How Rings of Power expands Tolkein's(sic) World by “Honoring his work”

EVEN AMONG DIEHARD LORD OF THE RINGS OBSESSIVES, LEITH MCPHERSON IS A SPECIAL KIND OF FAN.

“Every moment I can, I go back to my favorite place, the appendices of The Lord of the Rings,” McPherson tells Inverse. “The appendices feel like Tolkien is speaking to me, directly.”

McPherson brings up Appendix E, where the author unpacks Elvish and “lays down the phonetic description of the sounds.” “That’s my template. That’s my touchstone. That’s my home,” she says. “I try to be an ambassador for his work as much as I can.”

A decade ago, the UK-born, Australia-based dialect coach worked with the actors of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, teaching them both the fictional languages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth — namely Elvish, Dwarvish, and Orcish — and unearthing accents for characters who speak the “common” (English) tongue.

Now McPherson has reembarked on her unexpected journey. She’s once again the on-set dialect coach, this time for Amazon’s upcoming prequel series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. With the sun rising from her apartment window in Sydney, McPherson lectures me on her expertise — for example, she details the intricacies of Quenya, a “dialect” of elves that is like “Elvish Latin” in the Third Age but commonplace in the Second Age, when The Rings of Power takes place.

“You can, as many do, spend your entire scholastic and professional life focusing on one form of Elvish,” McPherson tells Inverse. “It has potency and power. It’s spoken with care.”