Like Warcraft, These Books Remind Us That Orcs Are People Too
Orcs have been a mainstay villain in fantasy literature for as long as the genre has been around. Over the course of many books and stories, they’ve often made for a convenient stock enemy for the heroes to kill without thought or remorse. Their many battles against groups of stalwart humans have formed the basis of a bookshelf’s worth of stories.
Orcs have their roots in early European fairy tales, and may share ancestry with Orges. William Blake prominently used them in his stories, dating to the late 1700s. The first time that our modern conception of Orcs appeared was in J.R.R. Tolkien’s oeuvre. He described them as short, ugly creatures with fangs—miserable, crafty and violent; unnatural creatures, created by Melkor early in the world’s history to be used as foot soldiers. Throughout Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, they fight unthinkingly on behalf of Sauron and Saruman.
Tolkien’s Orcs helped set the tone for what the creatures stood for throughout fantasy fiction. While other major second world fantasy stories—The Shannara Chronicles, The Wheel of Time, and A Song of Ice and Fire among them—don’t utilize the creatures (despite their debt to Tolkien’s works in numerous other ways), they do appear elsewhere, perhaps most notably as figures in Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. The earliest D&D books also cribbed heavily from Tolkien, and the creatures have appeared throughout the various editions of the roleplaying game, alternatively as villains, but also as characters in their own right.
Dungeons and Dragons wasn’t the only game to utilize Orcs. In 1994, Blizzard Entertainment introduced Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, a fantasy real-time strategy fantasy game. The game detailed the fights between orcs and humans, and would go on to become a major franchise. The company released numerous sequels, including World of Warcraft, one of the world’s most successful MMORPG games. Notably, the game allows the Orcs to develop a little more personality than their classic canon fodder status typically granted.
Other authors have attempted to give Orc culture a bit more shading, beyond their typical modus operandi: “kill all humans!” Amalia Dillin’s novel Honor Among Orcs features a forbidden romance between Princess Arianna and an orc named Bolthorn, whom she discovers trapped inside an enchanted mirror. Mary Gentle’s novel Grunts features Orcs as the primary characters: a band of them fighting under the command of Captain Ashnak realize their disposable status as foot soldiers in the army of an evil Necromancer, and take ahold of the reins to steer their own destinies. Morgan Howell uses the creatures as a prop in her novel King’s Property when a girl named Dar is enslaved by a regiment of Orcs, and learns their languages and culture to survive and escape.
In 2008, Stan Nicholls used orcs in a manner not dissimilar to Gentle, but with less of a parodic tone. In the appropriately titles Orcs, the first of a series, he puts an Orc in the lead, detailing the battles between Orcs and humans, but from the perspective of the Orcs. Nicholls’ noted that he was prompted to write the book by the realization that history was usually written from the point of view of the victors, and he wanted to get a different perspective.
Nicholls wasn’t the first or only person to show Orcs in a favorable light: in his 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academials, Terry Pratchett introduced Mr. Nutt, an Orc who was kidnapped by humans and forced to live in chains in their village for years. The experience brought him “into the light,” so to speak, and once discovered and freed, he set about ensuring his life would have meaning, teaching himself to read and write and fancying himself a philosopher. He eventually gets a job coaching football at Unseen University. (Not bad for a grunt.)
Katherine Addison’s lauded 2014 novel The Goblin Emperor obviously focuses on a creature only related to the Orc, but goblins have been similarly mistreated by much of fantasy literature. Addison’s novel makes great pains to build a rich and complex history for the creatures, whose politics and rights of succession are as byzantine as anything you’ll find in the world of men. Similarly, Jim C. Hines penned The Goblin Quest, a comedic four-book series starring Jig, a near-sighted goblin runt who is unwillingly strong-armed into joining a band of adventurers and winds up earning himself the status of “Jig Dragonslayer,” among other misadventures.
The move to examine Orcs in a more favorable light is something that’s carried into the film adaptation of Warcraft, which depicts both sides of a major battle between orcs and humans, and an eventual alliance between the two.
No longer (always) near-feral foot-soldiers for evil, the portrayal of Orcs in fantasy literature has become more nuanced over the years. Perhaps authors have simply sought to move away from tired tropes, or perhaps they’ve seen the dangers in creating such an easily castigated and oversimplified “Other” for our heroes to defeat. Either way, when you consider the entire breadth of the genre, you may conclude that they aren’t so monstrous after all.