Orc
An orc (sometimes spelt ork; /ɔːrk/[1][2]),[3] in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy fiction, is a race of humanoid monsters, which he also calls "goblin".
In Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, orcs appear as a brutish, aggressive, ugly, and malevolent race of monsters, contrasting with the benevolent Elves.
He described their origins inconsistently, including as a corrupted race of elves, or bred by the Dark Lord Morgoth, or turned to evil in the wild.
[T 1] Tolkien's concept of orcs has been adapted into the fantasy fiction of other authors, and into games of many different genres such as Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, and Warcraft.
Frederick Klaeber suggested it consisted of orc < L. orcus "the underworld" + neas "corpses", to which the translation "evil spirits" failed to do justice.
[T 8] The "sly Southerner" in The Fellowship of the Ring looks "more than half like a goblin";[T 10] similar but more orc-like hybrids appear in The Two Towers "man-high, but with goblin-faces, sallow, leering, squint-eyed.
"[T 11] In Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, the actors playing orcs are made up with masks designed to make them look evil.
"[T 12] However, in a note published in Vinyar Tengwar he gives an alternative translation: "Uglúk to the dung-pit with stinking Saruman-filth, pig-guts, gah!
[T 9] Shippey writes that the orcs in The Lord of the Rings were almost certainly created just to equip Middle-earth with a continual supply of enemies who one could kill without compunction,[23] or in Tolkien's words from The Monsters and the Critics "the infantry of the old war" ready to be slaughtered.
Shippey opined that Tolkien, as a Catholic, took it as a given that "evil cannot make, only mock", so orcs could not have an equal and opposite morality to that of men or elves.
[26] 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.
[27] Shippey notes that in The Two Towers, the orc Gorbag disapproves of the "regular elvish trick" (an immoral act) of abandoning a comrade, as he wrongly supposes Sam Gamgee has done to Frodo Baggins.
In a private letter, Tolkien describes orcs as:[T 20] 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.
[T 20]O'Hehir describes orcs as "a subhuman race bred by Morgoth and/or Sauron (although not created by them) that is morally irredeemable and deserves only death.
They are dark-skinned and slant-eyed, and although they possess reason, speech, social organization and, as Shippey mentions, a sort of moral sensibility, they are inherently evil.
"[30] He notes Tolkien's own description of them, saying it could scarcely be more revealing as a representation of the "Other", and states "it is also the product of his background and era, like most of our inescapable prejudices.
[30] The literary critic Jenny Turner, writing in the London Review of Books, endorses Andrew O'Hehir's comment on Salon.com that orcs are "by design and intention a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about".
[T 22]Scholars of English literature William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood note that a widespread element of late 19th century Western culture was fear of moral decline and degeneration; this led to eugenics.
[34] In The Two Towers, the Ent Treebeard says:[T 23] It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman's orcs can endure it, even if they hate it.
[T 23]The Germanic studies scholar Sandra Ballif Straubhaar however argues against the "recurring accusations" of racism, stating that "a polycultured, polylingual world is absolutely central" to Middle-earth, and that readers and filmgoers will easily see that.
[36] The journalist David Ibata writes that the interpretations of orcs in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films look much like "the worst depictions of the Japanese drawn by American and British illustrators during World War II".
), as a fiercely competitive bully, a tribal creature often dwelling and building underground;[51] in newer editions, orcs (though still described as sometimes inhabiting cavern complexes) had been shifted to become more prone to non-subterranean habitation as well, adapting captured villages into communities, for instance.
[52][41] The mythology and attitudes of the orcs are described in detail in Dragon #62 (June 1982), in Roger E. Moore's article, "The Half-Orc Point of View".
[53] The orc for the D&D offshoot Pathfinder RPG are detailed in the 2008 book Classic Monsters Revisited issued by the game's publisher Paizo.
[54] Games Workshop's Warhammer universe features cunning and brutal orcs in a fantasy setting, who are driven not so much by a need to do evil as to obtain fulfilment through the act of war.
