>>3661848>>3661863Falling for obvious bait this early in the thread, are we?
>>3661848>blacksIt's incredibly likely that orcs were made as a vague representative Other to fantasy writers' European sense of Self.
Take the example of Narnia: the only Narnia book I ever read was the last one, and in it, IIRC, the foreign desert people were led astray into worshiping a false Aslan by a false prophet monkey. Sound familiar?
Narnia is a very Christian fantasy series, given that Aslan is basically Jesus, and C.S. Lewis is one of the world's most foremost Christian apologetics, one that my aggressively secular leanings don't actually hate, he was a very good, respectable Christian with intelligent insights.
But that he portrayed Muhammad as a deceiving monkey is no accident. I distinctly remember Peter (or was it one of the other kids) saying, as he got rid of the curved Calormene sword he was using in exchange for a European-style longsword, that it felt so much more proper and ... was it "manly," what he said, or "noble"?
So yes, orcs likely are an Otherized representation, BUT they are likely not the blacks. Likelier, they're something like ... the Huns? The Mongols?
Notice how orcs are always collocated with "horde." You know who is often described as having come in "hordes," across the plain? The Golden Khanate.
And if it's not the Mongols, it's some other barbarian - "barbarian horde," and all that.
I'm not saying anyone was bigoted in making orcs like this (Tolkien was very anti-Nazi). I'm just saying, these stories were made by people raised in certain societies at certain periods in history
But who cares about all this historical speculation: fantasy-races these days have likely lost much of their likely racialist origins, and exist more as cookie-cutter world-building for hack writers who mold their fantasy worlds as closely to Tolkien as they possibly can in everything but his stories' most universally laudable aspect: realistic linguistic diversity.
