I always found those cockney Orcs in the film quite amusing myself. I know I ought not to but...they
were funny.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Brian Rosebury
(None of them, incidentally, is ‘working-class’, except in the minds of critics who - themselves, it seems, unconsciously equating ‘degraded language’ with ‘working-class’ language - have convinced themselves that the Orcs’ malign utterances betray Tolkien’s disdain for ‘mere working people’.)
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This is correct. I've read pieces by people who claim that the way the Orcs talk is down to Tolkien having class prejudice against people with regional accents. And I wonder if they've actually read the texts because of the glaringly obvious example of Sam with his own accent!
Tolkien might have spoken very 'far back' and been an academic but it does not mean he had any prejudice against accents. Far from it, he seems to have delighted in them, and one of his biggest influences was his tutor Joseph Wright, an expert in dialects. Here's a snippet about him if you haven't heard of him before, a truly fascinating figure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Wright_(linguist)