OSR, orcs, and a mini

Today, I was painting an orc and it got me thinking. 

Near TenKeep, orcs are brigands who prefer night to day, like the ravagers in Ferguson-Avery's Into the Wyrd and Wild:

The Wilds do strange things to people, bending them, changing them...For many, the Wilds means their death...However, there are some...who don't just survive...The bloodshed, the violence, the madness, it calls to them... 

***

I'd say Old School Essentials has it right. Orcs are "bad-tempered, animalistic." They carry axes, clubs, and spears. Orcs "delight in killing." 

***

Orcs first appeared in Beowulf - the curse of the biblical Cain. Seamus Heaney called them "evil phantoms":

...the Almighty made him [Cain] anathema / and out of the curse there sprang / ogres, and elves, and evil phantoms, and giants too..." (Heaney)

In Old English, they're called "orcneas":

...ealle onwocon / eontas ond ylfe    ond orcneas / swylce gigantas (line 110).

[...there awakened ettins and elfs       and orcs, also giants... (line 110]

***

In the Lord of the Rings, Treebeard, oldest of ents, detests them:

They come with fire, they come with axes. Gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning. Destroyers and usurpers. Curse them!

***

Once, in burning Dragomere, I heard a bard singing of orcs, hordes of orcs, marching in a darkness spell. The song was the same today, painting one of Max Carr's orcs of Isengard.


 









 

 

 

 

 

 

You could almost pity them. Thanks for reading.


 



 

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