Orc

• 1. Introduction

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  Orcs are everywhere in modern fantasy, from tabletop dungeons to blockbuster films, yet the word itself is more than a thousand years old. It surfaces in the Old English poem Beowulf, where the orcneas walk alongside elves and giants as cursed descendants of Cain. How did a creature from a medieval poem become the dominant villain of modern fantasy? And what does the relentless casting of orcs as wholly evil enemies reveal about the authors who invented them?

  The answer winds through the imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien, through his conflicted Catholic theology, through the racial anxieties of mid-twentieth century Europe, and through a surprising inability to keep his own monsters from behaving like people. Tolkien could not decide where orcs came from, how they reproduced, or whether they deserved mercy. That uncertainty, never resolved in his lifetime, is the most interesting thing about them.

• 2. A Word from Beowulf

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  Frederick Klaeber, the scholar who analysed Beowulf most closely, suggested that the compound orcneas breaks into two parts: orc, drawn from the Latin orcus meaning "the underworld", and neas, meaning "corpses". Together they form something like "demon-corpses" or "corpse from the underworld". The translation "evil spirits" that circulated for years, Klaeber believed, failed to capture that grim specificity.

  The 10th century Old English Cleopatra Glossaries offer a separate window into the same word. There, orcus is glossed as "orc, thyrs, or hell-devil", a trio of monstrous beings lumped together. The scholar Thomas Wright observed that Orcus was originally the name of Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, which explains the "hell-devil" connection neatly. Whatever the orcneas actually were in the Beowulf poet's mind, they were monstrous, condemned, and unmistakably walking: some scholars have read them as a kind of zombie-like creature, a product of ancient necromancy.

  When Tolkien chose the word orc for his own monsters, he was explicit about why. He stated it was selected purely for what he called "phonetic suitability" reasons. The sound of the word, not its lineage, was the draw. Yet the lineage came with it, and Tolkien knew that lineage intimately.

• 3. Tolkien's Contradictions

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  In a letter dated the 21st of October 1963 to a Mrs. Munsby, Tolkien confirmed that "there must have been orc-women", a detail that implies orcs reproduced sexually, "multiplied" like Elves and Men. That single line sits awkwardly against every other account of orc origins he ever offered.

  The early texts of The Fall of Gondolin describe Morgoth making orcs from slime by sorcery, "bred from the heats and slimes of the earth". The Silmarillion suggests they were East Elves, enslaved and tortured into a new form. Other passages consider the Avari, the Elves who refused to cross to Aman, turned "evil and savage in the wild". Still other notes propose that orcs were fallen Maiar, lesser spirits like Balrogs, or perhaps corrupted Men, or even that they resulted from Elves mating with beasts.

  The scholar Tom Shippey, writing about The Lord of the Rings, argues that Tolkien almost certainly invented orcs to supply Middle-earth with a steady supply of enemies who could be killed without moral cost. Tolkien himself described this function in The Monsters and the Critics, calling orcs "the infantry of the old war" ready to be slaughtered. Yet Shippey also notes that Tolkien, as a Catholic, held the conviction that "evil cannot make, only mock", which meant orcs could never possess an equal and opposite morality to men or elves. The problem was that they kept behaving as though they did.

• 4. When Monsters Have Morals

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  In The Two Towers, the orc Gorbag notices what he takes to be Sam Gamgee abandoning Frodo Baggins and calls it a "regular elvish trick". Shippey highlights this moment as the crack in the whole edifice: Gorbag is applying a recognisably human moral standard, disapproving of the abandonment of a comrade. An orc has shame.

  In a 1954 letter, Tolkien wrote that orcs were "fundamentally a race of 'rational incarnate' creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today". The scholar Robert Tally, writing in Mythlore, observed that despite the uniform portrayal of orcs as "loathsome, ugly, cruel, feared, and especially terminable", Tolkien could not resist the urge to "flesh out and 'humanize' these inhuman creatures from time to time", and in doing so gave them their own morality.

  Shippey frames this tension using two medieval philosophical positions. The Boethian view holds that evil is simply the absence of good; the Manichean view holds that evil coexists with good and is at least as powerful. Tolkien seems to have wanted the Boethian convenience for his plot but kept producing Manichean orcs who felt, judged, and resented. The gap between what orcs were supposed to be and what they became on the page was never closed.

  In a wartime letter to his son Christopher, who was serving in the RAF, Tolkien wrote that in real life orcs appear on both sides of every conflict: "a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels." His own fictional monsters, he admitted, were drawn from a reality he could not simplify.

• 5. Race and the Orc Question

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  In a private letter, Tolkien described 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." The journalist Andrew O'Hehir, writing for Salon.com, described Tolkien's orcs as "a subhuman race that is morally irredeemable and deserves only death", adding that they are "dark-skinned and slant-eyed" yet possess reason, speech, and social organisation.

  O'Hehir also concluded that while Tolkien's description is a revealing representation of the "Other", it is "also the product of his background and era", and that Tolkien was not consciously a racist or an anti-Semite. The literary critic Jenny Turner, writing in the London Review of Books, repeated the charge that orcs represent "a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about", but added that Tolkien did not appear "half as crackers on these topics as many others were" and had "sublimated the anxieties, perhaps, in his books".

  The Germanic studies scholar Sandra Ballif Straubhaar acknowledged a kind of racism in Tolkien's writing that was "perhaps not unremarkable in a mid-twentieth century Western man", but argued it is often overstated and must be weighed against the richly polycultural and multilingual world that is, in her phrase, "absolutely central" to Middle-earth. Tolkien himself, scholars note, expressed appalled objection to those who sought to use his work in support of racist ideas.

  William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood, both scholars of English literature, point to the widespread late-19th century Western anxiety about moral decline and degeneration that fed into the eugenics movement, suggesting that the cultural soil in which Tolkien grew up shaped what he put into his monsters, even when he pushed back against those ideas in his correspondence.

• 6. Orcs Beyond Middle-earth

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  The original edition of Dungeons and Dragons, published in 1974, borrowed the orc from Tolkien and gave it a distinctly pig-faced look that Tolkien never described. That porcine design stuck in the public imagination and was refined through subsequent editions, shifting from bald to hairy, then to gray-skinned in the third version of the game, even though the first edition Monster Manual from 1977 had included a more varied colour description.

  Dragon magazine issue 62, from June 1982, ran Roger E. Moore's article "The Half-Orc Point of View", which tried to make the hybrid race legible as a playable character rather than a generic enemy. Decades later, Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, written by Critical Role creator Matt Mercer, introduced the "Orcs of Exandria" as a race with options for skills including Animal Handling, Insight, Medicine, and Survival, departing significantly from the reduced Intelligence stat that the canonical orc race carried in Volo's Guide to Monsters. That departure was praised for addressing what commentators called the orc's "problematic history".

  Mary Gentle's 1992 novel Grunts! took a different approach, presenting orcs explicitly as generic infantry and using them as metaphorical cannon-fodder. Stan Nicholls's Orcs: First Blood series retold conflicts between orcs and humans from the orc side. Terry Pratchett's Discworld offered a backstory in which orcs were manufactured weapons, goblins transformed by sorcery "encouraged" by whips and beatings for use in a Great War.

  In Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, the orc masks were designed to look evil. After a disagreement with the film producer Harvey Weinstein, Jackson had one of those masks made to resemble Weinstein as an insult. The Magic: The Gathering card game, first published in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast, has featured orcs across numerous collectible cards ever since.