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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 8336333" data-attributes="member: 21169">CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST CLAIMS, IN QUOTATIONThis post proposes a possible pathway whereby the ideas of scientific racists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard could have influenced the AD&D 1e orc and half-orc via very similar ideas expressed in 1949 in the letters pages of the magazine Planet Stories. <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-problem-with-evil-races-is-not-what-you-think.680980/page-11#post-8328766" target="_blank">As described upthread</a> there is a remarkable correspondence between Grant and Stoddard's notions about black people having higher fertility rates and dominant genetic traits, and "fecund" orcs (AD&D 1e PHB) and 90% of half-orcs being "basically orcs" (AD&D 1e MM).Gary Gygax, born in 1938, was an avid reader of 1950s science fiction and fantasy magazines. He read back issues going back to 1940:<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/q-a-with-gary-gygax.22566/page-41#post-708656" target="_blank">Source</a>Letters from Edwin Sigler expressing similar ideas to those of Grant and Stoddard were published in the 1948 Fall and 1949 Spring issues of Planet Stories. <a href="https://archive.org/details/Planet_Stories_v04n02_1949-Spring" target="_blank">Planet Stories 1949 Spring</a>:As to allowing intermarriages that is silly. The victim of such action could not inherit any vigor from the lower race because it isn't there and he couldn't inherit any good qualities from the other parent because only scum would wish to intermarry. Since the term here refers to Negro and white marriages mainly, the following would be the result. The poor child would be neither white or black. What strength he might have inherited from the white would be submerged in the slothfulness of the black... No, the law against mixing races serves to protect the possible child as well and has been observed as far back as recorded history runs. Even the ancient Jews practiced it... It is the law of heredity that the lower must always drag down the higher and a person is a fool that attempts to violate it.Sigler, in both letters, uses the racial slur "mongrel" to refer to people who are biracial. <a href="https://archive.org/details/Planet_Stories_Canadian_Ed._v03n12_1948-Fall" target="_blank">Planet Stories 1948 Fall</a>: "As far as these ancient civilizations are concerned you cannot prove anything by them because the races that built them are not the races that occupy those lands now. They are merely mongrel descendants of the builder races."In JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), orcs are often described as "swart" or "black". Orc-human hybrids are encountered several times. Their creation is a "black evil"  and the result of a "foul craft."A huge orc-chieftain… leaped into the chamber... His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red. Presently two orcs came into view. One was... of a small breed, black-skinned, with wide and snuffling nostrils. In the last years of Denethor I the race of uruks, black orcs of great strength, first appeared out of Mordor. These creatures of Isengard, these half-orcs and goblin-men that the foul craft of Saruman has bred, they will not quail at the sun. Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!It seems quite possible that Gygax took Tolkien's orcs and half-orcs and, probably unconsciously, combined them with views openly expressed by Sigler or his like-minded contemporaries to create D&D half-orc "mongrels" that "favor the orcish strain heavily." (AD&D 1e MM) This post is not saying that Gygax agreed with Sigler.</blockquote>

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