It’s the “Model Minority” myth all over again…
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Until the 3rd game they actually almost exclusively hired Irish voice actors for the Dailish. The Exception is Merrill who was played by a Welsh actress who did a fair Irishish performance. I always felt that was a little more thought out and deliberate. IIRC they used modern Irish for the language, but actual Irish speakers to translate and pronounce it. And there’s real Irish myth, legendary and actual history, and material culture in how the Daelish are fleshed out. But in more transformative fashion over lazily tossed in set dressing.
But like a lot of what was well drawn in the series it was all hopelessly mucked up by number 3. So…
The language was directly based on Welsh, and much of the rest was based on Norse folklore. The Irishness of fantasy elves seems to have rolled out with Tolkiens broad strokes becoming the default high fantasy breakdown. Because yes, people use Irish as public domain elvish. And insular Celtic visual art is an easy way to make things medievally in a non knights and ladies way.
Irish folk are frequently exasperated by the lazy and thoroughly bullshit way they’re depicted by Americans. As is this Irish American. Its nice to something of yourself baked into the media you like. But when so much of it is badly mischaracterized or drawn from stereotype its not nice.
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Ha. I had to qualify the invaders as Normans because this was only a generation or two after the Norman invasion of England and the invaders weren’t really all that English yet. They are the ones that built most of the castles that dot the Irish countryside. They later stopped speaking Norman French, learned Gaelic and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”. A lot of my ancestors are these Norman Irish. (Lavin is an Irish name, though not one of the old families like O’Neill or O’Brian. It shows up in records from the 15th century but not before.) The latter English kept their legal claim from this first invasion but the Norman (English) weren’t the same as the latter English (English). Your cartoon could apply to those guys 
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Oh boy, Shadowrun. I love the setting to bits (having never played it except in computer games, but read about it a lot), but even with that, it has a TON of stuff that makes you go “Really?” Specially in that regard of “and now this country is something completly different”. México somehow moves from deeply Catholic country to revival of Aztec religion in no time whatsoever and, well, like by decree. Ireland is no longer a Catholic country either, is just Elf land. Etc, etc, etc.
Not going to stop loving it but I love it with warts and all, and boy, those are some big warts.
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Ok but I wouldn’t characterize *anything *JRRT did as lazy, or American for that matter. It’s certainly a hundred times more nuanced and respectful than the weird racist stereotype aliens in Star Wars, or, you know, breakfast cereal mascots.
But I understand. I live in Erin, a small rural town in the “Deep South” that was originally an Irish community, and of course the high school mascot is the tired “Fightin’ Irish” drunken leprechaun dude. It’s offensive to me.
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I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but the blog post that spawned it doesn’t even mention Tolkien. Its very much focused on the generally half assed use of features of Irish myth as evil and the bad guys and American’s poor understanding and lazy use of the language.
Thom mentions him in his post, but specifically his seeming disinterest in Irish and the Irish. And his role in this thing is mostly in providing the stock elves, dwarves, dark lord framework that others have grafted weak Irishness onto.
Fact of the matter is that Fantasy is lace curtain as fuck.
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Roger that!
I saw it as more akin to the Romano-Britons, who were forced out of England by the Angle-Saxons.
Picts or it didn’t happen. 
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IDK. I personally use at least some different words now than I did just 10 years ago, as fashions in speech and diction change. Words in common use get shortened and simplified, regional variations arise in what-things-we-routinely-talk-about. I can imagine differences in the way of life between the elves of Valinor vs Middle Earth are pretty huge (and growing, as Valinor would be almost unchanging), and millennia can make for a lot of linguistic drift even for a single individual.
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I remember a Forgotten Realms novel where some elf was named “Tintagel”, a random village in England I’d once visited, and that’s when I learned the difference between kitsch and camp.
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Alan Garner’s two YA books, ‘The Moon Of Gomrath’, and The Wierdstone of Brisingamen’ are both set around Alderley Edge, in Cheshire, in the North of England. Both books feature Elves and Dwarves, but neither are particularly Celtic, the Elves are cold, aloof, and almost amoral, but they’re not really Sidhe, who are, traditionally about as amoral as it gets, stealing human children for slaves, and leaving changlings in their place,
Painting the Aes Sidhe as just being mainly amoral child-stealers is kind of reinforcing the point of the original essay.
Irish mythology doesn’t paint them as monsters, but as people whose stuff you shouldn’t mess with, which is pretty much how those stories treat all powerful creatures, mythological or not.
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*ducks and awaits reactions from outraged Kernowyon*
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By the way, since when are “dwarves” Scottish? I vaguely had them pegged as being Slavic/Germanic due to historical mining in the Alps, and the miners in fairy tales originally being small due to malnourishment, kids looking like old men, but now it’s the Orcs who get the Eastern European accents.
I guess it’s like imagining all boucaniers spoke Cornish rather than Creole.
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Tolkien’s dwarves are jews. He came aware of this, recognized that this was tres problematique, and did quite a lot of make them admirable, noble and just in the development of the story. But obviously by the time we get to making movies 60 years later about miserly little guys taking their gold back from the evil germanic dragon … scottish it is.
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IIRC it actually goes the other way. Tolkien loathed antisemitism so in response to certain stuff going on he decided to work some Jewishness into Middle Earth in tribute to a particularly close Jewish friend and collaborator. He based the language in Hebrew and other Semitic languages and all the admirable noble stuff was intended to be the stuff he admired so much in his friends. The short hairy guys obsessed with gold part was already there and sort of ported over direct from a few different parts of legend and folklore.
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That’s supposed to be Robert Newton’s ‘fault’: Robert Newton - Wikipedia
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Not in the slightest.
Well, I have a source for the Scottish dwarves: Poul Anderson, by way of Gary Gygax.
I still like the idea of them being the Gnomes of Zurich, though. Fnord.
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