"Orcs are People!"
Some readings complicating the racist stereotype of Orcs in fantasy (aka: not just Tolkien!)
A list of sources that show how readers’ perceptions of Orcs have changed over time: first, from The Silmarillion Writers Guild: Orcs are People! The SWG does a fantastic job not only of archiving fanworks (all media), but inspiring them (through prompts and challenges), and curating Themed Collections (which are always acknowledged to be incomplete and request that readers provide additional items to add to the collection.
This collection by Curathol shows how some fans have challenged the all too common stereotypes of Orcs as “instruments of evil,” a view that Tolkien’s own writing challenges:
Whatever Tolkien’s final thoughts, his works depict Orcs with an undeniable humanity—they sing songs, chafe against Big Bosses, and even seek vengeance for deaths of family or comrades. Whether by intent or no, they were people beyond being mere pawns driven by a Dark Lord’s will.
Though within Tolkien’s world ‘Evil cannot create,’ it would do to remember that Morgoth was not wholly evil in his beginning. If they exist beyond Morgoth’s will, then by some measure they must also be Children of Eru. Even Finrod argued against the power of Morgoth to so wholly alter The One’s design. While the deepest philosophical questions of Orcs may remain unanswered by the Professor, his fans may, if not restore a lost humanity, firmly bestow one upon them.
A few brief moments in S2 of the Rings of Power series shows an attempt (arguably a weak and rather ineffective one from what I’ve read1), as this “Orc Baby” writer in Vox argues.
The Rings of Power is a direct descendant of Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien’s material, but all the cultural understandings of orcs seem to bear on decisions the show’s writers make. The writers seem to feel the responsibility of doing something with orcs, but instead of unpacking any of their baggage, they ignore the uncomfortable connotations in favor of a paste-on oppression narrative.
It’s almost as if, because orcs exist in such a distinct category of their own, The Rings of Power seeks to turn the orcs into a racialized population. This results in an oppression utterly devoid of context, so nonspecific as to be nothing. It’s an easy win to be against the concept of oppression; it’s much harder to actually say something about oppression. The reason X-Men, for instance, is interesting is not because oppression just exists, but because the mechanisms of oppression of mutants reveal how similar mechanisms harm real-world people — something that was very much on the mind of its creators during the civil rights era.
For an effective transformative work that (in my not so humble opinion!) completely solves Tolkien’s struggle with the problem of systemic racism that shaped the Orcs (and has operated for so many centuries up to the present), I can highly recommend a brilliant fanfiction that I wrote about a while ago: The Free Orcs AU. (NOTE: While Thorinsmut’s fic used to be available for anyone to read, they have changed the settings so that only members (who have an account at the archive) can read it; I presume the reason is harassment which has been a problem on AO3 in recent years). It’s well worth creating an account for although I should also note that the the genre of the story is slash, with some fairly graphic Thor/Azog sex scenes. The link below leads to my article.
Reid, Robin Anne. "Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut's Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien," Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 11, iss. 2 , article 3. Link.
Robert T. Tally, Jr. is the scholar who has invested the most time and work in the Orcs, so anybody writing on the topic should start with his work.
Tally, Robert T., Jr. "Demonizing the Enemy, Literally: Tolkien, Orcs, and the Sense of the World Wars," War and Literature: Commiserating with the Enemy Issue, Humanities, vol. 8, no. 54, 2019. doi.org/10.3390/h8010054,
Tally, Robert T., Jr. "Let Us Now Praise Famous Orcs: Simple Humanity in Tolkien's Inhuman Creatures." Mythlore, vol. 29, no. 1, article 3, 2010. Link.
Tally, Robert T., Jr. Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology. McFarland, 2024. Link.
And, forthcoming, The Mismeasure of Orcs: A Critical Reassessment of Tolkien’s Demonized Creatures, also coming from McFarland, 2025. Link.
I was bored (as well as irritated and grumpy) for the majority of time while dragging myself through S1 (Disa. I love Disa. But I don’t trust the showrunners with her story at all, at all.) So I’ve only read about Season 2, but I am interested in reading good meta and scholarship on the series because I’m a bit weird that way!