Medieval Thought and "Monstrous Races"

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that: “any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.”3 Fear of racial difference has been embodied through monsters for centuries, and the idea of “monstrous races” stretches back to the Classical Era. Medieval thought “created strong links between physical and non-physical characteristics among different human groups,” and used discourses of monstrosity to represent, for example, Jews, Mongols, and Muslims.4 From the Early Modern era as European powers expanded their imperial holdings increasingly widely, “monsters sustained the ongoing conceptualization of the unknown that was a prerequisite to conquest and colonization.”5 In the nineteenth century, during the height of European imperialism, Gothic monsters such as werewolves at times took on racial dimensions,6 while in contemporary popular culture vampires,7 zombies,8 and aliens9 have also variously had such discourses attached to them. Postcolonial resistance is also widely expressed through appropriation of monsters and monstrosity, or it re-appropriation where colonial discourses have created monsters where they did not exist before.10 Vampires, werewolves, zombies, and aliens  are mutable, embodying fears around gender, sexuality, class, and politics to name just a few, but orcs are always racial monsters, even on the occasions that they also intersect with other identify constructs.

Orcs in Fantasy came into existence through Tolkien’s imagination and have been transplanted into countless worlds outside Middle-earth. In Middle-earth they are a monstrous Other constructed through racial discourses. They are: somatically different to the White Self of the Fellowship; part of a millennium-old Western cultural discourse that Others the East and its people; and the embodiment of racial logics and stereotypes, and the perceived threat of miscegenation. They are the prototypes for the massed armies of evil’s foot-soldiers which swarm the worlds of High Fantasy under different names; from the moredhel of Raymond E. Feist’s Midkemia to the urgach and svart alfar of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar, and also appear under their own name in a great array of Fantasy.