Q: Did J.R.R. Tolkien Invent Orcs?
ANSWER: Who invented the Orcs of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings? Most people will tell you that J.R.R. Tolkien invented the Orcs of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings but that is not correct. Tolkien reused older ideas for his fantasy creatures, including the Orcs. He himself wrote: “Orcs (the word is as far as I am concerned actually derived from Old English orc ‘demon’, but only because of its phonetic suitability) are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin” (Letter No. 144). Hence, we can safely conclude that Tolkien did not borrow the word “orc” from any other source (orcneas is found in “Beowulf” and it is generally argued this is Tolkien’s source for the word).
But in Letter No. 151 Tolkien hints that his Orcs (evolved in The Lord of the Rings from the goblins of The Hobbit) may owe something to the goblins of George MacDonald’s Princess and the Goblin story: “Your preference of goblins to orcs involves a large question and a matter of taste, and perhaps historical pedantry on my pan. Personally I prefer Orcs (since these creatures are not ‘goblins’, not even the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble).”
J.R.R. Tolkien struggled throughout his life to explain the Orcs, who strike most readers as being especially evil and unsalvageable. Tolkien tried to explain how such creatures could come into existence in what he labeled as “Catholic story”, as in Letter No. 153 where he wrote:
I think I agree about the ‘creation by evil’. But you are more free with the word ‘creation’ than I am. Treebeard does not say that the Dark Lord ‘created’ Trolls and Ores. He says he ‘made’ them in counterfeit of certain creatures pre-existing. There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements, so wide that Treebeard’s statement could (in my world) have possibly been true. It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today.
Further on, he also wrote:
I don’t think it gave life to the Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.’ In the legends of the Elder Days it is suggested that the Diabolus subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves, before they had ever heard of the ‘gods’, let alone of God.
Perhaps the most definitive statement on the nature of Orcs comes in this paragraph:
To conclude: having mentioned Free Will, I might say that in my myth I have used ‘subcreation’ in a special way (not the same as ‘subcreation’ as a term in criticism of art, though I tried to show allegorically how that might come to be taken up into Creation in some plane in my ‘purgatorial’ story Leaf by Niggle (Dublin Review 1945)) to make visible and physical the effects of Sin or misused Free Will by men. Free Will is derivative, and is.’. only operative within provided circumstances; but in order that it may exist, it is necessary that the Author should guarantee it, whatever betides : sc. when it is ‘against His Will’, as we say, at any rate as it appears on a finite view. He does not stop or make ‘unreal’ sinful acts and their consequences. So in this myth, it is ‘feigned’ (legitimately whether that is a feature of the real world or not) that He gave special ‘subcreative’ powers to certain of His highest created beings: that is a guarantee that what they devised and made should be given the reality of Creation. Of course within limits, and of course subject to certain commands or prohibitions. But if they ‘fell’, as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things ‘for himself, to be their Lord’, these would then ‘be’, even if Morgoth broke the supreme ban against making other ‘rational’ creatures like Elves or Men. They would at least ‘be’ real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even ‘mocking’ the Children of God. They would be Morgoth’s greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote ‘irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.) But whether they could have ‘souls’ or ‘spirits’ seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible ‘delegation’, I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them. That God would ‘tolerate’ that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today. There might be other ‘makings’ all the same which were more like puppets filled (only at a distance) with their maker’s mind and will, or ant-like operating under direction of a queen-centre.
There is, however, a series of essays and notes that Christopher Tolkien published in Morgoth’s Ring where his father continued to wrangle with the issues of the Orcs:
“But even before this wickedness of Morgoth was suspected the Wise in the Elder Days taught always that the Orcs were not ‘made’ by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They mght have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded.
So that takes us a fair distance away from the question of whether J.R.R. Tolkien invented the Orcs. In one sense we can clearly say that they evolved under his hand from a borrowed idea that he sometimes acknowledged or almost acknowledged. Tolkien incorporated the Orcs into many stories as a convenient “cannon fodder” for his heroes to destroy but he also eventually found himself struggling to explain why such creatures should exist in the first place. The rationale for Orcs clearly belongs to Tolkien.
See also …
Who Are the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings?
Are Orcs and Goblins the Same Thing?
How Many Different Types of Orcs Are There?
Does Light Really Hurt the Orcs?
Are There Female Orcs in Middle-earth?
Why Is Azog Called ‘the White Orc’?
Why Did Saruman’s Uruk-hai Come Out of Pods?
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