Did you just look at his name and assume his ethnicity?
That sounds like a fun game. Let me try:
Afrasiabi
Afr - asia - bi
Afr - that makes me he think he must have ancestors who were part of the African diaspora
asia -clearly Asian
bi - that explains why he had to be pulled off of women and played gay chicken with dudes… but doesn’t help with his ethnicity
You could also checkc wowpedia.
The mainstay of horde savagery the orcs are incredibly european coded though… orcs are germanic to a T. Well the original orcish portrayal. Not as much anymore with the bleeding hollow clan and Tanaan jungle.
I’ve heard the theory about LOTR orcs representing Tolkien’s repressed fear/hate for the Germans he faced in WWI, but I don’t see anything particularly German about orc culture/infrastructure
One could argue that orcs represents the idea of individuals being twisted into a hatefilled war machine. More to represent Germany during WWII. With how Sauron twisted elves into orcs can be an analogy to hitler and the german people. Then you got the industrialization war machine of the orcs. Another analogy to WWII. He wrote orcs in a way to illustrate the worst parts of mankind that manifests into one being.
So Germanic that they use Mongolian script …
Warrior raider culture who wear furs, use axes, and are all about wolves. Very germanic. Now maybe if they were horse archers I suppose they would be more Mongolian.
Orcs in lotr represent the perversion of nature and the industrialized war machine that is product of that. As well as being the turning of an age. Tolkein fought in the trenches of WW1 so industrialized war that changed warfare and signaled a new age was something he was very familiar with. It’s right there.
He also grew up in an age when Europe was industrializing as a whole. You can see that influence with regards to the Shire and the Scouring of the Shire at the end.
Tolkien very much loved the rural parts of England that were being gobbled up, you might say, by England’s growth. The cities were expanding and the rural areas were shrinking.
Tolkien literally said he based them on Mongols.
The Hungarian Magyar are 7 clans unified by the one wolf clan lead by a war chief and a shaman. The Orcish Maghar are 7 clans unified later by the one wolf clan shaman becoming the war chief.
They’re yurts.
This is such a banally dishonest conversation.
Golden was the one who decided Garrosh was going to be German Fascist Man metaphor, because in her mind he was the “Orciest Orc” and “when that goes unchecked bad things happen”
Tolkein based his orcs off lots of things. The only statement I can find linking them to mongols is that they live on a steppe. In Tolkien’s letters to other authors he based them off goblins from another author’s works.
His letters literally mention he based them to be similar to mongols and it’s one of his most famous letter because many years later he affirms it again and regrets it because writing a permanently-fallen mortal race goes against his beliefs as a Catholic.
Read more boyo.
He was talking about appearance, and he also acknowledged that he was operating from a Eurocentric viewpoint. He didn’t say anything about their culture, to the extent that his orcs even have a culture.
Yes, I am aware, and WoW in turn based WoW Orcs on this idea + more cultural elements of Mongolian/Turkish/Hungarian peoples
And that characterization (or lackthereof except evil) is what he regretted.
I just think saying “He based them on Mongols” is a mischaracterization.
You admitted he did, appearance wise. Basing something on something else doesn’t require total basing. Odyn is based on Odin but Loken isn’t his adoptive son and give birth to a Horse Wild God that Odyn rides.
What he said is that orcs looked similar (but worse). He didn’t say what his thought process was or whether he had Mongols in mind when he created them. To say he “based” the orcs on Mongols implies a degree of intentionality that I don’t see in that statement from his letters. He may have gone about it that way, but we can’t use the letters to prove it.
He did, in one of his letters.
Look, are we talking about the same letter? The one where he said that orcs look like “degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types”? Because that does NOT describe his thought process in creating them. You’re making assumptions.
He literally says that in response to a 1958 film proposal that wanted to make Orcs bird-like monsters. He explicitly corrected the producer on what the Orcs should look like, what his intent and imagination for them was.