Blood for Bacon - Another Ecology of the Orc For Old School Campaigns

Much of what follows in my wake is taken from the Wiki entry on orcs
Ever since I was growing up going up in the Seventies I've been hearing about how 'orcs are racist' & how its wrong to paint them as merely evil's cogs & parts that act as a mechanism for slaughter of PC's & the forces that commit genocide on campaign settings. To which I say, "bull shite". Orcs have been with the grand game since its beginning in original Dungeons & Dragons. I know that these have been there because I've had countless PC's slaughtered by the Porky Pig faced bastards. But the origins of these pig faced horrors goes back into the dark recesses of mythology besides Tolkien;"Tolkien began the modern use of the English term "orc" to denote a race of evil, humanoid creatures. His earliest Elvish dictionaries include the entry Ork (orq-) "monster", "ogre", "demon", together with orqindi and "ogresse". He sometimes used the plural form orqui in his early texts.^[f] He stated that the Elvish words for orc were derived from a root ruku, "fear, horror"; in Quenya, orco, plural orkor; in Sindarin orch, plurals yrch and Orchoth (as a class).^{[T 2][T 1]} They had similar names in other Middle-earth languages: uruk in Black Speech (restricted to the larger soldier-orcs);^{[T 1]} in the language of the Drúedain gorgûn, "ork-folk"; in Khuzdul rukhs, plural rakhâs; and in the language of Rohan and in the Common Speech, orka.^{[T 2]}

Tolkien stated in a letter to the novelist Naomi Mitchison that his Orcs had been influenced by George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin.^{[T 1]} He explained that his "orc" was "derived from Old English orc 'demon', but only because of its phonetic suitability",^{[T 3]} and

I originally took the word from Old English orc (Beowulf 112 orc-neas and the gloss orc: þyrs ('ogre'), heldeofol ('hell-devil')).^[g] This is supposed not to be connected with modern English orc, ork, a name applied to various sea-beasts of the dolphin order".^{[T 4]}

Tolkien also observed a connection with the Latin word orcus, noting that "the word used in translation of Q[uenya] urko, S[indarin] orch is Orc. But that is because of the similarity of the ancient English word orc, 'evil spirit or bogey', to the Elvish words. There is possibly no connextion (sic) between them."
That's right going all of the way back into the beginning of Tolkien's work. But for me orcs have always been the 'other'. The other in this instance isn't a particular race,person, or thing but something utterly alien. Orcs to me are the inversion of mankind & a mockery of everything that it means to be human. This all comes down for me in Gary Gygax's B2 Keep on the Borderlands. 

Orcs are the evil monsters that along with a slew of other evil humanoid monsters in the Caves of Chaos are intent on slaughtering every human they can get a hold of. Its almost as though the orcs were created & bred for murder whole cloth. And that's exactly what they are. Don't believe me?! Again from the wiki on orcs; 


"The scholars of English literature William N. Rogers II and Michael R. Underwood note that a widespread element of late 19th century Western culture was fear of moral decline and degeneration; this led to eugenics.^[17] In The Two Towers, the Ent Treebeard says:^{[T 16]}

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!^{[T 16]}

The film-maker Andrew Stewart, writing in CounterPunch, cites this speech as an instance of "mid-twentieth century scientific racism .. which alarmingly spells out the notion of 'race mixing' as a great sin".^[18] Stewart notes, too, that the geography of Middle-earth deliberately pits the good West against the evil East;^[18] John Magoun, writing in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, concurs, supposing that Middle-earth has a "moral geography".^[16] Any moral bias towards a north-western geography, however, was directly addressed by Tolkien himself in a letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who had recently interviewed him in 1967:

Auden has asserted that for me 'the North is a sacred direction'. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man's home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not 'sacred', nor does it exhaust my affections. I do have, for instance, a particular fondness for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil [ie. Morgoth].^{[T 17]}

In a private letter, Tolkien describes orcs as:^{[T 18]}

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."^[19] The literary critic Jenny Turner, writing in the London Review of Books, endorses Andrew O'Hehir's comment on Salon.com that orcs are "by design and intention a northern European's paranoid caricature of the races he has dimly heard about".^[20][21] 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."^[21] He notes Tolkien's own description of them (quoted above), 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.^[21] 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.^{[T 19]}

The scholar of English literature Robert Tally describes the orcs as a demonized enemy, despite (he writes) Tolkien's own objections to demonization of the enemy in the two World Wars.^[22] The Germanic studies scholar Sandra Ballif Straubhaar however argues against the "recurring accusations" of racism, stating that "a polycultured, polylingual world is absolutely central" to Middle-earth, and that readers and filmgoers will easily see that.^[2] The historian and Tolkien scholar Jared Lobdell likewise disagreed with any notions of racism inherent or latent in Tolkien's works, and wondered "if there were a way of writing epic fantasy about a battle against an evil spirit and his monstrous servants without its being subject to speculation of racist intent""

The origins of the 'Orc' for me are much deeper stretch back further then Tolkein & his works of high fantasy. No for me the orcs go all the way back to William Hope Hodgeson's 'House on the Borderlands'.
"The House on the Borderland (1908) is a supernatural horror novel by British fantasist William Hope Hodgson. The novel is a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions."

The swine things that ravage, plague, & harrow the recluse are the perfect demonic Lovecraftian or is it Hodgesonian monsters that would be progenitors for the orc race. These are not a race that can be reasoned with or sat down to have tea with. These are murderous things intent on corrupting, destroying, & ravaging everything around them. Nightmare given flesh!



In 2000, DC Comics’ mature reader imprint Vertigo published a 96-page color graphic-novel adaptation The House on the Borderland, with story by Simon Revelstroke and art by Richard Corben.

The Vertigo imprint version of The House on the Borderland by Simon Revelstroke and art by Richard Corben takes some very heady liberties with the original source material. There's a very good review of The House on the Borderland & the Vertigo version of The House on the Borderland by Simon Revelstroke and art by Richard Corben on the Old Wine in New Wine Skins blog here. 
The truth is that we get a very alien & utterly demonic horror that seems at times to be a reflection of the evil or perversion of man. This is the other that William Hope Hodgeson brings to bare on his protagonist in the House on the Borderland. Wayne Douglas Barlow does an incredible job in his Barlowe's Guide to Fantasy portraying the Swine Things. Its implied in The House on the Borderland & The Hog both by William Hope Hodgeson that the Swine Things are appendages for some greater cosmic being or god.

For my campaigns the swine things are the 'other' & their rutting, invading, etc. are the source for the orc infestation across the multiverse. Want an OSR set of stats for the Swine Things the Throne of Salt blog has those here.  How are the orcs getting across planes?! Wizards, dark clerics, necromancers,etc. use the essence of the Swine Things & then begin spawning orcs in gene pools & the like. These things are programmed for destruction straight outta the artificial womb. They don't care about the niceties of mankind only its destruction!
“I’ve heard it. A sort of swinish clamouring melody that grunts and roars and shrieks in chunks of grunting sounds, all tied together with squealings and shot through with pig howls. I’ve sometimes thought there was a definite beat in it; for every now and again there comes a gargantuan GRUNT, breaking through the million pig-voiced roaring—a stupendous GRUNT that comes in with a beat. Can you understand me?”William Hope Hodgson’s “The Hog,” first published in Weird Tales in 1947 but certainly written much earlier since the author died in 1918.

Orcs are not simply evil but the essence of it. Their life is anti nature & they are hell bent on your PC's destruction. Make no bones about it. There's no racism about it only bloodshed, murder, & mayhem of any adventuring party that enters their domain. And if you think that this has nothing to do with Tolkien may I refer back to the orc wiki entry & what follows;"The Tolkien critic Tom Shippey writes that the orcs in The Lord of the Rings were almost certainly created just to equip Middle-earth with "a continual supply of enemies over whom one need feel no compunction",^[24] or in Tolkien's words from The Monsters and the Critics "the infantry of the old war" ready to be slaughtered.^[24] Shippey states that all the same, orcs share the human concept of good and evil, with a familiar sense of morality, though he notes that, like many people, orcs are quite unable to apply their morals to themselves. In his view, Tolkien, as a Roman Catholic, took it as a given that "evil cannot make, only mock", so orcs could not have an equal and opposite morality to that of men or elves.^[25] Shippey notes that in The Two Towers, the orc Gorbag disapproves of the "regular elvish trick" of seeming to abandon a comrade, as he wrongly supposes Sam has done with Frodo. Shippey describes the implied view of evil as Boethian, that evil is the absence of good; he notes however that Tolkien did not agree with that point of view, believing that evil had to be actively combatted, with war if necessary, the Manichean position"

There's good reason to slaughter those Pork Pig faced bastards in your Dungeons & Dragons games. Don't let orcs gain an inch in your campaigns or you may be dealing with a far greater & deadlier evil then your party of adventurers expects!


Otherworld Miniatures Orc Warband 

The OSR Campaign Apocalyse - The Battle Lines of Ragnarok

When I wrote about Algernon Henry Blackwood's blog entry yesterday I wrote about his reality of fiction merely being the beach head into our world. In the far future the opening chess moves for the battle of humanity's place in the multiverse & its very soul's very existence. Ragnarok is not merely one event but a multitude of mini events leading up to the final confrontations;
The völva describes the state of humanity:

Brœðr muno beriaz ok at bǫnom verða[z] muno systrungar sifiom spilla. Hart er í heimi, hórdómr mikill —skeggǫld, skálmǫld —skildir ro klofnir— vindǫld, vargǫld— áðr verǫld steypiz. Mun engi maðr ǫðrom þyrma.	Brothers will fight and kill each other, sisters' children will defile kinship. It is harsh in the world, whoredom rife —an axe age, a sword age —shields are riven— a wind age, a wolf age— before the world goes headlong. No man will have mercy on another.
—Old Norse[14]	—English translation[14]

This brings me to William Hope Hodgson's House On The Borderlands, Hodgson was a contemporary of Algernon Henry Blackwood. The novel The House On The Borderland transcends mostly anything that H.P Lovecraft put out. And the cosmic themes of the novel are very close to the weird tales material that Arthur Machen wrote. 
We are merely tenants on this Earth & there have been multitudes of races before us many of which weren't human & these were very alien beings. These are the themes of these giants of the literature of the weird tale whose boundaries cross the definitions of science fiction, fantasy, horror, & cosmic horror spun.The House On The Borderland  weaves these themes into " a hallucinatory account of a recluse's stay at a remote house, and his experiences of supernatural creatures and otherworldly dimensions."

Sunrise in the Woods By George Inness

The Ragnarok comes in the last great days of the Earth when the heroes & gods of Earth are murdered & killed across countless cultures. Among countless worlds this happens  in the far future of Earth thousands or millions of years in our future. The recluse sees the victors of these events in The House on The Borderland;

 

"And then, as I peered, curiously, a new terror came to me; for away up among the dim peaks to my right, I had descried a vast shape of blackness, giantlike. It grew upon my sight. It had an enormous equine head, with gigantic ears, and seemed to peer steadfastly down into the arena. There was that about the pose that gave me the impression of an eternal watchfulness—of having warded that dismal place, through unknown eternities. Slowly, the monster became plainer to me; and then, suddenly, my gaze sprang from it to something further off and higher among the crags. For a long minute, I gazed, fearfully. I was strangely conscious of something not altogether unfamiliar—as though something stirred in the back of my mind. The thing was black, and had four grotesque arms. The features showed indistinctly, 'round the neck, I made out several light-colored objects. Slowly, the details came to me, and I realized, coldly, that they were skulls. Further down the body was another circling belt, showing less dark against the black trunk. Then, even as I puzzled to know what the thing was, a memory slid into my mind, and straightway, I knew that I was looking at a monstrous representation of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death.

Other remembrances of my old student days drifted into my thoughts. My glance fell back upon the huge beast-headed Thing. Simultaneously, I recognized it for the ancient Egyptian god Set, or Seth, the Destroyer of Souls. With the knowledge, there came a great sweep of questioning—'Two of the—!' I stopped, and endeavored to think. Things beyond my imagination peered into my frightened mind. I saw, obscurely. 'The old gods of mythology!' I tried to comprehend to what it was all pointing. My gaze dwelt, flickeringly, between the two. 'If—'

An idea came swiftly, and I turned, and glanced rapidly upward, searching the gloomy crags, away to my left. Something loomed out under a great peak, a shape of greyness. I wondered I had not seen it earlier, and then remembered I had not yet viewed that portion. I saw it more plainly now. It was, as I have said, grey. It had a tremendous head; but no eyes. That part of its face was blank.

Now, I saw that there were other things up among the mountains. Further off, reclining on a lofty ledge, I made out a livid mass, irregular and ghoulish. It seemed without form, save for an unclean, half-animal face, that looked out, vilely, from somewhere about its middle. And then I saw others—there were hundreds of them. They seemed to grow out of the shadows. Several I recognized almost immediately as mythological deities; others were strange to me, utterly strange, beyond the power of a human mind to conceive.

On each side, I looked, and saw more, continually. The mountains were full of strange things—Beast-gods, and Horrors so atrocious and bestial that possibility and decency deny any further attempt to describe them. And I—I was filled with a terrible sense of overwhelming horror and fear and repugnance; yet, spite of these, I wondered exceedingly. Was there then, after all, something in the old heathen worship, something more than the mere deifying of men, animals, and elements? The thought gripped me—was there?

Later, a question repeated itself. What were they, those Beast-gods, and the others? At first, they had appeared to me just sculptured Monsters placed indiscriminately among the inaccessible peaks and precipices of the surrounding mountains. Now, as I scrutinized them with greater intentness, my mind began to reach out to fresh conclusions. There was something about them, an indescribable sort of silent vitality that suggested, to my broadening consciousness, a state of life-in-death—a something that was by no means life, as we understand it; but rather an inhuman form of existence, that well might be likened to a deathless trance—a condition in which it was possible to imagine their continuing, eternally. 'Immortal!' the word rose in my thoughts unbidden; and, straightway, I grew to wondering whether this might be the immortality of the gods."
Its not merely these powers of chaos & evil that wait patiently for the cracks in the universe & the stars to come right. But its their followers that work from within the confines of our own home universes. For example the Egg of Coot whose followers work for one of the multiplicity of pieces of the higher dimensional planar aspects of the entity. An entity that wants nothing more then to tear apart the dimensional structure & replace it with its own flawed order.

Even in worlds such as Bruce Heard's Calidar there are always those who act to unwittingly to allow powers from beyond the Outer Darkness into the realities of humanity. Take for example the Guild of Demonologists. These people have truck with demons from beyond the pale;

"craft is tolerated in Caldwen because of local culture and faith in deities with demonic ancestry. This stance is rooted in the knowledge that the darkest of evils can be redeemed. Demonology does not limit itself to such values, however: it is also about knowledge and power."


Symbol & Seal of The Guild Of Demonologists
copyrighted & trademarked to Bruce Heard.

Knowledge & power are the two watch words that have allowed others such as the Hyperboreans to ascend to power on Earth in the eons  after the events of Ragnarok. Long before the coming of the empires of Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique , Hyperborea was wretched into space.
How could these powers come back into the world & gain such a following among mankind? Through the power of men's dreams & those worlds where they touched. The only thing that prevented the complete extinction of mankind were heroes! Heroes & gods whose sacrifice at every turn secured the continued legacy of humanity.


The Hyperboreans were only a part of the events & after a span of thousands of years did their ancient gods return to Earth stirring even more destruction. The Earth's subjugation under their yoke was dark & very dire.


Hyperborea Players' Manual front cover pencils by Val Semeiks

Heroes & newer gods sacrificed themselves for the fate of humanity as the immortals watched from Mystara & beyond into Greyhawk. Time & space meant nothing to the gods whose lives were snuffed out like candles in the wind of the apocalypse. Only a few heroes & adventurers were left after the cycles completed themselves. They would train another group of heroes as dark powers watched from the shadows.


The victors would sit smug in the knowledge that they would have the upper hand for a while. The ever changing landscape of the planes insured that balance was forever out of reach. Across time & space the next stage was setting itself up. Heroes of course were not confined merely to the dreams of men but across many battle fields.Troubling nightmares plagued the undead dreams of an ageless villain roiling in the depths of a dungeon ancient beyond reckoning.