Translating Harry Potter? I think that is really extremely insulting to Americans. When's the translation of Huckleberry Finn into cis-Atlantic English coming out? Or the dubbed version of Dumbo?

I quite liked the Bakshi movie. Not polished, and uneven and thrown together, but the orc armies were impressive nightmares.

I can never understand it when people roll about laughing at the idea of characters in odd settings having American accents, as if they were any more out of place than English accents or Irish accents or whatever. You even get it when the characters involved are supposed to be Romans, for example!

What is more important is that people who are supposed to come from one place and one culture have accents consistent with each other. I'm all for New Zealand hobbits. The Shire is a place where it feels pretty settled and the rest of the world seems a long way off. Sounds more like New Zealand than England these days.

I don't think Tolkien would have gone for orcs sounding Russian.He was at pains to point out that in no way was the Lord of the Rings to be taken as any kind of analogy of the Cold War. (If anything orc talk reads more as if they are Londoners than anything...)