page_title: Tolkien and race
section_title: Orcs as demonized enemy
hierarchical_section_title: Tolkien and race / Alleged racism / Orcs as demonized enemy
caption_attribution_description: English: American World War II poster caricaturing Japanese and exhorting workers to avoid wasting material
context_page_description: J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings have often been accused of embodying wrong or outmoded attitudes to race, but he was strongly anti-racist both in peacetime and during the two World Wars, and Middle-earth is both multi-cultural and multi-lingual, in peace or war.
context_section_description: 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 scholar of English literature Robert Tally calls the orcs a demonized enemy, despite (he writes) Tolkien's own objections to demonization of the enemy in the two World Wars.
  Andrew 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, 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 literary critic Jenny Turner, writing in the London Review of Books, endorses O'Hehir's comment that orcs are "by design and intention a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about".
caption: Peter Jackson's film versions of Tolkien's Orcs have been compared to wartime caricatures of the Japanese (here, an American propaganda poster).[6]
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