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Monsters: the Meaning of Orcs

1 year ago 550

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It’s been a while since we’ve done a monster analysis, so I decided to come back for at least just one before saving the rest of them for spooky-season. I wanted to pick one that is a common monster, one that pops up in a lot of different fantasy stories. So, let’s talk about orcs.

A quick note before we get massively into it: this post is going to focus in on orcs as they are presented in Lord of the Rings and a little bit as well from Dungeons & Dragons. I know orcs are in a lot of other places – in fact, they’re a staple in most fantasy literature, movies and television shows. But I can’t get into every single instance of orcs – we’d be here forever. Lord of the Rings heavily influenced the development of fantasy – it became the backbone of fantasy literature and media, and therefore the depiction of LotR orcs have become the depiction of orcs more generally. While LotR did also influence Dungeons & Dragons, D&D has an influence all of it’s own on other aspects of role-playing games and video games, as well as other fantasy media more generally. So for the time being, I’m putting my focus on these two fantasy ancestors, unless I want to write a book about orcs. Which, to be fair, isn’t too far outside the realm of possibility – but not today.

So why don’t we first start with the basic description of an orc. Orcs are often defined by four primary features: (1) skin colour, often a dark green; (2) homelands outside of civilisation, often far outside the locations of built-up cities; (3) a “primitive” culture; and ultimately (4) extreme aggressiveness and irrationality. Even in more recent depictions of orcs, these four elements are somewhere present – they make up the characteristics that readers instantly recognise as “orcish”.

One of the founders of the scholarly approach to the study of monsters, Jeffrey Cohen, wrote that “monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual”. This means that whenever we’re analysing our monsters, we tend to start thinking of the monstrous differences in terms of other more human differences. Monstrous races are a common find in human history and fantasy literature, for example the monstrous depictions of Jews and Muslims.

For Tolkien, orcs are the embodied aspect of difference to the all-white Fellowship. The entirety of the Lord of the Rings, and even the Hobbit, is a marked separation of the West and East: the “men of the West” are depicted as corruptible, but ultimately good, as opposed to the “Eastern” men (the ones riding the giant elephants) who aren’t given the same consideration of empathy. Orcs are described by Tolkien 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 skin colour associated with orcs is an important part of the inherent racist Othering of orcs. Tolkien’s description of orcs skin-colour has already been shown, with the emphasis on the “sallow-skinned” monsters. Uruk-hai are a more complicated orc, one that has been “perfected” (according to Saruman), whose skin is noted as being so dark it’s almost black. In fact, Uruk-hai from Mordor are often referred to as “Black Orcs”.

In the 1979 Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, orcs are described as “particularly disgusting because their coloration – brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen – highlights their pinkish snouts and ears. Their bristly hair is dark brown or black”. And the descriptions don’t exactly get better as time goes on. The 4th edition Monster Manual, first published in 2008, has an image of orcs with some hair dreadlocked, and with darker skin colours.

The image of orcs in the 4th edition Monster Manual.

The depictions of orcs as “savage” or “primitive” are also present in this 2008 Manual. Orcs are “savage, bloodthirsty marauders” who “plague the civilized races of the world”. Here, we see the typical description of orcs as being outside the typical confines of what is considered “civilisation”, often described as living in “tribes”.

In fantasy media following D&D orcs, the separation is less about good vs evil, so much as it is the civilised vs savage, or more directly, the cultural considerations of centre vs periphery. In more simplistic terms, it’s about the us vs them.

Orcs are the more obvious direct example of how fantasy monsters can embody the distinguishing of monstrous races – being the way to epitomise the monstrous nature of Mongols (as in the case for Tolkien) or Black people more generally, as seems to be more aligned in the Monster Manuals of D&D. To analyse orcs is, essentially, to analyse racism.

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