Real Orcs Don't Do Windows - Page 4
© Michael Martinez
'They are not far away,' said the wizard. They are in these mountains. They were made by the Dwarves of Durin's clan many hundreds of years ago, when elves dwelt in Hollin, and there was peace between the two races. In those ancient days Durin dwelt in Caron-dun, and there was traffic on the Great River. But the Goblins -- fierce orcs in great number -- drove them out after many wars, and most of the dwarves that escaped removed into the far North....The note reads thus:
35 This is not the first use of the word Orcs in the LR papers: Gandalf refers to 'orcs and goblins' among the servants of the Dark Lord, pp. 211, 364; cf. also pp. 187, 320. But the rarity of the usage at this stage is remarkable. The word Orc goes back to the Lost Tales, and had been pervasive in all of my father's subsequent writings. In the Lost Tales the two terms were used as equivalents, though sometimes apparently distinguished (see II. 364, entry Goblins). A clue may be found in a passage that occurs in both the earlier and the later Quenta (IV. 82, V. 233): 'Goblins they may be called, but in ancient days they were strong and fell.' At this stage it seems that 'Orcs' are to be regarded as a more formidable kind of 'Goblin'; so in the preliminary sketch for 'The Mines of Moria' (p. 443) Gandalf says 'there are goblins -- of a very evil kind, larger than usual, real orcs.' -- It is incidentally notable that in the first edition of The Hobbit the word Orcs is used only once (at the end of Chapter VII 'Queer Lodgings'), while in the published LR goblins is hardly ever used.In writing the first version of "The Bridge of Khazad-dum", Tolkien had Gandalf describe what he saw when he looked out from the Chamber of Mazarbul (just as Gandalf does in the final version of the story): "'There are goblins: very many of them,' he said. 'Evil they look and large: black Orcs....'" The "black Orcs" phrase was eventually replaced by "black Uruks from Mordor", but it would not be until he was revising "An Orc-raid" months later that Tolkien would devise the name "Urukhai" and decide that some Orcs, larger than others, would be called the Uruks. And yet, the importance of the Uruks remained to be capped off in the appendices, which Tolkien did not begin working on until 1950 (two years after he completed the primary text for The Lord of the Rings).
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