s what he falls back on no matter what #he doesn’t know how to speak unless he sounds like a native speaker and that saves his life on more than one occasion #but he eventually finds that he’s spent so long perfecting the voices of others #that he’s almost entirely lost his own (willowenigma)
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
