This is something I have been pondering lately. I grew up on Tolkien, and his orcs were not super-strong giants. They are described as being smaller then humans, some the size of hobbits, and not especially strong either. Sometimes he uses the terms goblin and orcs synonymously. Other times he seems to make a differentiation between the two. But in any case, his orcs were sword-fodder, always being mowed down by the thousands, which makes it plain that they are not superb fighters either. Tolkien even introduced a new breed of orc - the Uruk-Hai - so that he could have a more dangerous foot soldier for the Army of Darkness. But even they are described as being shorter then men in his books (although Jackson made them bigger in the films).

Flash forward to today, and orcs are all muscle-bound giants like the Incredible Hulk. How did they get from those little guys who always got their asses kicked by the Army of Light, to hulking brutes that wrestle with King Kong for exercise? Was it the Warcraft games? Or sooner?

I am sure that part of the reason for their bulking up was when they started becoming playable characters in RPGs and games like WoW. First as Half-Orcs, which were always big fellas, then as full orcs. No one wants to play the little twerps standing in line for Aragorn to spit on the Flame of the West. So I think RPG makers starting bulking them up, to give them their own niche in the fantasy world: as the hulking brute.

Note that I am not complaining. I am not attached to orcs being giants or shrimps, and I have never had trouble playing them. I am just thinking aloud. Can anyone else add their two septims about the mysterious evolution of the Orc?

Tolkien =/= TES.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Orc

According to the Wiki (which, as we all know, is never wrong about anything) this Incredible Hulk archetype appears to have started with the Warhammer series. I quote: " In the 1980s, another orc archetype was introduced by the table-top miniature war games, "Warhammer Fantasy Battle," a heavily-muscled, green-skinned barbarian with exaggerated tusks, brow, and lower jaw, whose personality is not so much evil as crudely thuggish, often to a comical degree. This style of orc has since become popular in a vast number of fantasy settings and games, including a signature of the Warcraft series of computer games and spin-offs."

Dunno, SubRosa. I never learned anything about Tolkien or WoW. My first exposure to orcs were the half-orcs you could play as in Baldur's Gate II. They were green hulking badass packages of muscle and speed. So. . . TES seemed perfectly natural to me.

+1! I didn't get into Warhammer other than Relic's first Warhammer RTS game. But I liked this "Orc" stereotype.
Also, I think "orcs" in Tolkien's books were simply a catch-all description for any humanoid race (e.g. trolls, goblins, hobgoblins etc...) born out of experimentations with Ents, Men and Elves by Morgoth/Melkor who wanted his own subjects. Or was it Sauron who first experimented on Men and Elves? (Yes. I got into the Tolkien books.)

Of course the Elder Scrolls universe is not the Tolkien universe -- but of course there are similarities given Tolkien's amazing world.

In Elder Scrolls Trolls are quite a bit different too.

Orcs in Elder Scrolls seem to be influenced by other things, as mentioned above. And from the wiki:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orc

orcs in media need to look like big hulking monsters, it makes the heroes look way cooler when they curb stomp them, if they were short, stupid, and weak the heroes would seem boring

Plus no one wants to play a stupid, short weak, character. When i play the "bad guy" race (sounds horrible) i want to be something frightning, or monsterous. Granted tes orcs are far from either of those, they remind me of survival of the fittest warrior clans.

I have no idea I have always though of Orc's as those muscular, rugged people, I know that Warcraft did not have female orcs, the Orc's send out spores or something like that, and out of those spores came out other Orc's been a while since I read any lore, of course female Orc's were added with WoW...then again WoW destroys Lore for breakfast, I still enjoy playing it though! xD
Not sure about Tolkien, read the books but that was forever ago.
But well I believe, since Orc's tend to be portrayed as the bad guys, who will want to squish a small thing, I mean I would rather see the heroes destroy a huge monster instead of a small shrimp!

Hehe, I remember getting my hands on a D&D book when i was little, as well as a guide for the monsters, I made myself a Orc Mage :3, I showed it to one of my D&D playing friends recently and he told me that I will easily be able to pull it off, now to find some people that play D&D

I never knew they were actually small in Tolkien′s books. I have always assumed they were big brutes with super-human strength.

Orcs always remind me of Shrek for some reason........

TES Orcs remind me of Klingons, especially as they're depicted in Morrowind. "Fight Well!"

Warcraft certainly had female Orcs, to the same extent that it had female Humans, which was very little. The early Warcraft games were RTS's, and all the "units" were male, but there were a few female characters thrown in to the "quests", that you had to rescue, kill, whatever. In those games, the Orcs were matched to the human side in capabilities, with stats matching on the corresponding units. An Orc grunt was a green version of the human footsoldier.

Tolkiens Orcs were fearsome by being hordes. They made in numbers anything they lacked as individuals.

TES games have always had races with biases towards specific skills/attributes as part of the character selection so you could roll more variety into your avatar. When you do that you are always likely to get stereotypes emerging (small Bosmer archers, tall Altmer mages) but that also offers the opportunity to make a character that goes against the grain. So the Orc started to become the Hulk when he moved from a swarming cannon-fodder enemy to a playable individual, and the gap in the existing line-up was for a low-magic bruiser.

It would be nice to see a future TES game allow the character selection to dissociate all the skills and attributes from race without just nullifying variety completely. I'd like to play a small, delicate Orc mage with amazing Speechcraft.

Well except the height (mods available I′m sure), isn′t that already possible in this great game?

Then where did I read that , must have been another game though, when I was little I used to read lore of the games like crazy! Hahah xD

What has been seen cannot be unseen... o_O

Tolkien's general orcs (or goblins) are runty, but he also had the Uruk-Hai and Mordor Uruks and the movies kinda cover the contrast. As well as Olog-hai (super intelligent trolls)

One problem that we regularly run into when discussing Tolkien is that he changed his mind about many things over the course of 60 years. The word 'retcon' could probably be used here. One can point to different letters written at different times in his life to support different interpretations of his work. His concept of 'Orc' is of the things he re-thought as he went along. In general, I'd say they tended to get bigger and stronger and more fearsome the more he wrote about them. This same unexplainable metamorphosis happened to Balrogs too.

Interesting, but I cannot for the life of me picture a balrog small and not fearsome!

I'm not sure they were ever small but they were certainly less powerful. Glorfindel, an Elf, single-handedly slew a Balrog in the first age. Gothmog, the Lord of Balrogs himself, fought the Elf F?anor over a long period of time and was unable to defeat him until a second Balrog came up behind and svcker punched F?anor.

When they first appear in Tolkien's fiction there are small armies of them. An army of Balogs the strength of Durin's Bane would almost certainly have decimated not only Middle Earth but Valinor as well. I think it's safe to say that as the years went on Balrogs tended to dwindle in number and become individually more powerful in Tolkien's imagination.

Wow, a lot more responses then I expected! Too many to respond to them all. (btw Renee, see, I made another topic! )

I never would have thought of Warhammer. Tabletop wargaming never really interested me, so I did not pay to much attention to Warhammer back in the day. But it is the right timeframe. The first I can recall having orcs as playable characters was in the game Shadowrun (where they were called orks), and they were already big, muscle-bound bruisers there. That was already in the early 90s though, so a decade after Warhammer started. I played an ork in that game, a rigger named Butch (he had a dog named Sundance ). He was a lot of fun, because I played him against type. He was a shy, sensitive, and very self-conscious guy who got in a little over his head with the shadowrunning business. But thankfully another character (an old merc) took him under his wing and showed him the ropes.

I cannot remember when half-orcs started appearing as playable characters in D&D. The wiki says they were in 1st Edition, got cut, then later brought back again. But that was so long ago I don't remember, and I never paid too much attention to the rulebooks anyhow. I stopped playing D&D pretty quickly anyway, and found better games, like Shadowrun, Earthdawn, the old West End Star Wars rpg, Call of Cthulhy, Champions/Fusion/Gurps, etc... Though I did get dragged back into a 3.5 edition D&D game later on. But that was because it was with a good bunch of roleplayers. The game itself did not matter so much, because the characters we had were so good.

I can also remember orcs before they got the pig faces. I never really understood that. It never did anything for me. That is why I use a mod in Oblivion to de-pig their faces. I prefer them more old-school.

Edit: I rummaged through my closet, and dug out my 1st Edition D&D Player's Handbook. Yep, Half-Orcs are in there as playable alright. The full orcs in the monster manual even have the pig-faces as well.

+1 for reading the Silmarillion. Feanor rocked! That tragic, little elf.

To my understanding, the pig-faced Orcs are from the original D+D tabletop game by Gygax and Arneson.

One thing about orcs as I knew them anyway. They couldn′t be out in the sunlight, right? That′s why the Uruk-hai came to be in Tolkien′s world? Or am I completely off here?

The sunlight did not harm them, they just did not like it. In many RPGs they were given a penalty to their die rolls in sunlight. In Shadowrun all metahumans (elves, dwarves, orks, humans) had to have an allergy. Sunlight was one of those to choose from.

Now some of Tolkien's trolls turned to stone in the sunlight. Like those from The Hobbit.

Ah! I thought it was harmful to them. Thanks