TheSword
Legend
As someone from the West Midlands and currently living there I can say that there aren’t any characters with a Black Country accent in TRoP. (Though Lenny Henry is from Dudley).Apparently, not very. I watched a few youtube videos purporting to be examples of West Midlands and/or Black Country accents, and it's not quite like I imagined. It actually reminded me a bit of recordings of Tolkien I've heard though.
These are two good examples of that accent which is really distinctive. Gran and the Bloody Baron. Both from the Witcher 3 game. You definitely know it when you hear it. You can also hear it in the Peaky Blinders series, which is set in and around Birmingham.
So Sean Austin in LOTR had a West Country accent common to SW england - particularly Cornwall. The quintessential farmers accent. Which I guess is easy to confuse with Black Country because of the name. In the first video with Gran, Little Jonny has a classic West Country accent.I had a copy of the Nicol Williamson reading of The Hobbit when I was growing up, and I've always imagined Bilbo and other hobbits using the same accent he uses for the character. It's similar to the one used by Sean Astin for Sam in the Peter Jackson movie (although I'm sure it was butchered pretty badly by him). It's not quite what I heard in those videos, though, as a West Midlands or Black Country accent. I read that Williamson spent a lot of time in Birmingham growing up, though, so it might not be that far off.
Nicol Williamson actually speaks pretty good RP Queens English without any accent at all when reading The Hobbit. Though he tends to use Yorkshire accents for dwarves… which I’m sure started a trend.
The Harfoots definitely have an Irish base with there own twang. That’s been corroborated by producers. To be honest I think they’re trying to evoke the British traveler community accent which also has a strong Irish twang and would make a lot of sense in the context. But maybe they’re downplaying that in interviews.
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