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Location
Weatherford, Oklahoma
Document Type
Paper
Event Website
https://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-54.htm
Start Date
26-7-2026 3:30 PM
End Date
26-7-2026 4:20 PM
Description
J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs are perhaps his most exported creations, having become stereotypical antagonists of fantasy games, hewn down in countless dungeons as the evil minions of unnumbered dragons. Commentators have raised justifiable questions about the notion of an ‘evil race,’ though on examination the absorption of orcs into the post-Tolkienian genre, especially by writers from the British Commonwealth, has perpetuated a strikingly consistent, coherently evolving notion of what that evil is. Rather than relitigate questions about the admissibility of orcish evil, the purpose of this paper is to document this point of continuance.
Tolkien equates the orcs of Middle-earth to the goblins of George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin – portraits of abject spiritual disengagement. Tolkien galvanises this idea, presenting orcish evil as a deficit of redeeming moral effort. British publishers Games Workshop have developed his notion further. The company adopted Tolkien’s orcs into its Warhammer 40,000 mythos in 1987, initially as caricatures of British football hooligans, a characterisation which merits comparison with MacDonald and Tolkien’s depiction of orcs as examples of moral sloth.
This characterisation has developed as Warhammer 40,000 has evolved into an avowedly gothic fantasy milieu. Rather than displaying the masochism typical of Warhammer’s humans, Warhammer ‘orks’ display precisely the sadism which sees characters in gothic fantasy absorbed into the dystopia against which they seek to assert themselves, preserving Tolkien’s depiction and refining to the needs a specific subgenre of fantasy. This evolution is particularly evident in the orkish “Kult ofSpeed” depicted in Warhammer’s “Third War for Armageddon” event in 2000, who display clear influence by the savage cinema of Australian director George Miller – another dystopia focusing attention on the concept of moral engagement. The road from George MacDonald’s fairytales through Tolkienian mythopoeia to modern, commercially-driven 'dark’ fantasy thus preserves and refines a coherent literary theme.
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Included in
The Road to Armageddon; Commonwealth Orcs, 1872-2000
Weatherford, Oklahoma
J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs are perhaps his most exported creations, having become stereotypical antagonists of fantasy games, hewn down in countless dungeons as the evil minions of unnumbered dragons. Commentators have raised justifiable questions about the notion of an ‘evil race,’ though on examination the absorption of orcs into the post-Tolkienian genre, especially by writers from the British Commonwealth, has perpetuated a strikingly consistent, coherently evolving notion of what that evil is. Rather than relitigate questions about the admissibility of orcish evil, the purpose of this paper is to document this point of continuance.
Tolkien equates the orcs of Middle-earth to the goblins of George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin – portraits of abject spiritual disengagement. Tolkien galvanises this idea, presenting orcish evil as a deficit of redeeming moral effort. British publishers Games Workshop have developed his notion further. The company adopted Tolkien’s orcs into its Warhammer 40,000 mythos in 1987, initially as caricatures of British football hooligans, a characterisation which merits comparison with MacDonald and Tolkien’s depiction of orcs as examples of moral sloth.
This characterisation has developed as Warhammer 40,000 has evolved into an avowedly gothic fantasy milieu. Rather than displaying the masochism typical of Warhammer’s humans, Warhammer ‘orks’ display precisely the sadism which sees characters in gothic fantasy absorbed into the dystopia against which they seek to assert themselves, preserving Tolkien’s depiction and refining to the needs a specific subgenre of fantasy. This evolution is particularly evident in the orkish “Kult ofSpeed” depicted in Warhammer’s “Third War for Armageddon” event in 2000, who display clear influence by the savage cinema of Australian director George Miller – another dystopia focusing attention on the concept of moral engagement. The road from George MacDonald’s fairytales through Tolkienian mythopoeia to modern, commercially-driven 'dark’ fantasy thus preserves and refines a coherent literary theme.
https://dc.swosu.edu/mythcon/mc54/schedule/31
