page_title: Orc
section_title: Alleged racism
hierarchical_section_title: Orc / Tolkien / Alleged racism
caption_attribution_description: English: American World War II poster caricaturing Japanese and exhorting workers to avoid wasting material
context_page_description: An orc is a fictional humanoid monster akin to a goblin. Orcs were brought into modern usage by the fantasy writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, especially The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien's works, orcs are a brutish, aggressive, ugly and malevolent race, contrasting with the benevolent Elves and serving an evil power, though they share a human sense of morality. His description of them has been criticised as caricature-like, even racist by some commentators, though others have noted that Tolkien was clearly anti-racist by intention.
  Mythological monsters with names similar to "orc" can be found in the Old English poem Beowulf, in Early Modern poetry, and in Northern European folk tales and fairy tales. Tolkien stated that he took the name from Beowulf.
  Tolkien's concept of orcs has been adapted and imported into the fantasy fiction of other authors, and into role-playing and strategy games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer, and Warcraft.
context_section_description: The scholars of English literature William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood note that a widespread element of late 19th century Western culture was fear of moral decline and degeneration; this led to eugenics. In The Two Towers, the Ent Treebeard says:
  It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman's Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it. I wonder what he has done? Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!
  The film-maker Andrew Stewart, writing in CounterPunch, cites this speech as an instance of "mid-twentieth century scientific racism .. which alarmingly spells out the notion of 'race mixing' as a great sin". Stewart notes, too, that the geography of Middle-earth deliberately pits the good West against the evil East; John Magoun, writing in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, concurs, stating that Middle-earth has a "fully expressed moral geography". Any moral bias towards a north-western geography, however, was directly addressed by Tolkien himself in a letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had recently interviewed him in 1967:
  Auden has asserted that for me 'the North is a sacred direction'. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man's home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not 'sacred', nor does it exhaust my affections. I do have, for instance, a particular fondness for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil [ie. Morgoth].
  In a private letter, Tolkien 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."
  A variety of critics and commentators have noted that orcs are somewhat like caricatures of non-Europeans. The journalist David Ibata writes that the orcs in Peter Jackson's Tolkien films look much like "the worst depictions of the Japanese drawn by American and British illustrators during World War II." The literary critic Jenny Turner, writing in the London Review of Books, endorses Andrew O'Hehir's comment on Salon.com that orcs are "by design and intention a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about". O'Hehir describes orcs as "a subhuman race bred by Morgoth and/or Sauron (although not created by them) that is morally irredeemable and deserves only death. They are dark-skinned and slant-eyed, and although they possess reason, speech, social organization and, as Shippey mentions, a sort of moral sensibility, they are inherently evil." He notes Tolkien's own description of them (quoted above), saying it could scarcely be more revealing of his attitude to the "Other", but excuses him saying that "it is also the product of his background and era, like most of our inescapable prejudices. At the level of conscious intention, he was not a racist or an anti-Semite" and mentions his letters to this effect. In a letter to his son, Christopher who was serving in the RAF in the Second World War, Tolkien wrote of orcs as appearing on both sides of the conflict:
  Yes, I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in 'realistic' fiction ... only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For 'romance' has grown out of 'allegory', and its wars are still derived from the 'inner war' of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels.
  The scholar of English literature Robert Tally describes the orcs as a demonized enemy, despite (he writes) Tolkien's own objections to demonization of the enemy in the two World Wars. The Germanic studies scholar Sandra Ballif Straubhaar 
caption: Peter Jackson's film versions of Tolkien's Orcs have been compared to wartime caricatures of the Japanese (here, an American propaganda poster).[20]
exif: {}