(He seems to speak High Valyrian fine! But his Common Tongue is London through and through.) This kind of works for the whole groovy gay hippy "Brotherhood Without Banners" vibe, but it absolutely does not work for a hypothetical accent spreadsheet some viewers may have created at some dark point in their hypothetical lives.Īnd also: Jorah Mormont is from far in the north, and is played by the Scottish Iain Glen, yet has the same ACTING! accent that (two of) the Baratheons and (two of the) Lannisters have.
#Game of thrones lorath free
Thoros of Myr, on the other hand, is from, yes, the Free City of Myr, and yet as played by Paul Kaye he sounds like he's from London. (Not that we've thought about it in any depth before, obviously.) We don't know Shae's background, but since she's played by the German-accented Sibel Kekilli we can assume she's from Lorath. Carice van Houten, who plays Asshai-born Melisandre, speaks her lines with her Dutch accent. Jaqen H'ghar, who is maybe Lorathi, has Tom Wlaschiha's native German accent. Syrio Forel of Braavos is played by Englishman Miltos Yerolemou with a kind of. Why does Thoros of Myr have a Westerosi accent? Just as the Westerosi characters in Game of Thrones have English accents, the characters from the Free Cities and other destinations across the Narrow Sea speak in various "European" accents.
Stannis and Renly Baratheon, meanwhile, both speak with very actorly and slightly different southern accents. (In fact, some of the knights in the Vale speak with Welsh accents, which, Jesus.)
But that would require the people of the Vale, in the east of Westeros, to speak with northern accents-none of which are on display when Catelyn Stark and Tyrion Lannister drop by for a visit in Season One. And you could maybe explain this away by pointing out that Robert and Ned both grew up as wards of John Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of the Vale, and therefore adopted the accent of their foster father. See:Įxcept that, okay, King Robert isn't from the north, the way Ned is: He's from the Stormlands in the east. Why do all the Baratheons have different accents? King Robert Baratheon's northern accent, courtesy of York native Mark Addy, is among the best deployments of accent-as-characterization in the series: King Robert and Lord Eddard are boyhood friends who fought side by side in Robert's Rebellion their similar accents reflect their shared past, communicate their rapport, and warn of the distance between the two men and the posh, RP southern-accented Lannisters.
But! The kids' nurse Old Nan (played by the late Welsh actress Margaret John) has a strong northern accent. (Sometimes when Arya Stark speaks you can pick out Maisie Williams' slight West Country accent.) This is, maybe, explained by the fact that the girls and the younger boys have largely been raised by their mother, Catelyn Stark, who is from the Riverlands in the south (of Westeros, not England) (well, south of the North) and, as played by the North Irish actress Michelle Fairley, speaks with a decent though not perfect southern English accent. The younger Stark kids, however, all have sort of generic southern accents. Robb Stark, Jon Snow and Theon Greyjoy, Ned's older sons (sort of), are all played by non-northern English actors (Richard Madden, who plays Robb, is from Scotland, which is too far north, I guess you can listen to his real accent below), but they've all, to varying degrees of success, adopted Bean's Sheffield accent.
Why do Ned Stark's kids all have different accents? Stark, as noted above, is played with a distinct, and real ("real") northern accent.
#Game of thrones lorath series
It's a useful way for a dense, complicated series to quietly signal backgrounds, affiliations and alliances it draws on pre-existing associations to quickly develop and define character and it provides people on the internet with a new axis along which nitpicking can take place. Generally speaking this is very cool (to nerdy Anglophile prisses, I mean. Tywin Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock and Warden of the West, is played with a posh southern accent by the great Charles Dance. Eddard Stark, the Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, is played by Sheffield's own Sean Bean, sporting his native northern English accent. This is because Americans are still unconvinced that England is a real country, and associate English speech patterns with kings and magic and sorcery and frequent stabbings.īut Game of Thrones takes its accents a step further: Its characters in speak in several different English accents, and often those accents correspond to to the real-world geography of Britain. Like most fantasy television shows, Game of Thrones is largely populated by English actors speaking with English accents. Today, we are thinking about inconsistent regional accent use in the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones.