Your Daily Tolkien Ping! Coming from many sources, these articles cover many aspects of Tolkien and his literary works. If anyone would like for me to ping them directly when I post articles such as this let me know. Enjoy!
Posted on 12/03/2002 2:16:07 AM PST by JameRetief
Real orcs don't do windows
While doing some research on the Uruk-hai, I came across an interesting fact: there were no Uruk-hai when Tolkien first wrote the chapter which introduced them. He hadn't conceived of them by that point. The original title for the chapter was "An Orc-raid".
Well, that doesn't sound very exciting, does it? In fact, by the time Tolkien had reached this point in the story, Uruks (much less Uruk-hai) had yet to appear.
Hang on, as Harry Potter might say. Let's back up a bit, and start over.
While most people know that "orc" rarely occurs in The Hobbit (Christopher Tolkien was able to find only one occurrence, for example, in the first edition of the book), you can still find a few "orc" passages in the second and third editions. What is significant about the rarity of "orc" in The Hobbit (and the near-rarity of "goblin" in The Lord of the Rings) is that the frequencies of these words represent a fundamental transition in Tolkien's thinking about the creatures which menaced Hobbits.
Goblins haunted Tolkien's imagination as far back as his school days. The oldest extant example of Tolkien's use of goblins in literature is the poem "Goblin feet", which was published in the 1915 Oxford Poetry:
I am off down the road Where the fairy lanterns glowed And the little pretty flitter-mice are flying: A slender band of gray It runs creepily away And the hedges and the grass are a-sighing The air is full of wings And of blundery beetle-things That warn you with their whirring and their humming O! I hear the tiny horns Of enchanted leprechauns And the padded feet of many gnomes a-comingO! the lights! O! the gleams! O! the little tinkly sounds: O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes! O! the echo of their feet -- of their happy little feet: O! their swinging lamps in little starlit globes!
I must follow in their train Down the crooked fairy lane Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone And where silvery they sing In a moving moonlit ring All a-twinkle with the jewels they have on They are fadding round the turn Where the glow-worms palely burn And the echo of their padding feet is dying O! It's knocking at my heart -- Let me go! O! Let me start! For the little magic hours are all a-flying
O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colours in the dark! O! the gauzy winds of golden honey-flies! O! the music of their feet -- of their dancing goblin feet! O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies
Goblins are, of course, an old staple of English folklore. They have been there, glorified by Shakespeare and old wives tales, for as long as anyone can remember. And goblins have appeared in Tolkien's poems and tales for as long as anyone can remember, but though today we say with confidence that Goblins and Orcs are the same, that wasn't always so.
In the index to The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, Christopher Tolkien provided the following entry:
GOBLINS Frequently used as alternative term to Orcs (cf. Melko's goblins, the Orcs of the hills 157, but sometimes apparently distinguished, 31, 230)....
The first is from the "Tale of Tinuviel", and describes Angamandi (Melko's fortress): "...Nigh were the sad chambers where the thrall-Noldoli laboured bitterly under the Orcs and goblins of the hills...."
The second passage comes in "The Nauglafring", and describes how Naugladur, a dwarf-king, gathers an army of dark creatures: "Moreover he gathered about him a great host of the Orcs, and wandering goblins, promising them a good wage, and the pleasure of their Master forever, and a rich booty at the end;..."
Both distinctions seem rather ambiguous. Tolkien could have been using Orcs and goblins interchangeably to refer to similar creatures, or he could have been implying that some creatures were Orcs and some were goblins. It's not really clear what he intended at that point.
But when Tolkien wrote The Hobbit to amuse his children, he carelessly threw together many elements from several traditions in order to make his story more interesting. Upon bringing the book to publication, he naturally tightened it up a little bit, and kept the Orcs to a minimum while lavishing goblins galore upon the tale.
Goblins had become, by the mid-1930s, a staple in the diet of the Tolkien family's imaginary adventures. The Father Christmas Letters, which JRRT sent to his children from 1920 to 1943, occasionally regaled the children with incidents (and drawings which showed how the mayhem unfolded) involving goblins, little dark creatures who could bring on no end of mischief.
The Hobbit's goblins are a blend of many creatures, drawing upon folklore, Tolkien lore, and ideas from George Macdonald's The Princess and the Goblin. These goblins do not have to be very serious at all. They capture Bilbo and his dwarven companions but miss Gandalf, who slays their fashionless leader the Great Goblin in the heart of their Goblin Town.
But the Hobbit goblins gradually become more terrifying creatures, partially as part of the effect of Tolkien's story-telling, partially due to the necessity of introducing a convincing menace near the end of the story. When The Hobbit was first considered for publication, it had no ending. The Battle of Five Armies had not yet been imagined, and Bolg of the North marks the first appearance of a major goblin-character (even if a non-speaking one) intended for publication. That is, he was not conceived of until Tolkien needed to present a finished tale to the publisher.
When The Hobbit became a published success, Tolkien briefly aspired to bring his Silmarillion stories to publication. His publishers wanted to bring out more books about Hobbits, however, and Tolkien had to set The Silmarillion (which had replaced The Book of Lost Tales as his primary mythological project) aside for many years.
From 1937 to 1948, Tolkien strove to produce a sequel to The Hobbit which would not only entertain his readership, but which would also interest him. During those years, he used the word "goblin" less and less -- ultimately consigning it to a few passages of Hobbit dialogue -- and "Orc" more and more.
While it can be said that "Orc" sounds more threatening than "Goblin", Tolkien may have had a more urgent reason to abandon the long-used word. As a philologist, he undoubtedly knew the history of the word "goblin", which came to late Old English from Norman French. That is, goblins are not true English bogeys. Instead, they are named for a gobelin, a spirit which is said to have haunted the French town of Evreux in the 1100s.
"Orc", on the other hand, has a very mysterious past. Most commentators now suggest it probably came from Anglo-Saxon orcneas, usually translate as "whales" (because it comes from the Latin Orca, meaning "hell" or "death"). The original Anglo-Saxon text is found in "Beowulf", line 112, "eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas" (Ettins and Elves and Orcs -- descendants of Cain).
"Ettins" are giants or trolls. Elves are, in the Christian view, evil creatures. Orcs are impossible to describe, except that they must be fairy creatures familiar to the audience of the Beowulf poet. Some people today (and perhaps even Tolkien) suggest they may have been spirits or demons (although ascribing a descent from Cain thus makes no sense). However, if an Orc is a spirit or demon, and a goblin is a malevolent spirit, then substituting Orc for Goblin starts to make sense.
So, at some point in his development of Middle-earth, Tolkien may have decided to abandon "goblin" in favor of "Orc" because "goblin" had a tainted linguistic history (Tolkien was not very fond of the French language).
And here things become interesting, because even though he had suggested some changes be made to The Hobbit in 1947 to make it more compatible with The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien seems to have begun experimenting with Hobbit-related matters prior to that time.
For example, in Note 35 for "The Ring Goes South", published in The Return of the Shadow, Christopher pauses to reflect on his father's use of "Orcs" in the following passage (where the Fellowship discuss the Mines of Moria):
'They are not far away,' said the wizard. They are in these mountains. They were made by the Dwarves of Durin's clan many hundreds of years ago, when elves dwelt in Hollin, and there was peace between the two races. In those ancient days Durin dwelt in Caron-dun, and there was traffic on the Great River. But the Goblins -- fierce orcs in great number -- drove them out after many wars, and most of the dwarves that escaped removed into the far North....
The note reads thus:
35 This is not the first use of the word Orcs in the LR papers: Gandalf refers to 'orcs and goblins' among the servants of the Dark Lord, pp. 211, 364; cf. also pp. 187, 320. But the rarity of the usage at this stage is remarkable. The word Orc goes back to the Lost Tales, and had been pervasive in all of my father's subsequent writings. In the Lost Tales the two terms were used as equivalents, though sometimes apparently distinguished (see II. 364, entry Goblins). A clue may be found in a passage that occurs in both the earlier and the later Quenta (IV. 82, V. 233): 'Goblins they may be called, but in ancient days they were strong and fell.' At this stage it seems that 'Orcs' are to be regarded as a more formidable kind of 'Goblin'; so in the preliminary sketch for 'The Mines of Moria' (p. 443) Gandalf says 'there are goblins -- of a very evil kind, larger than usual, real orcs.' -- It is incidentally notable that in the first edition of The Hobbit the word Orcs is used only once (at the end of Chapter VII 'Queer Lodgings'), while in the published LR goblins is hardly ever used.
In writing the first version of "The Bridge of Khazad-dum", Tolkien had Gandalf describe what he saw when he looked out from the Chamber of Mazarbul (just as Gandalf does in the final version of the story): "'There are goblins: very many of them,' he said. 'Evil they look and large: black Orcs....'"
The "black Orcs" phrase was eventually replaced by "black Uruks from Mordor", but it would not be until he was revising "An Orc-raid" months later that Tolkien would devise the name "Urukhai" and decide that some Orcs, larger than others, would be called the Uruks. And yet, the importance of the Uruks remained to be capped off in the appendices, which Tolkien did not begin working on until 1950 (two years after he completed the primary text for The Lord of the Rings).
In the earliest versions of "The Heirs of Elendil" and "The Tale of Years", there are no mentions of Uruks, which in the published book are said to have first appeared in the reign of Denethor I, Ruling Steward of Gondor. All Tolkien says of them is "in the last years of Denethor I the race of uruks, black orcs of great strength, first appeared out of Mordor, and in 2475 they swept across Ithilien and took Osgiliath...." (Lord of the Rings, Appendix A)
In Appendix F, Tolkien discussed the Orcs and the Black Speech. In the first paragraph, he wrote:
Orc is the form of the name that other races had for this foul people as it was in the language of Rohan. In Sindarin it was orch. Related, no doubt, was the word uruk of the Black Speech, though this was applied as a rule only to the great soldier-orcs that at this time issued from Mordor and Isengard. The lesser kinds were called, especially by the Uruk-hai, snaga 'slave'.
Tolkien thus asserts that he has used the Old English word, orcneas, to represent the Rohirric word for the Orcs. The transition from goblin to orc is complete, but not from Hobgoblin to Uruk.
That is, in The Hobbit, Tolkien used the word "hobgoblin" as a name for larger Orcs. But in English folklore, a hobgoblin is a small goblin, not a large one (in fact, they were supposed to be household sprites). Tolkien was, in effect, turning English folklore upside down, asserting that the worst goblins, the real orcs, were the hobgoblins.
In a way, Tolkien was correcting a mistake. He transformed his goblins, malicious little sprites, into Orcs, fell creatures sent out from Angband (Hell). But he also elevated his hobgoblins (larger Orcs) by distinguishing them as "goblins of the hills" and "Orcs of the mountains". They were not household sprites like Robin Goodfellow. They were Uruks.
Furthermore, the Uruks became nasty, deadly, serious monsters capable of inspiring awe and fear even in their greatest foes. Uruks did not drool like George Macdonald's goblins, did not have pittery-pattery little feet, and they were not even the least bit friendly to men or the friends of men. Uruks are the most evil and malevolent of Orcs, corrupted as far as evil overlords can take them, retaining only the barest essential human qualities of courage, loyalty, friendship, and (in the case of Saruman's Uruk-hai) pride.
And Tolkien did make them very man-like, even pointing out their physical similarities to men. He wanted nothing to make the Uruks look like little fairy creatures. Nor did he want anyone to associate the Uruks with phantoms and ghosts, such as might haunt medieval French towns. The Uruks were very real, so real that Gandalf did not (in the published text) have to call them "real Orcs".
Yet Tolkien's fascination with "real Orcs" did not end with The Lord of the Rings. He hinted very strongly in the abandoned sequel to LoTR, The New Shadow, that Orcs had become little more than a memory haunting Dunadan history and sensibility in the Fourth Age Gondor. Boys played at being Orcs, having no real idea of the harm Orcs had once inflicted.
In the space of a few generations, Tolkien supposed, the memory of "real Orcs" had faded and been replaced by a more playful concept. And how like true English history might that have seemed to him? Beowulf's Orc was forgotten and replaced in the popular imagination by a French goblin. But who shall ever forget the Uruks?
Author: Michael Martinez
Published on: November 29, 2002
Michael Martinez is the author of Visualizing Middle-earth
Your Daily Tolkien Ping! Coming from many sources, these articles cover many aspects of Tolkien and his literary works. If anyone would like for me to ping them directly when I post articles such as this let me know. Enjoy!
11) He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water by Michael Martinez
12) All About Sam by Quickbeam
13) Count, count, weigh, divide by Michael Martinez
14) Real orcs don't do windows by Michael Martinez
 Ring Ping!! |
"And now it is clear that [Saruman] is a black traitor. He has taken up with foul folk, with the Orcs. Brm, hoom! Worse than that: he has been doing something to them; something dangerous. For these Isengarders are more like wicked Men. 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!"
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.