What is an Orc in ‘Lord of the Rings’?

If you’re looking to find out what an orc is in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, you’ve come to the right place. Their history is a lot more complex than you might have imagined.

~Come hither, come hither, for how dost thou fare?

I speaketh of orcs, a topic most rare~

No, but seriously, I’m sure that with all this Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power talk, there’s probably a handful of people who are looking at the orcs and despairing. They’re probably thinking, Oh, god, yet another weird fantasy thing that I’m not gonna understand in the slightest. And in any other case, you would be right.

Fortunately for you, though, my orcish ass is here, with all my very-specific knowledge of how race and fantasy intersect. So, you wanna know more about orcs? You trying to figure them out? Then you, my friend, have come to the right place.

What “Is” an Orc?

Let’s just get the easy part out of the way: orcs are a monstrous humanoid race that are meant to contrast the elves. In other words, whereas elves are designed to be pure and righteous, orcs are nasty, nasty little guys who are only out for numero orco.

In the context of Lord of the Rings, they serve a relatively simple purpose: they’re the bad guys, who serve badder guys. While they have a more “human” line of thinking than elves do, they ultimately lack any desire to do good, as they are somewhat of a “fallen” race. Yes, this is all sounding very biblical, but that’s the short and simple of it.

What this means for The Rings of Power is that there will be a lot of unabashedly straightforward orc killin’. However, by the time Rings takes place, orcs are a struggling race and aren’t as populous as in the original LOTR trilogy. Therefore, they’re going to be portrayed slightly differently, being a bit scrappier, more cunning, and…dare I say…occasionally female?

Tolkienian Origins

Ultimately, Tolkien is Orc Daddy—i.e. he’s the reason the modern orc is a thing at all. While he wasn’t necessarily the first guy to use the term “orc,” he is the guy who made them into a race. Really, Tolkien is responsible for the conception of most “modern fantasy races” as we know them, and orcs are no exception.

That said, we can be a little critical of these origins while also celebrating the fact that we have fantasy as a genre. In one of his letters, Tolkien describes orcs in very choice words:

The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) 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.

Tolkien, Letter #210

So, yeah. Right. I sometimes see people reaching and saying that this doesn’t mean he, himself, is making a racist caricature out of his literal “most evil” race, but at a certain point, you just gotta sit down, chill out, and accept that your fantasy daddy was a product of his time who designed an entire race while inspired by wartime Yellow Peril. Oopsie.

It’d be one thing if orcs were just generally deplorable monsters, but he really had to go and give them a specific nose shape, a specific eye shape, even a specific skin shade. The real rub is that these characteristics are given to a race that’s designed to be killed, with their only morally redeemable feature being that they can be killed at all.

Does this mean you should feel guilty watching Lord of the Rings? No, and we’ll get to that in a second. Modernity has cured the ills of fantasy past in many ways, and as it stands, the current costume designers of Rings of Power are just having fun with reinventing lore-accurate orcs. But this also doesn’t mean you should come at me, an Asian person who grew up hearing this sort of crap thrown at friends and family all the time, and tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. You can’t fool me, Orc Daddy.

Modern Adaptations

Now, if all this time, you’re just confused about what an orc is because there’s, like, a million different orcs out there, then I get you. I barely knew what an orc was until a few years ago. I feel like I’d load up any fantasy game and be greeted with some iteration of orcishness, with the most memorable being the orcs in the Elder Scrolls series.

Indeed, a lot has changed since the wartime scares of Tolkien’s day, and with that has changed what being an orc entails. I’m very pleased to see that, generally, we’ve moved away from making our most deplorable and killable fantasy races the ones that bear some sort of resemblance to real-life people. Or, at the very least, I’m pleased to see that orcs aren’t the exception anymore. We’ve rounded them out. We’ve given them lore. And we’ve even added some other evildoers to balance the ratio, such as the drow.

Does this mean that orcs can’t be improved upon? Well, I’d like to think everything can be improved upon in fantasy, so no, there’ll probably be quite a few more revisions to the Orc Canon in years to come. But I am curious to see how The Rings of Power decides to handle our warfaring friends.

(Featured Image: New Line Cinema)