Introduction

Hey, Professor Tolkien. What do orcs look like?

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.

Cool. That’s from his Letter #210, and he just described me and all my relatives on my mom’s side. Why would he say that?

Orcs are a species—more commonly labeled a “race”—of wicked, dangerous humanoids found en masse in JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth as well as most of analog and electronic gaming. But Tolkien derived their ugly appearance and savage temperament, like almost all orcish traits common across different media, from a long and painful history.

We say Tolkien invented orcs as we know them today. More precisely, he synthesized their nature from various traditional characterizations—not of mythical beings, but of real-life humans. Some of those characterizations came from popular European conceptions of the greatest threats to Western civilization. Others came from pseudoscientific frameworks of racism, some of which Tolkien would have encountered in his academic training. But Tolkien would meet the most germane theory to his orcs in his military service with the British Army: the fallacy of the martial race.

Orcs are my problematic fave. Show me a fantasy game with orcs in it, and my first question is whether I can play as one. But I’m a multiracial person of color who works in gaming as a cultural consultant, and therefore a connoisseur of classic racial prejudice. I can’t ignore the staggering racism which directly inspired the Tolkienian tropes which influenced every corner of nerd culture, most of all Dungeons & Dragons.

The story of why orcs are the way they are, and in fact why we talk about science fiction species and fantasy races the way we do, takes us back into military history, to British imperialism in Scotland, the Pacific Islands, Africa, and especially Asia; and, in fact, all the way back to the Mongolian steppe at the turn of the thirteenth century.

It’s a long journey, which we’ll take in two parts. This first part tracks all the historical and racial influences on Middle-earth’s orcs. The second, which will come later, shows how those ideas’ confluence in The Lord of the Rings has played out in successive speculative fiction, with particular attention to fantasy role-playing games and to people of color’s struggle to see themselves represented in nerd culture. But let’s start on the steppe.

From Scourge of God to Yellow Peril

Societies fighting different societies have always constructed narratives around those conflicts which elevate themselves and denigrate their enemies. The term “barbarian” comes from an ancient Greek onomatopœia for the way foreign tongues sounded to Greeks. Tolkien’s particular take on civilization versus barbarism, though, owes a special debt to Eastern threats to Europe: the myriad related but distinct Eurasian and Central Asian equestrian civilizations whom fearful Western Europeans labeled “Tartars.”

Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God, terrorized Europe during the fall of the Roman Empire, that dubious bastion of Western civilization to which the Eurocentric imagination would always hearken back. But Attila won some, lost some, and died an ignominious death. In the thirteenth century CE, Chinggis Khagan’s armies rolled out of Mongolia and over every source of opposition they faced to create the largest empire the world would ever know. They would have conquered Europe, too, had Chinggis’s death not recalled his commanders to the Kherlen River. As we explore Tolkien’s background and his creations, references (subtle and overt, but mostly overt) to Asia in general and Mongolia in particular will come up again and again.

Shadows of the Empire

So what factors preserved the Mongol Terror until Tolkien’s birth in 1892?

Was it cruelty? Doubtful—the Mongols’ enemies and victims accused them of all the same atrocities conquering armies always seem to commit.

Was it success? For sure, at least in part. The Mongols accomplished seemingly impossible feats of strategy and logistics.

I suspect Mongol curiosity about foreign cultures and religions set them apart. Despite all their violent acts, they rarely stamped out local cultures, nor chewed them up and spit them out as digested versions of their own. Instead, they shared and learned. When they left the steppe and encountered fortresses their horse archers couldn’t beat, they learned siegecraft and grew as feared for their trebuchets as for their mounts and bows. They collected new religions like Pokémon and proclaimed freedom of worship throughout their empire. When Papal missionaries arrived in Khubilai Khagan’s court, they were surprised to find the Great Khan practicing several seemingly contradictory religions—including his mother’s, Christianity—without any worry of conflict between them. You couldn’t beat Mongols in battle because they were tougher and more resourceful. But you also couldn’t beat them in a culture war, because they wouldn’t fight you at all. They’d welcome you into the tent and sit down and listen to you over drinks. Is it any wonder the Mongols intermarried so freely with all the peoples they encountered?

Of course, a less savory narrative surrounded—and surrounds—that intermixture. Potentates in the former Mongol Empire claimed apocryphal descent from Chinggis Khagan all the damn time. But as recently as 2003, a genetics paper asserted that one in two hundred men alive today descends from Chinggis Khagan, based on a certain Mongolian Y-chromosomal lineage’s prevalence across the former Mongol Empire due to “a novel form of social selection resulting from [Chinggis Khagan’s relatives’] behavior.” The study thus lends credence to an old canard that paints Mongols in general and Chinggis in particular as virulent sexual predators. That matter’s truth or falsehood isn’t actually germane to this meandering discussion about orcs; but given the worldwide prevalence of rape culture in the Mongol Empire’s time and now, I caution readers about the conclusion that this culture was somehow worse in this regard. Nevertheless, this narrative contributed to the Mongol Terror’s legacy in a pretty creepy way.

That Wasn’t Even Its Final Form

By the time of Tolkien’s birth, nationalistic sentiment and imperialist expansion drove European foreign policy. But since fundamentally different cultural paradigms drove the past’s greatest empire, the imperialist mind twisted Mongolian syncretism and admixture into an insidious campaign to infiltrate and usurp Western society’s cherished institutions by artifice and treachery. Central to this plot was the threat of forceful miscegenation: that these small, effeminate men, too desperate and rapacious to fight or love fair, would steal white women from their rightful mates. As of the American conquest of the Philippines, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Russo-Japanese War, Filipinos and Chinese and Japanese replaced Mongols as the greatest threat. The Mongol Terror had transformed into the Yellow Peril.