Orcs didn't actually begin with Tolkien. In archaic English, the word referred to evil or dark spirits. Orcus (another name that got reinterpreted for D&D, though oddly with no relation to this humanoid race) was a name for Pluto/Hades, and thus Orcs were spirits of the underworld.
Etymologically, Orcs are likely linked to Ogres, and may more or less be the same thing when you get right down to it. Indeed, ogres have been a staple of fantasy and fairy tales for a very long time. (They also play a very similar role to trolls - I think the giant brute of a monster archetype simply has different names in different regions, with trolls being more Germanic and Scandinavian and Ogres being a little more Northwestern Europe - for the French and English).
Still, orcs were not in common use until J.R.R. Tolkien codified much of how we define them in Middle Earth sagas - though even there the terminology is mixed. Tolkien's Orcs and his Goblins are actually the same thing. (Also, fun fact, the Welsh word for Elf is "cobblyn," so just remember that basically all fantasy races are kind of the same thing when you go back far enough).
Tolkien wanted to have an enemy for his heroes to fight against without feeling bad about slaying them. After experiencing the horrors of World War One, Tolkien didn't relish the thought of having fun adventures about slaying other people.
But he also struggled with the idea that Orcs were still a people with a culture, and specifically how that worked with his Catholic beliefs - that only God could breathe true life into a being, and thus that the Orcs couldn't be a wholecloth creation by Morgoth, his world's Satanic equivalent. Thus, he had the idea that Orcs were former elves who had been twisted with corruption. We don't see any evil elves in Tolkien's works (even his Dark Elves are more neutral) because, well, the orcs are the evil elves.
But after Tolkien established Orcs as a mainstay of fantasy fiction, there's been iteration and development of their character. Tolkien's Orcs were inherently brutish barbarians who killed and destroyed everywhere they went. Indeed, even the 5th Edition Monster Manual describes Orcs as irredeemable - essentially, it says their creator god Gruumsh was jealous of all the territories the other races' creators had claimed, and made his the ones who would destroy and ravage the others' realms. The orcish fertility goddess Luthic is said to encourage incessant breeding, coming just short of saying (though definitely implying) that she encourages rape if it will mean more orcs or half-orcs. The Player's Handbook's guidance on alignment for half-orcs suggests that many of them will embrace their inherently evil orcish half, and that those who don't need to actively remain vigilant against it.
And yet, in modern fantasy, orcs have seen so much development as a fictional culture and trope that it was inevitable we deconstruct and rebuild orcs as a nuanced and free-willed, and potentially heroic people.
Perhaps the most famous example is that of Warcraft. In the first two Warcraft games, the Orcs were very Tolkien-esque. They came from another world and immediately set about destroying and laying waste to the world of Azeroth. But between a planned adventure game after Warcraft II and the significant reimagining of the Orcs and their Horde in Warcraft III, "Warcraft Orcs" took on a totally different vibe.
Yes, they were guilty of atrocities like their Tolkienesque equivalents, but here there was an explanation that went beyond "they're just inherently evil." Instead, we learned that Orcs had previously had a rugged and shamanistic culture - one that was perhaps rough around the edges, and involved a fair amount of violence, but only because they lived in a rugged world where strength was necessary to survive. Within that culture there was a respect for nature and the land, and ancestral veneration. Ultimately, the Orcs were the most promising chance for a peaceful and kinder world, until their cultural development was arrested by what was effectively a colonizing force - demonic exploiters who twisted their admirable value of honor into something cruel and brutal, manipulating them into serving as a proxy army.
The Orcs' story in Warcraft has been reckoning with that past - struggling to let go of the celebration of a period of cruelty and barbarism, and the famous figures of that era, while still finding a way to feel pride and dignity (in fact, the Orcs' struggle to reckon with the good and evil legacies of figures like Orgrim Doomhammer really feels reminiscent of America's reckoning with figures like Thomas Jefferson - someone who inspired much of our conceptions of freedom and liberty while he owned humans as if they were livestock.)
D&D does need its irredeemable monsters - the creatures we can feel no compunction about killing with our greatswords and fireballs. But there is a question now of what monsters are fair game for that. Fiends, who are not people but manifestations of evil itself, feel pretty safe. Undead, who aren't even truly alive, and questionably sentient, also feel pretty safe.
And, notably, a more nuanced approach to Orcs does not mean you can't have a campaign with an evil orc army to battle. Humans and human-like creatures in D&D and fantasy in general are capable of the highs and lows of human experience. Humanity in the real world has had villains that needed to be fought, and even killed, for the good of the world - the worst villains being the ones that have treated other humans as inhuman monsters who can be killed with no remorse.
Orcs were created to be monsters, but over time, they've started to feel more and more like people. And people deserve to be treated with the nuance and complexity that real-world humans do. Indeed, much of the reckoning over this sort of thing in fantasy and D&D in particular is the sense that dehumanizing in fiction can make it easier to dehumanize in real life. We've seen significant re-workings of the stories of the Drow and the Goblinoid races in recent years. Orcs feel like they're due for some cool new lore to give them the same treatment.
Some postscript thoughts:
(Content Warning: genocide, violence against children)
One of the complications regarding the way Orcish culture has been portrayed is our evolving notions of what it means to be civilized versus barbaric. Orcs tend to embody "barbarism," and even positive portrayals can lean into the "noble savage" trope, which is problematic in its own way.
I think a good way to explore and expand upon Orcs as a people and culture is to let them play different roles in the world's history.
As Western culture undergoes a reckoning over the effects of imperialism and colonialism (or, I should say, part of the culture, while another part drags its heels and refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing whatsoever) one thing that becomes apparent is how Eurocentric the ideas of "civilization" can be. After all, India was a profoundly ancient civilization before the British colonized it. The concentration of population centers into major cities in parts of Africa contributed to a surge in Malaria that killed countless people - yeah, it turns out that living in small, isolated villages actually served a very important purpose that the colonizers didn't consider, feeling that everything should work on their model.
The result, I think, is that if we are to look for real-world inspiration for a barbaric group of invaders who come in, destroying and conquering a once-peaceful land... well, maybe the British Empire would be a great place to start.
Now, of course, we do run into some double-negative issues here - if we're flipping the script and making orcs the imperialists and humans or elves or what have you into the indigenous people suffering under colonialism, we have still turned around and made the Orcs the evil guys once again.
I've seen some arguments that fantasy worlds shouldn't have things like racism or colonialism - saying that it's such a burden to deal with in the real world, and why would you want to live your fantasy inside that system as well.
It's an argument that I find sympathetic, and I think it's wonderful that people are creating worlds where they imagine these things have never been part of the history.
For me, though, fantasy offers a way to examine these real-world problems in a new context. And it can lead to some catharsis. Most of my dad's family (before he was born) was murdered by the Nazis in the 1940s for being Jewish. Both of my grandparents on that side lost their first spouses, and my uncle Lajos, who was only about five years old, was murdered.
I think one of the great "fantasies" of the fantasy genre is that evil can be directly confronted and defeated. The real world doesn't have entities that can be slain that represent these evils.
It also gives us a structure for our imagination. Imagining a world without bigotry and colonialism is beautiful. But I think there's also a place to imagine how we transition from a world that has those things and arrive at a place where we've moved beyond them.
Star Trek, for example, which is one of my biggest pop-culture influences, portrays a progressive utopia, where the toxic social hierarchies of the past - those of race, wealth, and social class - have been eliminated to create an Earth where prosperity is shared by all and we can turn our attention away from selfish profit and toward exploring the cosmos and our place within it. But that very desirable future (though get back to me on the way transporters work, because I have concerns,) only comes in that story after reckoning with all of those things that we needed to fix before we could get there. The Warp Drive, which both allows humanity to explore the universe and also put us in contact with aliens for the first time, only comes about after a devastating world war. The demons of humanity's past aren't written out entirely in the show, but the way in which those problems were solved is part of what makes the show so hopeful.
Catharsis, of course, isn't always achieved through stories with happy endings. Indeed, it's often more associated with tragedy. Sometimes, fantasy allows us to escape into an even darker world than the one we inhabit. Think about the popularity of Mad Max, or Warhammer 40k, or, to keep things in D&D terms, Ravenloft. Sometimes it's fun to confront the terror and horror in the safety of fiction.
I think the reckoning over historically "villainous" races is more about recognizing that we're all marked with the legacy of racism, and that it doesn't all come in the form of klansmen lynching people. Sometimes it's just the seemingly reasonable assertion that "oh, these guys are all evil."
And, to be honest, this isn't actually all that new. For all the complaints about "woke culture" ruining everything, I've been reading a whole bunch of 2nd Edition Planescape books (like... a lot. I think I've read near a thousand pages by now) and there's nuance there. There are good dark elves and orcs and such. Indeed, one of the central concepts of Planescape is to introduce nuance into notions that a place can be totally good or totally evil.
Anyway, this has gotten to be a sort of meandering rant more than a real argument, so I'll cut myself off here.
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