I love Rob Inglis narration of Earthsea, but…
Doing my annual re-listen to the Earthsea quintet. This is my first and truest love of fantasy and of Ursula, and the Tombs of Atuan reading by Inglis is an absolute masterpiece.
Then I start the Farthest Shore and Arren starts speaking - and Inglis voices him in EXACTLY the same way as he voices Sam Gamgee. It’s such a strange choice - I get that a prince of Enlad would have a different dialect than a Gontishman or a Karg, but why does the prince of the house of Morred talk like a gardener boy from Hobbiton? Why, Rob, Why?
And then in the second chapter Arren says “if I could talk to Dragons in their own tongue, I wouldn’t care about my dialect” or something like that. And so I try to embrace the Arren-Sam hybrid and listen to the words. But it’s still jarring every time.