Orcs and the "gamefication" of Middle Earth

[Hobgoblin]

I think the point was that most wargamers' notion of the orcs of Tolkien's legendarium bears little or no resemblance to the orcs invented and described by Tolkien.

Yes, I think that's really my point. I have no beef (pork?) with pig-faced orcs and the like; what really interests me here is the way in which gamers see the orcs of Middle Earth through a thick fog of often quite erratic interpretations.

Certainly D&D, Warhammer and the rest of it have had a damaging "backfeed effect" on Tolkien's legendarium. But just to be clear, I think the blame for that lies on the collective of wargamers and other fantasy aficionados making that conflation, as opposed to the "alternative" fantasy settings themselves, or their creators. Gygax and other people like him crafting Tolkien-derived fantasy settings weren't (presumably) trying to impose themselves on Tolkien. The public at large just made it turn out like that anyway.

I agree with this (and also with EvilDoctor, ZeroTwentyThree and Captain Blood that "orc" inevitably harks back to Tolkien to some extent). I think the Peter Jackson films are a good example, in many ways, as the material is approached through the game-influenced miasma that we're talking about. Look at how Jackson turns Gimli into a walking tank tooled up with god knows how many axes - and throwing axes: any time I see a thrown knife or axe in a fantasy film, I hear the rattle of D20s. And look how his uruks become tall, muscular, grunting monsters. Zak Sabbath, the guy who wrote Vornheim, said something to the effect that the third Hobbit film had little to do with Tolkien but was "the most Warhammer film ever".

I agree that it's a pity that Tolkien's image of orcs is less available in miniature form than many of the alternative images, especially the dominant gorillaform orcs (because in an ideal world there would be no "dominant" image). Tolkien's orcs have self-worth as well (obviously! ), so there ought to be miniatures for them, just as there ought to be miniatures for the alternative images that have self-worth, even the gorillaforms.

Yes. I don't like the recent gorillas, but then I love the old C15 armoured orcs - which have little flavour of Middle Earth either. And I think the Minifigs pig-faced orcs are superb too!

I did, however, feel a twinge of geeky self-righteousness when I read someone dismiss Jez Goodwin's sublime Asgard orcs as "not suitable as orcs, maybe OK for goblins"! 

I'm glad that lots of people seem to be enjoying this thread! For me, the most interesting "discovery" in writing the OP was the comment that the tracker makes about the "fighters" (i.e. the uruks) messing up the war. That served to confirm my long-held suspicion that most of the orcs who appear in the pages of LotR are actually uruks.

[Hobgoblin]

This blog post (from the excellent Middenmurk blog) has some excellent ideas of what can be done with the orc trope in gaming. He keeps the Tolkien original in the "Gongs" entry, but explores some of the derivative aspects - and adds some of his own. It's well worth a read.

By the way, the author gets Orknies from CS Lewis, who in turn got the from Beowulf's orcneas - which is where Tolkien got orcs in the first place.

[Steam Flunky]

Thanks for starting this hobgoblin, really enjoying it.
I also consider the GW "Fantasy Tribes" pre slotta as some of the best goblins made but it might be simply nostalgia as they were some of the earliest figures i bought. I did a speed-repaint job on the army a couple of years ago after 30 years and unfortunately changed the skin from black to green (i actually wanted a reddish brown and used a maroon base colour. When you add yellow to make it lighter it goes green and i just accepted it.)
There are 3 or 4 non GW newer orcs in the pictures here.

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I also used to have some of the Ral Partha goblins that are still partly available from Ral Partha europe and partly available (or will be) from Iron Winds in the USA.
The way the larger orcs fight in this crouched position behind their shields used to really make me think of the battles in the tunnel systems under the Misty Mountains and i used have hours of fun in the polystrene tunnels i built for them.



In 15mm the Khurusan Miniatures goblins seem to be very Tolkien in style. I will have to get some as i have the Blood Dawn orcs fromm Magister Militum which are nice miniatures but very GW in style.

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[ZeroTwentythree]

Zak Sabbath, the guy who wrote Vornheim, said something to the effect that the third Hobbit film had little to do with Tolkien but was "the most Warhammer film ever".

I enjoyed the LotR films quite a bit as something "inspired by" yet distinctly different from the books. But I was barely able to make it through that first Hobbit film, and never mustered the fortitude to see the second or third.

I should stress again that my original points are only intended to apply to Middle Earth gaming - and are observations rather than prescriptions! (No one should take seriously a crank ranting about goblins on the internet! Wink)

Understood. I think, as Roderic mentioned, that as the conversation grew, others were referencing the use of orc/orcs beyond Tolkien. And crank or not, I think it's apparent that quite a few of us are interested in such matters. Thanks again for starting the discussion.

[Hupp n at em]

To add another stem to the argument, I'd have to say that one of my formative images of Orcs are from Ralph Bakshi's version of Lord of the Rings, mainly as I would have seen it for the first time around about the time I first read the books. How do we think they fit in with the changing image of Tolkien's creations?

Oh man, those Bakshi orcs. Pure goodness.

[Cubs]

But I was barely able to make it through that first Hobbit film, and never mustered the fortitude to see the second or third.

Wise choice. I didn't mind the first one too much (although the Goblin Town nonsense upset me) but sadly it was the high point for me.

[Hobgoblin]

Steam Flunky, that's a superb horde of C16 goodness!

ZeroTwentythree/Cubs,
I only saw the first Hobbit film too - and that was enough. But the "gamefication" was all too clear in the heavily armed dwarves and the SuperMario goblin sequence - ugh!

This review of a book about gaming makes a nice point:

"All it takes to get caught up in this material is curiosity about why the trolls of Peter Jackson, which are of the high-def world of video games, seem so at odds with the trolls of Tolkien, which hail from the murky, unknowable world of fairy tales."

[Captain Blood]

Wise choice. I didn't mind the first one too much (although the Goblin Town nonsense upset me) but sadly it was the high point for me.

Yep. Adored the Lord of The Rings movies.

Hated a great deal about the Hobbit movies - except for Martin Freeman. The CGI overload really ruined so much of it, especially the orcs. A load of Kiwi extras in rubber suits were so much more believable and frightening than the ludicrous computer game characters of Azog and Bolg.

[Hobgoblin]

For me, the whole Azog plotline was just bonkers. I have no problem at all with cutting bits out of stories in adaptation (I think the LotR films could have done with cutting more of the elves, for example). And I don't care what's added, so long as it's done well. But the Azog bit was just awful - shoehorned in to no good effect.

My main beef with the LotR films was with the sudden lapses of tone and taste: dwarf-tossing, endless Jet Set Will-style crumbling staircases, oliphaunt-surfing and - perhaps worst of all - the scenes with Theoden in Edoras. They did that brilliant bit with Eoywn and the flag, but then threw the audience into some zany kung-fu computer-game scene - and topped it off with an instant haircut and manicure for the king. What on earth was wrong with just letting an actor act?

[Captain Blood]

My main beef with the LotR films was with the sudden lapses of tone and taste: dwarf-tossing, endless Jet Set Will-style crumbling staircases, oliphaunt-surfing and - perhaps worst of all - the scenes with Theoden in Edoras.

Yes, those are things that rankled with me. A bit of a cop-out to chuck in such naff moments of light relief, which just jarred with the other 99% of the movies. Similarly the reduction of Merry and Pippin to almost entirely silly comic characters. Fine, so they come of age in the third film, but they were nothing like such a pair of idiotic nitwits in Tolkien...

[mdauben]

In short, all orcs are goblins, and all goblins are orcs.

I agree with this.  There may be some slight indication of a sort of goblin<orc<hobgoblin hierarch in terms of size and ferocity in some places, but its far from definite or universal and I would not go out of my way to argue for it.  I would just see this as variations within the overall race, rather than a true separate race.  

In short, all uruks are orcs. And all uruks are goblin too!

I'm a bit less confident on this.  Now, there were references for some of Sauron's orcs as "black uruks"  which I think may have just been a descriptive term for a subset or tribe of orcs.  However, to me TTT seems to make a definite distinction between normal orcs and Saruman's Uruk-hai, which are IIRC described as larger than other orcs, less bothered by sunlight (which was considered a common feature of the original evil races) and using more human style weapons and armor.  Also, Gandalf(?) speculates at one point that the Uruk-hai may be the result of Saruman cross-breeding humans and orcs, which would imply they were somewhere between the two races in terms of size and strength.  None of that justifies the big, strapping Uruk-hai of the movies, or course, although they do make for cool opponents for Rohan.  

It’s only later (in Flotsam and Jetsam) that we learn that there were many creatures like Bill Ferny’s friend in the armies of Isengard – and that there were “many” of them at Helm’s Deep. These are the same type of creatures that show up in The Scouring of the Shire – and they are clearly not the Uruk-hai.

Is it?  I always took it that these were just examples of more Uruk-hai with enough human blood in them to pass as humans.  

In the end, despite the endless world-building and background notes that JRR accumulated for Middle Earth, he did not AFAIK really address this definitively, leaving it open for interpretation.  

Oh, and the orcs of Middle Earth aren’t green. But we all knew that – didn’t we?  

In that, we are in complete agreement!  

[Rhoderic]

So... in the (perhaps vain) hope that this thread may serve as actual inspiration or reference for some "patron of the hobby" to sculpt or commission a new range of orcs in the orthodox Tolkienist tradition, what should they ideally look like? As in, what's the nitty-gritty brief that one would send to a sculptor if one was commissioning the actual figures? (To be clear, I'm not planning to do any such thing - unless I win the lottery - but I think it worth going over, anyway.)

Some aspects to think about, beginning with the assumption of "baseline" (non-uruk) orcs:

1. Body shape and size? Based on what's been said in this thread, I'm imagining bandy legs and stooped postures which make them about the height of dwarves, or perhaps slightly taller than that but certainly shorter than men. Would they be the bulk of dwarves though, or more like the bulk of men (who I assume are greater in bulk than dwarves due simply to having more height over which to distribute that bulk), given that their stooped, bandy-legged nature could potentially still make them quite bulky despite their dwarf-like height? Also, is it wrong of me to imagine that their legs would be somewhat shorter but their arms somewhat longer than those of a human? Or that their heads would be quite big but their necks quite short? These aspects haven't been mentioned in this thread (other than the big heads), but they just feel right to me. Agree/disagree?

2. Any clue in the source material as to what their faces ought to look like? Long noses, stubby snouts, or neither of the above? Fangs? Sloping foreheads? Wide, predatory-looking mouths? Overbites or underbites? What size eyes? What shape ears? Should their facial features vary to a greater extent than do those of us humans, so that for instance one might have a cartoonishly long and sharp nose, and another might have a stubby snout? Should their facial expressions convey vicious, bloodthirsty wickedness or more of a cowed, self-loathing misery?

3. Hair? How much of it?

4. Viewing the above questions in a somewhat different light, how much should they look like human actors trying to look like orcs, like many of the GW LotR/Hobbit figures do? I mean, I get (and agree with) Captain Blood's point that the "actors in rubber suits" of the LotR films beat the "video game characters" of the Hobbit films (even if I personally am equally lukewarm to both trilogies, overall), but still, excluding CGI, there's only so much you can do to make a human actor look non-human no matter the budget. You can give him a prosthetic nose, brow, cheekbones, chin, etc., change his hairline and do some other stuff like that, but you can't make his eyes closer together or wider apart, or his mouth unnaturally wide, or make the nose simply go away, or make the forehead more sloping (without the addition of a prosthetic brow protruding dramatically over the eyepits), or change the overall structure of the face to a more animal-like one that has the eyes more "at the sides" and less "at the front", and so on. You can make him adopt a stooped pose but you can't make his arms unnaturally long or his neck unnaturally short. So, given that you can do all of these things with miniatures, should you? To be honest, one of my main gripes with many of the GW LotR/Hobbit orcs is that they look a bit too much like miniatures of human actors in costume. Meanwhile, I get that there's such a thing as overly cartoonish orcs/goblins as well.

5. What kind of clothing, how much of it, and how much variety of it? Some orc/goblin miniature ranges manage to pull off a fairly "uniform" look quite well (especially the Vendel/SGMM goblins), but most of the best ranges I've seen go for a lot of variety. At any rate, does the source material offer any hints in this regard? Would there be a tendency for a specific style of dress, such as robes (as with the Bakshi orcs), or tunics with naked legs, or conversely trousers with naked torsos, or an abundance of furs and animal skins covering most of the body, or something else? If indeed they are clever and technologically sophisticated, does that mean they wear "well-crafted" clothes of their own making? Any indications in the source material of decorative garments? And what about boots, belts/straps, cloaks and other practicalities of that sort?

6. What style of armour and weaponry, how much of it, and how much variety of it? Scimitars instead of straight swords? Axes, spears, maces? "Funny" weapons like flails, tridents and spiked wooden clubs? Bows or crossbows? Thrown weapons like javelins? Chainmail, plated mail, leather armour, or not much body armour at all? What shape/size shields? What general aesthetic of their crafted items (eg. jagged, angular and "industrial" like in the Peter Jackson films, or vaguely oriental, or that iconic Angus McBride aesthetic which Wargames Factory and Khurasan have imitated)? How crude or well-crafted? How decorative? How much of a "mass-produced" look (as for instance with the Peter Jackson uruk-hai)?

7. How many discernible "combat roles"? Should there be dedicated archers or crossbow-users separate from the melee fighters, or is it more of one big mob wherein some of the orcs happen to also have missile weapons? Who (as in which variety of orcs) would the wolfriders be, and would they use missile weapons at all? Also, absolutely no "shamans" or other magic-users of any sort?

8. Keep in mind, all of the above questions have mainly been to do with the baseline orcs so far - the ones that aren't uruks and (accepting Hobgoblin's theory that uruks would have been the brunt of the orc armies by the end of the Third Age) would have been the regular soldiers before uruks came along. So, what is their role "in orchood" relative to the other types of orcs, and how does that inform the above questions, like what size they should be and how well-equipped?

9. What, then, can we say about uruks regarding all the above questions? How would their physical appearance, clothing, armour, armaments and combat roles differ from the baseline?

10. And man-orcs? How do their differences from orcs and uruks manifest in all the above respects? Would they just physically look like ordinary men but with orcish faces? Would their clothes, weapons and armour be more "mannish" in appearance? From a practical point of view, could man-orc figures be converted out of suitably warlike (or thug-like) human figures with head swaps and perhaps some weapon swaps and shield swaps, or are they more distinctive-looking than that?

11. Finally, is there a point thinking about "extra small" orcs as a separate grouping, such as might be encountered as "local tribes" (though "tribe" is probably not the right word) in the mountains, forests and other wild places all over Middle Earth? If so, what could be said about them apropos all of the above questions?

TLDR: Don't really know how to write a TLDR for this one, sorry

[Humorous_Conclusion]

While Games Workshop's LOTR Orcs may not be entirely faithful to Tolkein's descriptions, what they are certainly not like are Warhammer Orcs. If you want to follow Tolkein, you could do worse than just use "Moria Goblins" for every kind of Orc (about the size of a dwarf with squat, bent legged poses) and just not paint them green. Maybe use some of the standard Orcs as "black uruks of Mordor".

[nicknorthstar]

When I read your opening post, I just thought, 'yeah so, we know this already'. As the thread went on, I realised 'no, its me, it's because I've been obsessed with Tolkien for 35 years'.

I've also been a gamer for as long, and I have to say I've still never found a range of orcs/ goblins that fits my mental image of Tolkien's evil race. Considering I've been in the figure industry for 28 years, it's a bit pathetic of me to have not done them myself. Maybe I should start a vanity project.

I have noticed that over the past few years Orcs are starting to have a life of their own in mainstream culture, and it's the 'green gorilla' variety rather than Tolkiens, I'm thinking World of Warcraft in particular. Everytime I see them, I just keep thinking 'The biggest orcs are just man sized!'

Apart from the ramblings above, I thought I'd throw something useful into the debate.

One of the really interesting snippets of information I got from Christopher Tolkiens 'Morgoths Ring' on Orcs was the idea that Orc armies were led by Boldogs, spirits of evil like but lesser than Balrogs, who took Orc form to lead the legions. The histories of Middle-Earths wars talk about Orc captains re-appearing in battle long after the life-span of men.

I've never seen this in any wargame ruleset, immortal spirits/ demons leading Orc armies. What an idea!

Nick
North Star

[nicknorthstar]

Hmm, I wrote my post while Rhoderic was doing his!