One of Tolkien’s letters describes orcs as“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.”
And I was thinking about, 1.) Look at the legs on these Mongolian wrestlers all decked out for a major national wrestling festival, and also 2.) how Tolkien’s racist description wasn’t enough, and orcs have been depicted as more and more grotesque over time. Canonically orcs more or less just look like humans, but that’s not “other” enough so they keep getting turned in to more and more bizarre looking monsters.
Either way, this is what i’m thinking about when i’m laid up with the 'rona. If y’all like wrestling or buff men in tiny pants check out Mongolian wrestling. From what I understand it’s a hugely popular sport there and has been for like a thousand years.
Was doing a bit of reading; apparently the reason the orcs in the Jackson films look all kinds of different ways, with radically different facial structures and skin colors, is Jackson was aware of this description and threw it out. Apparently the idea was that having orcs be wildly diverse in their appearance wouldn’t allow audiences to treat them as a stereotype of any race or ethnic group. Dunno if it’s true but if it is good on Jackson for seeing the problem and addressing it.
Jackson did the right thing there, “accuracy” be damned.
John Howe’s orcs are about what I pictured them to be based off what Tolkien was writing them in the books.
Yeah, I can dig it. They look like people, just different people.
I don’t know if I’d have wanted Tolkien to have finalized his ideas about Orcs or not. Afaik he never decided exactly where they came from. I wrote a short story once set a hundred or two hunred years in to the first age. The idea was that a Man/Edain was riding out to parley with an orc tribe, and it’s been a few generations, and he sees the orcs for the first time and thinks they just look like short men, so surely the accounts of them being weird looking monsters during the War of the Ring long ago were exaggerations. And the idea I had was that with the last Dark Lord and follower of Morgoth defeated the power of evil that held the orcs had waned to nothing and they had gradually become man-like or elf-like, and in time were so indistinguishable from Men/Edain that they all started banging and the two species or races or whatever merged in to each other.
Afaik he never decided exactly where they came from.
In The Tolkien Bestiary illustrated by John Blanche and Ian Miller, orcs are said to be corrupted elves, goblins are corrupted dwarves, and trolls are corrupted ents. Basically what happened to Smeagol and turning into Gollum. As elves/dwarves/ents are sealed away in darkness, tortured, and are given various concoctions and incantations, they are turned into orcs/goblins/trolls. They’re analogous to fallen angels turning into demons.
I’m not sure how canon this is. It wasn’t written by Tolkien himself, but it was an official product published only a few years after his death.
It’s canonish. I think the elves were corrupted to orcs thing comes from a couple of different versions of Sillmarillion stories. Trolls being Ents is related to something Treebeard says, but Treebeard says they were made as a mockery of ents, not from ents. I think Tolkien talks about the idea that maybe stone trolls turn to stone in the sun bc they’re not “really” alive, they’re just cheap knock-offs because Melkor couldn’t really create without Illuvatar’s help. Whereas the dwarves are really alive because when Illuvatar found out Aule had made them Aule asked for Illuvatar’s help so they could have fea and really be living and free willed.
Orcs and goblins is a linguistic thing. I think the Sindarin word for Orc is “yrch”. The hobbit was originally written to be quite silly and approachable. I think the original edition mentioned something about riding a train to China before it was edited to be more clearly tied in to LotR. But The Hobbit uses much less Sindarin and more common english words like Goblin and Hobgoblin, but orcs and goblins are different ways of referring to the same sort of people.
RETVRN
Where there’s a whip [wha-tish] there’s a way!
That song slapped.
Then again most Rankin/Bass goblin/orc songs slapped, like Down Down to Goblin Town.
WE DON’T WANNA GO TO WAR TODAY
Semi related to thread. Follow combat sports. Mongolian wrestling is interesting. They are tanks
Good god. I, uhh… oh, i twisted my ankle! Could you carry me for a bit giant wrestler man?
This got me thinking about the depiction of Germans as “Huns” by the Brits in WWI. The Brits racializing Germans as asiatic “Huns” is certainly a head scratcher. It’s got me wondering what Tolkien thought Mongolians looked like in the context of the ignorance and racism of the 40s-70s. I can’t imagine he knew very many Mongolians, so I imagine he was mostly familiar with contemporary racist yellow-peril propaganda. but then it’s Tolkien so who knows, guy read a lot. *shrug*
It hadn’t occurred to me prior to try to unpack this within the context of then contemporary stereotypes and ignorance. Like it’s one thing to know it’s racist, but what does that actually mean? Like, what was the racial stereotype he was mired in? What was his exposure to Mongols?
Like, John Wayne kind of notoriously portrayed Chingis Khan in '56, which is as ridiculous as it sounds CW: John Wayne in, I don’t even know, yellow-face? The put him in makeup to play Chingis Khan and he looks ridiculous.
The Brits racializing Germans as asiatic “Huns” is certainly a head scratcher.
During the Boxer Rebellion, Kaiser Wilhelm II reportedly ordered his troops to behave “Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their king Attila”. This speech became a lightning rod for fears of German expansion in Europe.
is that you john wayne
John Wayne starring as Big Chungus Khan.
Wearing crop tops, booty shorts, and cowboy boots with the boys
Fuck.
I already saw Tolkien as a problematic favorite where I acknowledge the
from the author, but this is worse than what I already knew bout him.I may as well post this comic in tribute to our orc comrades and their class struggle against the bourgeoisie of Rivendell.
Afaik this is about as bad as he ever gets. Like, credit to the guy, his orcs aren’t actually a racial stereotype of anyone, they’re more a metaphor for industrial warfare. LotR has it’s issues; Monarchism, Hobbits as utopian yeomen farmers, all kinds of stuff, but it’s much less egregious than the stories that inspired it and the stories it inspired. Like it’s smack in the middle between Conan and Warcraft, with Conan being straight up Klan levels of racist, and then you’ve got Warcraft’s traditional depiction of trolls as Jamaican stereotypes, native american minotaurs, whatever their orcs are supposed to be.
Games Workshop did weirdly good by making their orcs British soccer hooligans.
Games Workshop did weirdly good by making their orcs British soccer hooligans.
They also made their flavor of ontologically evil elves into pasty nordic vikings.
rare Br*tish win
The Druchii aren’t really Nordic at all, that would be the Norscans/Norseman. If anything the Druchii are like if a canadian mining company gave out the CIA torture guide as part of the employee handbook.
Games Workshop did weirdly good by making their orcs British soccer hooligans.
Yeh, dat wuz a gud plan, and dat’s why I’m a proppa git for me orky boyz.
I have never seen anything Warhammer 40K related that wasn’t improved by putting more focus on the Orkz.
Though admittedly on the very few occasions I touch WH40K anything, I tend to go Imperial Guard. I’m an incurable sucker for stories about ordinary people fighting through terrible situations
I remember GW did a scenario pitting a planet’s Imperial Guard against a Space Marine chapter, but they fucked it up by going with the most boring possible motivation of “the planet’s population has been mind-controlled including its Imperial Guard, so the Space Marines have to save the day” rather than one of the countless understandable reasons an element of the Guard would mutiny.
Games Workshop has increasingly leaned into making what was once a Thatcher
-era satire of all things Thatcher into a “these space fascists are actually good guys and you should admire and look up to them” pandering effort to sell more Spehs Mehreens to chuddy enthusiasts.As a consequence, the setting is in places ponderously tryhard and pretentious and up its own ass, and Da Orkz is a proppa pressa valve to dat muckin’ about.
I know Tolkien always said his stories werent an allegorical, LotR is still a story about dark forces amassing in the east, coming to destroy the fairskinned blond haired
fascistsgood guysI really struggled watching rings of power because i was instantly rooting for, Adar and his band of merry friends (with chosen names, struggling for national liberation)
I started reading the Russian middle earth story from the orcs perspective (i cant recall the name), and i was really enjoying it until i got distracted
sorry I’m rambling, hope youre feeling better Frank
Those outfits are killer.
Right? It’d be fun to go all around the world comparing the uniforms different cultures use for wrestling. Pretty much every culture has some kind of wrestling tradition and they’ve all got their variation on booty shorts or unitards.
I would like if they were more revealing though
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So, uh, where does one watch Mongolian wrestling (other than just searching online)? Where can we follow this enthralling sport?
In this game called head-up-ass the challenge is to stick phallus shapped rod on head up your opponent’s ass. Some games have centipedes of head-up-ass over a dozen men long.
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