A.P. Canavan: “Let’s hunt some orc!”: Reevaluating the Monstrosity of Orcs

With the exception of dragons, one of the most recognizable monsters of genre fantasy is the humble orc. Orcs, commonly found in hordes (which I believe is the ™ term), are the readily identifiable, disposable foot soldiers of every evil wizard’s or Dark Lord’s army, and they are the ever-useful opponents for would-be heroes in training. But given the trend of modern genre fantasy to move away from moral polarities to more complicated relativistic positions, can we still treat and react to orcs in the same way? Is it time to reevaluate orcs and as a result the texts in which they appear? Can we now view orcs as the victims of the self-proclaimed heroes? With some notable exceptions, such as Mary Gentle’s Grunts (1992) and Stan Nicholls’s Orcs novels (1999–present), the treatment of orcs has remained fairly consistent ever since Tolkien popularized them as the enemies of the hero.

I am sure that everyone is familiar with the orcs of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. We could describe them as barbaric, savage, evil, corrupt, fractious, treacherous, cannibalistic, and irredeemably evil. In short, they are ugly, snarling, monstrous creatures. Yet they are clearly also sentient; some are at the very least bilingual. As Tolkien points out in “The Uruk Hai” in the third part of The Lord of the Rings:

To Pippin’s surprise he found that much of the talk was intelligible; many of the orcs were using ordinary language. Apparently the members of two or three quite different tribes were present, and they could not understand one another’s orc-speech. (580)

So clearly these orcs speak at least two, maybe even three, languages: the Black Speech of Mordor, their own orcish language, and the common tongue of hobbits and men. Therefore, not all orcs are the same. There are different tribes with different languages, and given that language and culture are intertwined, we could presume that there might be significant cultural differences as well. Certainly the most obvious example is made apparent between the Mordor orcs and Saruman’s Uruk-Hai as the dispute between Grishnakh and Ugluk in The Two Towers clearly demonstrates.

But that conflict also proves that orcs can evaluate social or group goals and needs in addition to their own personal goals and ambitions. They have loyalties, can choose to follow orders, and possess at least some element of free will. They understand social and cultural hierarchy as well as individual positions of power. Grishnak and Ugluk argue over what to do with the hobbits—should they be killed, should they be brought to Sauron, should they be searched? There is tension between the orcs as they struggle to assert personal dominance as well as the dominance of their respective allegiances and military hierarchies.

What is clear is that they can reason and explain their reasoning. In effect, these are sentient beings; they are rational, thinking people ... at least to some extent.

And while they appear cruel at least by our standards, they feed Merry and Pippin their orc-draughts to give them enough energy to keep running. They demonstrate some level of compassion for their prisoners, minimal though it may be, and for which the motivations are not necessarily discernible or clear, as Tolkien does not investigate the orcish perspective given his focus on the human and hobbit perspectives. But these orcs are not creatures, they are not monsters, and they are not dumb animals.

So where can we find stories that address this lack of orcish voice, that give us the perspective of the orcs, that tell the story from the orc side of the war?

A book that purports to redress this balance is Mary Gentle’s Grunts! Gentle takes the orcish perspective as a group of orcs prepare for the great battle between the forces of good and evil. However, this is not a straight redressing of the imbalance of perspective; it is from beginning to end a pointed satire or parody of a perceived stereotype of genre fantasy fiction, the great war.

Yet despite being a parody of the good versus evil, cataclysmic battle/apocalypse, a trope that appears in much early genre fantasy, Gentle does attempt to give voice to the orcs, who, despite being nearly ubiquitous in their appearance in diverse fantasy series, are a peculiarly voiceless and underrepresented fantasy race, narratorially speaking.

But this synopsis is slightly disingenuous. While Gentle begins with a focus on the orcish perspective she rapidly alters the orcs. By introducing an external magical factor, a geas or magical spell on the weapons some orcs find in the dragon cache. This changes the orcs from recognizable fantasy characters to caricatures of US Marines fighting a war in a fantasy world.

Barashkukor straightened his slouching spine until he thought it would crack. The strange words the big Agaku used were becoming instantly familiar, almost part of his own tongue. No magic-sniffer, he nonetheless felt by orc-instinct that presence of sorcery, geas, or curse. But if the Marine first class (Magic-Disposal) wasn’t complaining.... He fixed his gaze directly ahead and sang out: “We are Marines!” (51)

The introduction of an external force to change the orcs allows them to behave in different ways, to act contrary to their established fantasy characters and characteristics. This is of course perfectly in line with Gentle’s focus and intention for the novel, to lampoon the ossified Ultimate Battle motif that seems to recur with alarming regularity.

However, this means that the inversion of the Tolkienic orc is used only for comic effect and does not actually attempt to give a voice to the “genuine” orcish world view or attempt to investigate orcs in anything other than parody. In effect, Gentle’s work ultimately fails to provide the orcs with their own voice, to represent their world view, and it fails utterly to present the orcs as an actual race of rounded, developed characters. Only their Marine characteristics are given full voice.

Another narrative that purports to tell the orc side of the story is Stan Nicholls’s Orcs series. These novels tell the story of a fantasy world’s battles from the orc perspective, following the trials, tribulations, and adventures of orc Captain Stryke and his warband, the Wolverines. This series is not a parody, it is not a satire, and it is not attempting to lampoon fantasy cliché. For all intents and purposes, Nicholls appears to be writing the very thing discussed here, a fantasy series from the perspective of the much-maligned orcs.

However, rather than using the narrative opportunity presented by Tolkien in The Two Towers—that is the rare insight we get into orcish internal politics and the tensions between Mordor orcs, Mountain orcs, and Saruman’s fighting Uruk-Hai—Nicholls uses a bait and switch. In the first chapter of the first novel, Orcs: First Blood, the Wolverines are sacking a human village and come across a baby:

The cries of the baby rose to a more incessant pitch. Stryke turned to look at it. His green, viperish tongue flicked over mottled lips. “Are the rest of you as hungry as I am?”, he wondered.

His jest broke the tension. They laughed.

“It’d be exactly what they would expect of us,” Coilla said, reaching down and hoisting the infant by the scruff of its neck.... “Ride down to the plain and leave this where the humans will find it. And try to be ... gentle with the thing.” (13–15)

Unfortunately, the “gentle” there is a coincidence. But still.

Nicholls has done much the same as Gentle in that he has changed the orcs to something much more sympathetic. He has rewritten what an orc is and in effect reduced them to another fantasy cliché, that of the noble savage, the barbarian tribesmen, the put-upon native people who have an overriding sense of honor that has been abused by “evil” masters. These orcs are the unwilling servants of a Dark Power.

So again this is another attempt to redress the narrative imbalance of a widely used fantasy race that suffers from a seeming lack of ability to genuinely conceive of what orcs are like, despite the fact that this is clearly evident from Tolkien’s work.

There is also the newish computer game, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. In this game, the player controls the human Ranger hero, Talian, who shares a body with an elven wraith/spirit and who is tasked with several missions within the bounds of Mordor. The ultimate goal is to track down and kill in revenge an evil human servant of Sauron. However, the vast majority of the game is spent exploring Mordor and killing its citizens, who are, of course, orcs of various shapes and sizes.

The player is encouraged to torture and interrogate orcs in order to progress through the game. In fact, the torturing of orcs for information is at times mandated by the game and at other times is simply the easiest, most expedient way to progress. Following an interrogation, the orc is then executed. Bonus mission rewards are given for execution kills, stealth kills, ranged kills, and so forth, that allow the player to augment and improve the character. The player is continually prompted to kill and torture the various orc characters throughout the game.

Talian encounters several orc characters who display sentience, cunning, loyalty, honor, ambition, and a host of other characteristics in varying degrees and measures. Indeed, several of the missions demonstrate that many orcs are pressed into service by stronger and more brutal “leaders” and have no choice but to serve in Mordor’s army. There are also a number of occasions in which the character allies with an orc in order to complete goals.

Despite this, orcs are considered intrinsically evil monsters who cannot be trusted or redeemed.

Yet there are examples in which orcs remain orcs, and their stories are accessible, their point of view is articulated, and their voices are heard.

While not exactly the most respected or critically examined areas of fantasy literature and narrative, Dungeons & Dragons and the various worlds and fantasy series associated with it provide a fascinating perspective on the evolution of orcs as a fantasy race.

What is interesting is that D&D had to confront an issue with Tolkien’s initial construction of the orc. If orcs are sentient, then why were they treated as monsters and not simply as enemies? Early editions of D&D used orcs in much the same manner as bad fantasy does: they were simply a stack of low-level cannon fodder enemies to be killed off by the heroes to prove how wonderful Sir Killalot and Princess Smack-them-in-the-head are.

However, as the game grew increasingly more complex (in part to expand the world so that players had greater variety and choice and therefore would keep buying more supplements and products, but also because the fantasy world grew as the game developed), it became more sophisticated. It began to probe and investigate difficult areas of what was assumed to be a simplistic paradigm. If you can have half-elves, half-dwarves, as playable characters, can you have half-orcs?

If you can have half-orcs as playable characters, can you have full-blooded orcs as playable characters? How does orc society function? What are orcs actually like?

In order to continually develop D&D for market, the company continued to add races and playable character types, including some that the confining moral alignment rules describe as evil. Orcs have gradually entered the game as a playable race, equal to and on par with elves, humans, and dwarves. D&D is not the only game to do this. Orcs appear as playable races in a number of Games Workshop products (Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, Blood Bowl, and so forth).

However, the simple inclusion of something called orcs (as Nicholls has proven) does not necessarily guarantee that they remain identifiable as orcs.

So let us consider R.A. Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt series, a long-running (and still ongoing) fantasy series concerning the adventures of a Drow (dark elf) and his companions. In The Hunter’s Blades Trilogy (comprising The Thousand Orcs [2002], The Lone Drow [2003], and The Two Swords [2004], books 14–16 of the Legend of Drizzt), one of the major secondary narrative strings is a developing storyline about an orc chieftain or warlord, Obould Many Arrows. Obould Many Arrows is initially allied to a clan of frost giants and has amassed a massive horde™. If he were a human or an elf or a dwarf, he might say he has called together a large military force or army, but as he is an orc, he is stuck with a horde.

As the books develop his army—er, horde—manages to push the dwarves back to the gates of the dwarvish realm, Mithral Hall. And the purpose of this conflict is to clear space in the foothills of the dwarvish mountain range so that the orcish clan can establish a genuine kingdom free from the interference of giants, dark lords, evil wizards, etc. As a result, Obould can open diplomatic relations equal to elves, dwarves, and humans—in effect, to create a recognized orcish sovereign territory.

What makes this interesting is not that there is an orc horde but that the purpose of their “invasion” is actually to find a kingdom and land of their own. They push the dwarves back to their own Kingdom and, without too much thought, you realize that this means that the dwarves can be reframed as evil, imperialistic conquerors hell-bent on wiping out an indigenous race in order to steal their land and wealth. Not that Salvatore states this explicitly, but the subtext is present.

The orcs, on the other hand, are pushing the dwarves back, in essence repelling an evil expanding army. The orcs are not “stealing” land from the dwarves. The dwarves live underground, so they don’t need nor use the land above the mountain; the lower slopes of the mountain are free, unoccupied, and not in use.

And the purpose of the orc army is not to kill off the other races or destroy the forces of good; it is to create a consolidated homeland where the orcs can live free from persecution, no longer hunted down like animals.

In effect, then, Salavatore has done something that Gentle and Nicholls did not. He has created an engaging, political storyline that considers and addresses the orcish perspective without altering who and what orcs are. In hindsight, it seems strange that no one did this before. Yet the earlier examples given could not seem to conceive of orcishness as anything other than monstrosity.

Returning then to The Lord of the Rings, we need to reconsider orcs in this new light. While Tolkien at least focused on the fact that Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas weighed their decision and chose to try to rescue Merry and Pippin at the beginning of The Two Towers, Jackson’s film adaptation is more revealing of my point.

When, in the film, Aragorn turns to his companions and says with barely restrained glee, “We travel light. Let’s hunt some orc!” we can now see how this reduces a sentient and potentially “redeemable” species to an animalistic and monstrous fate.

But Jackson is not entirely to blame because aspects of this concept, this attitude, appear in Tolkien’s work. At the battle of the Hornberg in Helm’s Deep, Legolas and Gimli have a competition to see who can kill the greatest number of orcs. This friendly competition is presented in a heroic light and in the film adaptation is even a source of humor.

But if we consider this episode from this new perspective, counting the number of orcs killed now appears as crass, distasteful, and even malicious behavior. It appears as a misguided glorification of the murder of enemies rather than the joyous celebration of monsters put down.

Furthermore, in this battle, the remaining orc horde is herded into an indefensible position surrounded by the Ents and Huorns, who then, rather than letting them surrender, simply destroy them, off-page, without a sound, without a murmur, without a second thought. Tolkien describes this in fairly unambiguous terminology: “Wailing they passed under the waiting shadow of the trees; and from that shadow none ever came again” (707).

Yet, while this is a cause for the heroes to celebrate—the orcs were an enemy that need to be defeated—why do we as readers never once consider that this is the systematic extermination of a race? That this is mass murder, even attempted genocide. The heroes might feel justified in their attitudes as such positions might be necessary in war and combat, but for readers, surely we should question the heroes’ actions.

The heroes do not take orcish prisoners. The heroes do not even set up forced labor camps or prisoner-of-war camps. All enemy combatants, even if they are retreating or have surrendered, are slaughtered. When it comes to honoring the dead, the heroes do not give the fallen orcs a modicum of respect or attempt proper funeral rites; rather they are stacked and burned or tossed into mass graves.

So if we have never questioned this, it seems that we as readers not actually involved in the war , tacitly or openly agree with the mass extermination of an entire species; we revel in the slaughter of a sentient race; we delight in the murder of surrendering enemy combatants; we never once treat orcs as people, as a sentient species, as a race that may be on the other side of the war but still deserve consideration and respect.

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A.P. Canavan lives in Belfast. A version of this essay was presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in 2012.

Works Cited

Gentle, Mary. Grunts! London: Bantam Press, 1992.

Jackson, Peter. The Two Towers. New Line Cinema, 2002.

Nicholls, Stan. Orcs: First Blood (1999–2000). Omnibus edition. Garden City, New York: Science Fiction Book Club, 2002.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings (1954–56). Omnibus edition. London: Unwin, 1988.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Monolith Productions, 2014.

Comments

[Franz Brehme]

This is the theme I am currently thinking about... Motivations of antagonists and respect with sentient life, even if they are orcs.
Amazing text, A.P. Thank you very much.
And this is a brilliant complement to the vision you gave in Philip Chase's channel concerning the Siege of Pale, in the MBotF / Gardens of the Moon and the notion of the Malazan Army biegn the orcs and Pale, Minas Tirith.

[Franz Brehme]

Also, I would like to know if I am allowed to translate this article to Brazilian Portuguese, in order to post it in the website www.tolkienista.com a Tolkien & fantasy site runned by a friend, Cristina Casagrande, an academic in fantasy.

[A. P. Canavan]

Hi Franz,
I have no problem with you translating the text and sending it to your friend as long as you include the details that it was first published here and a link is provided to this text.
Thanks for the kind words.

[Franz Brehme]

Dear A.P. Thank you very much! I was already going to do as you suggested: credits and info of where it was first published. Also, when published, will post the link here! :) Sláinte!

[Franz Brehme]

Dear A.P. Canavan: just realized that the Shadow of Mordor player-character is called Talion, not Talian. Best wishes.

[Franz Brehme]

Dear A.P.:
the translation was just released here: https://tolkienista.com/2021/02/05/vamos-cacar-alguns-orques-reavaliando-a-monstruosidade-dos-orques/

[Kevin J. Maroney]

Thank you, Frank!