01.21
I’ve already written a bit about goblins and lizardfolk, so I wanted to move on to another, possibly *the* most major, fantasy race creation of the 20th century. The difference between “orcs” and “goblins” (let alone bugbears, hobgoblins, redcaps, ogres, Uruk-Hai, etc.) is pretty vague, but I would say that orcs in the modern sense originated with J.R.R. Tolkien. The defining moment was sometime between “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings,” in which the former’s cave-dwelling goblins — probably inspired by the goblins in George MacDonald’s 1872 The Princess and the Goblin — morphed into the militaristic masses of army orcs seen in LotR.
Like all of Tolkien’s worldview, orcs were heavily shaped by World War I and World War II. In orcs, the generic evil fairy/goblin fantasy race of European mythology was strained through a filter of literalism, making creatures which had once been phantasmal, fairy-like things (half-spirit, half-flesh) into solid living creatures. (Meanwhile, elves, dwarves and hobbits got the other aspects of the amorphous fairytale sprite — elves got the noble, Faerie Court qualities, hobbits got the home-and-hearth brownie aspect, and dwarves got the cave-digging, mining end of the deal.) As Tolkien’s Middle-Earth morphed from a world of individual heroism and myth into a world of mass warfare where flesh and blood were very real, orcs became The Opponents, The Other. This is how orcs were defined — as a mass of totally evil creatures, enemies so evil that you can feel no remorse about killing ‘em off in huge quantities.
For this reason, orcs are probably my least favorite of all the standard fantasy races. By definition, they are Evil and there are Lots of Them. That is really all there is to it. Their appearance is rather vague, except that they are ugly and brutal-looking. Sometimes they have gray skin, sometimes they have green skin. But what do orcs look like in Tolkien’s own words…? According to Tolkiengateway.net, in one of the letters reprinted in “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien,” Tolkien describes orcs as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types”.
Yes — as “The Other,” orcs also represent an unavoidable element of racial prejudice. Tolkien’s quote is pretty blatant. If we were to be generous, Tolkien adds “to Europeans”, which by the standards of someone born in 1892, is at least admitting that he knows where his own prejudices are coming from. On other occasions, Tolkien did sometimes make anti-racist comments, to judge from another letter which recounts Tolkien’s answer when a publisher in 1938 Nazi Germany inquired into publishing “The Hobbit” and asked him if he was of Aryan origin. (”Thank you for your letter … I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware noone (sic) of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”) But just because one makes statements in defense of one ethnic group doesn’t mean that one is free from other types of racial prejudice. World War 2 made anti-Semitism (in the anti-Jewish sense) extremely unfashionable, but prejudices against other foreign “Eastern” mysterious dark-skinned Others continued to proliferate. And so, 50 years later, we have things like the movie “300,” in which the evil vaguely Arabic armies are literally transformed into orc- and ogre-like creatures.
Retroactively Blond Orc
Peter Jackson, I think, recognized this race-prejudice aspect when he made the Lord of the Rings movies, and he tried to skirt around it while not removing it entirely (because how could you? Seriously, someone tell me /_\ ). It’s the same as the scene in “The Two Towers” with the “Evil Men from the East”, Sauron’s allies, who are explicitly Middle Eastern. But then when you actually see a closeup of an “Evil Man” in “Return of the King”, and he’s some tattooed white guy. If I were being uncharitable to Jackson, I’d say that he was trying to sneak the original “oooh scary Middle Easterners” element in there, but then if someone complains, he can point to “Return of the King” and say “Hey, they’re white! What are you complaining about?” -_-;; A similar scene, I think, is in “The Two Towers” when you see a long, lingering closeup of an orc with scraggly blonde death-metal hair. This archetypally “white” hair defuses the other racial signifiers of the orc (the dark skin, etc.).
Of course, by now orcs have literally multiplied all over the pop-culture and fantasy landscape to the point that they’re everywhere, and you don’t need to have Tolkien’s views on race to have an orc desktop wallpaper or something. Some fantasy world designers, like the World of Warcraft people, have gone the Avatar route and given orcs the ‘noble savage’ flavor, so that gamers can enjoy being mighty orcish hunters or orcish hide-tanners and whatnot. Of course, as George Lucas could tell you, the majority of fantasy or science fiction “alien races” have some elements from real-world ethnic stereotyping, and orcs are just one example. Snakemen and lizardmen and other ’savage’ species in the Conan mode were certainly influenced by the racist views of writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. But orcs’ Otherness and Evilness is their strongest trait, and outweighs the specificity of anything else in their design. Lizardfolk are at least lizardy, they have aspects of a particular animal on top of being ‘monsters’ or ‘enemies,’ but orcs are just….. orcs.
I can think of two ways offhand to make orcs more interesting and less objectionable:
(1) Emphasize the ‘tainted elf’ aspect which Tolkien alludes to. Orcs could sort of become the new Drow, twisted mockeries of elves, with pointed ears and all, but mutated and monstrous.
(2) Emphasize the ‘mass production/industrialism’ element which was also part of Tolkien’s hatred of modernism. Orcs are creatures of mass warfare — in the Peter Jackson movies, they’re not even born, they’re sort of mined from the ground. They are about iron and smoke and soot and fire. (Of course, ’soot’ and the resulting ‘darkness’ has its own racial weight, but… but… where do you draw the line? >_< )
I may have bitten off a too-heavy theme in this article, and I know other people have said the same thing many times, but in short, this is what I don’t like about orcs. They don’t have enough flavor of their own; they’re just there to be beaten up, and to provide a group that is so evil, you can do anything to them and you’re still the Good Guys. All of this is buried somewhere in the back of Tolkien, and by extension in the back of D&D.
One thing I forgot to add to this post was: I would like to see someone who is getting plastic surgery to transform into an orc. If someone is turning into a snake, I should hope there is an orc fan out there who will transform into an orc. But does anyone really like orcs enough? That’s the question.
While I agree that most Fantasy RPGs paint a negative picture of orcs, the German system ‘Das schwarze Auge’ (Realms of Arcania) uses them in a dual role: they are a warrior-like people, and the inhabitants of the world often fear them. But on a meta-level the players realize that they have a culture of their own and when they get to learn more about that culture, they realize that orcs arenot ‘evil’ but simply ‘different’. Which desn’t stop the orcs from occasionally invading the territories helf by other peoples, because that’s part of their culture, like it is with Western culture to occasionally forcibly impress the benefits of democracy on countries less democratic…
I’ve actually figured out the role of orcs in my Neo-Pegana campaign world:
They are extinct.
They were wiped out hundreds of years ago because they looked ugly and most of the other races hated them. As a culture or “race,” they could not survive such intense negative publicity. Parents raised their children on stories of scary orcs, and wave upon wave of adventurers attacked them, until they were all gone. As to whether they were “good” or “evil” before they were all destroyed, the question is now irrelevant…
For my campaign, I decided to just not have “evil races” at all. The villains would be the same races available to the players. That way the players could not gloss over the morality of killing by claiming that the enemy race was ‘evil’. More details on my journal here: http://wp.me/pylJj-11
Hmmm… the extinct orc angle is interesting, particularly if the players can run into artifacts of orcish civilization. Unless there are PCs who are hundreds of years old, though, I might make the extinction more recent – in their parents’ or grandparents’ generation.
I play a Celtic-style campaign, and I use Orcs as “Fomorii”. They are roughly patterned on Pre-Contact Native Americans – many different tribes, lots of cultures and languages and fighting styles. But they are generally a bit more aggressive and warlike than historical Native tribes. It’s done a lot to create a frontier style feeling to the game, and makes them less “evil Others” and more varied.