Fantasy is a fascinating genre. It’s very bound by convention, although every so often you’ll see that convention turned upside down by some angry writer. It’s good for us to think about where these things came from. Here, we’re going to look at the storied history of everyone’s favourite cannon fodder, the humble orc.

Orcs were invented by Tolkien in the forties. He noticed the ‘orcneas’ mentioned once in Beowulf as maybe sorta undead badies, liked the sound of the word, and created the snarling foot soldier of Lord of the Rings. Something which people tend to forget is that J. R. R.’s orcs are very nearly human – close enough to have children with us, in fact – but they are dark skinned and barbaric and irredeemably evil. Their speech is supposedly based on a genuine extinct non-European language called Hurrian.

A lot’s been written on Tolkien’s attitudes to race. There’s a good article to start you off on Wikipedia, and although he has some defenders, I think it’s fair to say we’re in the realm of problematic. I’m going to talk about this more fully another day, although, as you’ll see, we can’t get away from it.

Given how iconic orcs are in The Lord of the Rings, it was inevitable that they would live on in Dungeons and Dragons in the seventies. D&D was hugely influenced by Tolkien, and originally had loads of his IP in it, although they changed a lot of names after threats of lawsuits (you don’t mess with the Tolkien estate). As a British eighties nerd I’ve never played it, so I don’t know much about it, but I understand that is was in D&D that orcs picked up their distinctive pointy ears, tusks and snouty noses, and went through a series of skin and face revisions. I don’t think they were a particularly big deal in that game, just another target to grind out XP using your Mace of Smiting.

So, now, to the eighties. There’s a legend that some anonymous Games Workshop miniature painter had an army of tiny metal orks (note the ‘k’; you continue to not mess with the Tolkien estate) to paint for the Warhammer Fantasy Battle tabletop game. They had some kind of paint shortage, and needed a substitute skin colour. They chose green.

At the time, football (soccer) hooligans were a big thing in the UK. Because satire was not yet dead, the Warhammer orks were modelled on the media depiction of Millwall fans. If you weren’t around in Blighty then, this was a cartoonish ultra-violent cockney, white, tattooed, skinheaded, eager to drink and fight and sing. So the great green hulks of muscle picked up their distinctive Sarf London accent, and some delightful chants. Ere we go, ere we go, ere we go, waaaaagh! Maybe the green was actually inspired by the bomber jackets worn by the yobs of the time. (In the SF version of that game, Warhammer 40,000, the great ork boss is called Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka. He was named after the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.)

I’m sure it helped that the very nerds who were playing Warhammer were terrified of the skinheads who pushed them around after maths.

Someone must have realised that this new orc was green gold: they had a baddie which was immediately visually recognisable, and wasn’t objectionable in the same way that Tolkien’s brown orcs were. So, heavily inspired by the Games Workshop orks, Blizzard released the video game Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. On the cover was a snarling greenskin, big teef and all. Now the world knew dat da orcs iz green and iz ere!

People had been trying to film the various Tolkien books for years. No one had ever achieved it because of the sheer scale. However, when New Line gave Steve Jackson a pot of money and a lot of trust, he achieved the impossible, and produced three fairly faithful and wildly successful movies. In order to do that, he had to realise our favourite hunks of anger.

Jackson’s orcs had a set of muted skin colours. They were mostly grey, but there’s pink grey and brown grey and purple grey and quite a lot of just grey grey. Famously, there’s one white one who’s modelled on Harvey Weinstein. They’re also not very human: we see one being hatched as an adult from a pit of gloop. Saruman has a bit of gloat about how he’s made better ones, implying that they were all made that way, which is a tonal shift from the books. They feel like cloned supersoldiers rather than elves who were corrupted by temptation and magic. But they kept their D&D pointy ears and big teeth, and Games Worskshop accents; they were still the tusked cockney psychopaths of the eighties, presumably because Jackson decided it fitted with the other British accents. ‘What can men do against such reckless hate?’ asks Theoden, King of Rohan, as the vast and furious horde bears down on Helms Deep; you can’t hear them singing ‘you’re shit and you know you are,’ but that’s presumably just off camera.

The movie orcs were not uniformly well received. Some people complained that they were too comic and not scary enough, and others asked how they knew what a menu was. David Ibata, however, made the uncomfortable comparison between these grey monsters and the horrible World War II propaganda caricatures of Japanese people. Jackson probably wasn’t trying to be racist, and yet he landed back in the same mire of twentieth century intolerance that the books were born from.

What do we make of this?

Orcs are a device that our heroes can massacre without guilt, a thing to be butchered for glory. They have been moulded by the other of the era they were created in: non-Europeans from Victorian attitudes to race, soccer hooligans from the tabloids of the eighties, genetically designed clones from the future. Orcs are made to be genocided, and we see this over and over again: from casual mentions of the elves butchering fleeing orcs after victories over them, to massacre for experience points, to brutal no-holds-barred war on the tabletop and computer screen. An orc has no children, because familial love would mean there would be repercussions for dispatching them. An orc never repents or changes allegiance, and this means that the only good orc is truly a dead orc. Maybe this is acceptable in the grimdark universe of Warhammer, but in Tolkien’s noble world, should we tolerate this?

Fantasy has celebrated righteous violence since its inception. It can only do this while it has an enemy which can be justly murdered. Orcs have been this, and they have evolved as the acceptable target for this violence has changed with the times. Tolkien knew what he was doing: the ‘Uruk’ in Uruk-hai is the most important city in the history of the world, the place where writing and the wheel were invented. But J. R. R. venerated his beloved Anglo-Saxon poetry, and so had no compunction throwing this little poisoned dart into his works, and that’s where the cycle began.

Look, we all understand that fantasy is, well, fantasy. But it’s important to ask ourselves where this wish-fulfilment of death takes us. Is it good for us to indulge something which is so impossible in the real world? Do we end up as better people for making straw monsters, green or otherwise, and knocking them down?

Cards on the table, though. I’m on team orc. And that’s because, in the grim darkness of the forty-first millennium and pretty much all the other works they appear in, the orcs are the only beings who’re having fun. So next time you’re celebrating the massacre of greenskins, remember that somewhere there’s more of us singing, can we fight you, can we fight you every week?

Orcs

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