Everybody thinks they have a clear idea of what fantasy creatures sound like. To hear a dwarf speak with anything other than a thick Scottish brogue, or an elf deviating even a little from the Queen’s English, would feel as incorrect as an American ordering fish and chips.

The problem with these well-entrenched conventions, however, is that they’re actually recent inventions. J. R. R. Tolkien, for instance, imagined dwarves speaking a semetic-style language like Arabic or Hebrew, not Scottish.

But probably the weirdest accent evolution in fantasy has come from the orcs. Nowadays, if you see an orc on screen, they’re almost certain to speak with a thick cockney accent, an accent traditionally associated with the London working class. But how did we come to universally accept that all orcs sound like Michael Caine?

Cockney in Tolkien’s Books

Let me start by dispelling a widespread myth. Tolkien did not intend for orcs in his novels to be read as in any way cockney. In his book Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, Brian Rosebury demonstrates that orc speech was not meant to be based on any specific accent or group of people.

“With the Orcs, whose speech is intended to suggest a closed militaristic culture of hatred and cruelty, Tolkien draws on a number of models. There are at least three different dialogue-types for Orcs, corresponding to differences of rank and of tribe. (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’.)”

The three models, incidentally, are the melodramatic monologuing of orc leaders such as Grishnákh: (“My dear tender little fools … everything you have, and everything you know, will be got out of you in due time: everything!”) the martial chants of the Uruk-Hai: (“We are the fighting Uruk-Hai!”) and the broken and brutal speech of squabbling orcs (“‘I’m not going down those stairs again’, growled Snaga, ‘be you captain or no. Nar! Keep your hands off your knife, or I’ll put an arrow in your guts.’”).

The only time Tolkien employs a cockney accent is for three trolls, Tom, Bert and William, in The Hobbit. However, Tolkien seems to have quickly turned against the idea of cockney in Middle Earth because the accent is never used again, by trolls or otherwise.

Tolkien may have been an English gentleman to the core, but he certainly did not view the orcs as a metaphor for the working classes. The Tolkien character with the most obvious working-class dialect is actually Sam Gamgee, who alone among the main characters comes from a non-aristocratic background (the class difference between Frodo and Sam is less obvious in the movies). 

The Accents of Tolkien Adaptations

For decades after The Lord of the Rings‘ publication in the 1950s, readers largely stuck to Tolkien’s ideas about accents. With Tolkien’s blessing, the hobbits were given a light country accent in a 1955 BBC radio adaptation, but the orc accents remained neutral.

The 1980 animated Return of the King film also avoided cockney orcs (in fact they sound rather American), as did the 1981 BBC radio drama.

The 1980s Shift

That brings us to the 1980s, the most important decade in our story.

First, we need to go on a bit of a tangent. In the 80s, a small group of English game designers working for a company called Games Workshop started riffing off of Tolkien’s works for their own fantasy war games. In 1983, they developed Warhammer Fantasy Battles, a tabletop game where players controlled armies of orcs, elves, and other fantasy creatures. Four years later, the team created Warhammer 40,000, a spinoff set in the far future, where orks (space orcs) battled eldar (space elves) along with space marines, inquisitors, and other assorted factions.

In its early years, Warhammer 40,000 (also known as Warhammer 40k) didn’t take itself too seriously. The designers intended for the game to be a over-the-top parody of British society, with the game’s space dwarfs taking their aesthetics from punk biker gangs, or the Imperium of Man (the game’s human faction) parodying the British civil service with its mountains of unread paperwork and indifference to human life.

The orks, for their part, were based on contemporary “football hooligan” culture. In the 1980s, soccer fans in the UK and elsewhere in Europe became infamous for causing mass violence, rioting, burning, and looting around big games. The British saw the cockney accent as inextricably linked to the hooligans. For instance, the popular term for hooligan-inflicted violence was bovver, the cockney pronunciation of bother. 

The net result was that almost from their introduction, the game designers of Warhammer 40k gave the orks a cartoonishly thick cockney accent. When the first complete ork rulebook (entitled ‘Ere We Go) came out in 1991, the book was chock-full of cockney slang, like this exchange where an ork doctor argues with a patient about his new artificial leg.

“No de luxe booster legs left. Da bionik hand’s da latest model, bootiful workmanship innit?’

‘But ‘ow am I goin’ ter get around da camp on dis wooden leg?’

“Wot yer don’t unnerstand, yer honour, is dat its a special – er – ‘oppin’ leg. Hones da co-ordination, improves da circulation. Tell you wot, I’ll have it painted red fer no extra charge.”

Warhammer 40k’s orks were cockney not because of an Oxford Professor’s disdain for the working class, but as part of a light-hearted parody of hooligan culture. 

For the rest of the 1990s, Warhammer 40k remained a relatively obscure hobby, although the idea of cockney orcs soon spread to the original Warhammer Fantasy game. But everything changed in 2001, when Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring came out. 

In Peter Jackson’s beloved The Lord of the Rings trilogy, virtually every orc (with the notable exception of the Uruk-Hai) speaks with a cockney accent. But the exact inspiration for the choice remains a murky subject. The movie’s accent coach, Andrew Jack, had the following to say in a 2004 interview: 

We were very strict with ourselves. We followed the rules that Tolkien wrote—the information you can find in the appendices of the book—virtually to the letter. Except that we originally intended that the Orcs would sound more evil without any accent, but then decided that the Orcs should be ‘Cockney’ to bring in a modern sound to what was supposed to be a rural and altogether separate world of accents. Nevertheless, I think we pleased the audience by doing it like this and not dramatically changing a lot by keeping the pronunciation very close to the way Tolkien had originally intended.”

It shouldn’t be surpising that Andrew Jack decided to use real-world accents in the movies. If you want to create a rich vocal tapestry in Lord of the Rings, you’re basically required to draw upon real-world accents, since creating a “fictional accent” is a near impossibility given the complexity of language. 

But here’s the real question: Why did Andrew Jack choose cockney? 

Andrew Jack passed away in 2020, so we may never know the definitive answer to that question. But my theory is that Jack was taking inspiration, whether consciously or unconsciously, directly or with a few degrees of separation, from Warhammer 40k. Aside from Warhammer, I cannot find a single other example of cockney orcs in the 1990s media. 

Of course, it might be a complete coincidence that Andrew Jack chose cockney, but it seems unlikely that both Warhammer 40k and Andrew Jack would pick the same accent out of the United Kingdom’s hundreds of options. 

Whatever Andrew Jack’s inspiration, his last-minute decision to switch the orcs to cockney catapulted the interpretation into the mainstream. Since then, whether in the Shadow of Mordor video games or in the Rings of Power series, the cockney accent has become the default. 

The Evolution of Fictional Accents

Tolkien’s works occupy a special and canonical place in fantasy, so it’s strange to see small bits of 1980s subculture sneak in and co-opt pieces of the story. But just as real languages naturally evolve, so too do our interpretations of fictional languages. That evolution can come from anywhere, even a small London game studio.

Fussy linguist that he was, Tolkien would likely have been scandalized at the choice to take a specific London accent and apply it to his fantasy characters, but wotcher gonna do abou’ it, squire?