Neandertal's? 'dem dere's orcs!!!

[mythusmage]

Isn't that from Orlando Furioso? I don't think that incident is in the original Chanson. Ariosto obviously meant the "orc" to be a sea monster there too, so it's probably not very directly related. Tolkein himself said he got it from Old English.

No, it's been used in some versions of the Chason de Roland.

Over time words do get used in different ways. For sea monsters for example, as in Furious Roland. Since Old English is a Germanic tongue (via Saxon and old Frisian) it doesn't surprise me it would include some very old Germanic words.

The Germanic language group has a long history.

Now Professor Tolkien's innovation was using orc as a word for goblin. Goblins were monsters in children's stories. Orc sounded much more adult. It was the good professor's purpose to have his history taken as an adult work, not a children's work. And orc is a harsh word.

BTW, have you ever noticed how much Orcish or Dark Speech resembles Sumerian? The first major discoveries regarding the civilization were made about the time Tolkien started working on his book, and being a man with a deep interest in antiquities he may have read up on the new findings.

 

[tarchon]

No, it's been used in some versions of the Chason de Roland.

Really? Which ones?

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

For one thing, orcs don't really have a lot in the way of mythological roots. Until Tolkein, 'orc' was just a generic word for monster or demon. (hence orcus and orca).

Heh. How fitting that in Shadowrun, oni are a Japanese variation of orks.

In any case, I rather severely dislike introducing the concept of evolution into fantasy campaign settings. My rule is, theories and fields of inquiry not developed by the time that the setting most resembles simply do not exist-- and evolution and genetics came around in the 16th and 19th centuries, respectively.

In my games, the main sentient, mortal races were created by their respective deities (unless their creation myths read otherwise) and the reasons that some can interbreed and some cannot are purely mystical, relating to those creator deities and their wishes. Generally, it means that medium-sized humanoid creatures can produce offspring with Humans, but not with each other, since Humans are a kind of baseline or intermediary between the other humanoids.

It also means that Neanderthals (and other protohumans) simply do not exist.

 

[wingsandsword]

I always figured that legends of Orcs came from outsiders views of the Celts or of distant memories of the Picts. A foriegn culture of a people seen as incredibly, subhumanly barbaric, with a tongue incomprehensible to civilized folk, who fight with unheard of rage and fury, live in what seems to be clan/tribal organizations, and even have bizarre skin coloring (thanks to woad).

Roman tales of barbarians with their strange skin and uncivilized furious fighting slowly morphed thoughout the dark ages into folklore of Orcs, or that's how I always presumed it (and when I ran a quasi-historic game, the "orcs" were isolated enclaves of Celts with a big chip on their shoulder against the rest of the world).

 

[tombshroud]

There is a sound that all mammals instinctively fear.

It is the sound of a predator's breathing (it had a funny shaped nasal cavity) as it hunted the shrew-like ancestor of all mammals.

Someone found the fossil of the predator (it is quite extinct) and made a tube from a cast of its nasal cavity and blew through it one radio.

People called in to say that hair was standing up on the backs of their necks, that their cats had fled the room, etc.

And of course there is the obvious (spiders and snakes).

My random blather too.

Very Interesting. I am curious about what this predator was. Is there any more information you might have - a name, a link? I would really appreciate it. Thanks!

Has anyone ever thought of having orcs and humans BOTH be descended from Neanderthals? One branched off to become more technologically adept and one reverted to being more barbaric than either?

In my homebrew orcs tend to be larger and more aggresive than the typical MM orc.

 

[Zander]

Orcs as we use them in D&D games come from Tolkien. Originally, an orc was a demon (the name is shortened from Orcus). The orcs in Tolkien and FRPs in general owe their origin to distorted stories of medieval Muslims (such as from the Song of Roland, where they're red-eyed beastmen), Turks, and Mongolians. Ogre, a related term, probably comes from Uighur: the name of a Mongolian tribe. The modern orc was probably bootstrapped from ancient religious and territorial conflicts.

Neanderthals did, incidentally, have brains that were about 10% larger than premodern humans of the same period and probably had high-pitched voices. None of that is very orc-like.

Tolkien described orcs as having mongoloid-like faces (not very PC!) which accords well with your suggestion that they derive from a distorted view of Mongolians. However, it's likely that Tolkien's orc concept was also influenced by a racist view of the Japanese with whom Britain was at war when LotR was being written.

Tolkien also described orcs as being simian (hairy, stooped with long arms IIRC) which suggests that he also thought of them as degenerate/less evolved/savage men.

 

[JamesDJarvis]

as anyone ever thought about have neandertal *be* the orcs of their campaign? It's an interesting thought.

Yup. There was also an article in Dragon Magazine a long time ago that mapped several of the goblinoid/giant-type races to real world primitive near humans.

 

[Particle_Man]

BTW, you might want to check out Orkworld, by John Wick. Gives a look at the culture of "orks" from their own point of view, set off vs. a pseudoroman empire of humans, along with dwarves, elves, etc., as enemies. Tribes, storytelling, etc. Interesting stuff.

 

[Desdichado]

Tolkien described orcs as having mongoloid-like faces (not very PC!) which accords well with your suggestion that they derive from a distorted view of Mongolians. However, it's likely that Tolkien's orc concept was also influenced by a racist view of the Japanese with whom Britain was at war when LotR was being written.

Tolkien's concept of orcs goes back much farther than that, though, and he's specifically and emphatically rejected any such notions of real world "current" events coloring the Lord of the Rings in any way.

It's always been my strong impression that Tolkien's descriptions of orcs had a very strong correspondence with early Roman descriptions of the Huns, and that was the source of the descriptions.

And although technically Britain and Japan were at war in WW2, did they actually have much action together? I've always been under the impression that almost all of the British action was against the Germans.

mythusmage; I'm really curious where you got that derivation of orc/Orcus. Please share your source! From everything I've ever seen of the origin of the word orc (and I've done a fair amount of digging) that background you present is (to put it kindly) completely speculative. Orcus himself is believed to come from an Etruscan tradition, not Germanic. But I'd love to see who came up with that ancient Germanic heritage for the word orc. I also really want to see what other chansons supposedly feature the word; I've only ever heard of it in Orlando Furioso.

trancejeremy; there is absolutely no way that anthropologists could possibly determine that Neandertals were less warlike or aggressive than modern humans other than looking at the incidence of violent death on the skeletons, etc. And based on that, if anything, Neanderthals were more aggressive than modern humans and suffered a much higher degree of injury, although they've usually been interpreted as hunting related, not warfare related. It is true that there have been folks who have succumbed to the temptation to paint Neanderthals as a kind of idealised, Utopian "noble savage" or hippy (heck, Björn Kurten himself did it of all people), but that same temptation has been present with every type of primitive human society, so I don't think it means anything particularly. As to why they went extinct, that's a speculative morass. Genocide by modern humans is the polar opposite of the other popular theory; that Neanderthals were merely genetically swamped when the two groups intermingled. Granted, mtDNA studies on Neanderthal bones in recent years seem to have set that theory back a bit, but it hasn't gone away. And there are other theories out there as well; all of them just as likely and just as speculative, as near as I can tell.

As to (one of) Spooney's original questions, yes, I have quite often looked to combining the roles of Neanderthals and orcs in campaigns I developed.

 

[mythusmage]

Joshua,

It goes back to a book on Tolkien and his predecessors by Lin Carter. Whatever Lin used for his sources did not get included. No bibliography in other words.

Where Orcus is concerned, it's not unknown for gods from one source to get renamed. One thing to keep in mind is that '---us' is a Latin construction, not a Etruscan. In Greece village and town names with "oos" indicate locales dating back to pre-Mycean times.

Where words come from can get complicated, etymology is rarely as straight forward as popular works make it out to be.

And let us not forget that Tolkien mixed things up a tad. Elves were Germans who spoke Finnish while orcs were Huns who spoke Sumerian.