Is anyone in this world inherently and irredeemably evil?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is the moral question at the heart of the fantasy race known most often as \u201corcs.\u201d They are occasionally called by other names, of course: goblins, tuskers, blackbloods, etc. Sometimes, you will also find different but similar fantasy races filling the same niche: trolls, kobolds, trollocs, ogres, etc. But the thing that ties them all together is that they are both inherently and irredeemably evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026or are they? In some iterations, the orcs aren\u2019t necessarily evil, just savage\u2014kind of like Robert E. Howard\u2019s Conan, or his many stories extolling the barbaric hero who stands against the corrupt forces of a decadent civilization. I played around with that myself in my novelette \u201cA Hill On Which To Die.\u201d<\/a> More recently, such as in Amazon\u2019s Rings of Power series, the orcs are played up as sympathetic creatures, whose only true fault is that they come from a different culture than our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s the thing, though. While I enjoy a good redemption arc, or a heel-face turn when it\u2019s done really well, I also believe that there are some people and some cultures in this world that are wholly and irredeemably evil. They may not have started out that way\u2014indeed, my faith teaches me that we are all children of an eternal Heavenly Father who loves us\u2014but my faith also teaches me that evil also exists, and that there are some in this world who cannot be saved, because they have become sons of perdition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Traditional publishing (and the entertainment industry more broadly) is currently dominated by people who skew to the left in their politics and their cultural values. As such, they are heavily influenced by the philosophies of thinkers like Rousseau, who posited that all people are inherently good, and that evil originates from social structures and institutions. That\u2019s why they are so obsessed with \u201csystemic oppression,\u201d or with stories that obsess over victimization and victimhood\u2014as if being a victim (especially of \u201ccolonization\u201d) makes one inherently virtuous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true, though. I think that some cultures are more virtuous or morally good than others. For example, when Columbus discovered the truth about the Amerindians he\u2019d first made contact with\u2014that they were the remnants of a tribe that had been conquered by cannibals, who had slaughtered all their men, put their women on an island, and were now farming them out for meat, visiting them once a year to devour all their infant children, then raping and impregnating them again before leaving\u2014I believe that Columbus was justified in concluding that the culture of this vile cannibal tribe was inherently and irredeemably evil. And I believe that the world was made a better place after this culture was exterminated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The term \u201corc\u201d has its origins in Old English, especially in the epic poem Beowulf, where the word \u201corcneas\u201d refers to monstrous beings who make an appearance in the poem. Tolkien was a scholar of Old English, so when he needed a name for his race of inherently and irredeemably evil creatures, he came up with the name \u201corc.\u201d Tolkien also saw action in the trenches of WWI as a British soldier, and that undoubtedly influenced him as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is an unfortunate reality of war that in order to fight effectively, you need to dehumanize the enemy. This is true, whether or not the enemy deserves to be dehumanized. World War I was perhaps the most senseless war in history, where the cause that everyone was fighting for was ultimately a suicide pact made by the incompetent and incestuous European royal branches. I honestly don\u2019t know that the Germans were the bad guys in that war (though WWII is a very different story). I honestly don\u2019t know if there were any bad guys\u2014or any good guys, for that matter. The whole war was just a senseless cluster of a catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So even though I do believe that some cultures are inherently evil, I can also sympathize with those who take a principled anti-war stance and say that we should all take a step back and focus on the things we have in common before rushing off to war. In our own day and age, there are many corrupt and evil warmongers who are working very hard to dehumanize the various groups that they would have us go to war against, whether those are Jews, Arabs, Russians, Ukrainians, Christians, Muslims, immigrants, or Trump voters. In such a complex world, there is a very real temptation to listen to such voices, and embrace the view that the other side is inherently and irredeemably evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, there is such a thing as pure evil. There are some people who cannot\u2014or will not\u2014be redeemed. For that reason alone, I think there is still a place in our fantasy literature for creatures like the orc, who are inherently and irredeemably evil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is anyone in this world inherently and irredeemably evil? That is the moral question at the heart of the fantasy race known most often as \u201corcs.\u201d They are occasionally called by other names, of course: goblins, tuskers, blackbloods, etc. Sometimes, you will also find different but similar fantasy races filling the same niche: trolls, kobolds,… Continue reading Fantasy from A to Z: O is for Orcs<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1010],"tags":[458,501,700,636,86],"class_list":["post-21645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-hill-on-which-to-die","tag-good-and-evil","tag-j-r-r-tolkien","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-morality","tag-war","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-5D7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21645"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21734,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21645\/revisions\/21734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}