The Mongols made such a tremendous impression because they mass murdered anyone who got in their way. They easily brushed aside the armored knights of Europe. They would have made it all the way to Portugal except for the fact that Ghengis Khan died and they were called back to Mongolia to decide on a new leader.
The medieval Germans called them knockers, and I’ve seen a couple of Youtube videos from mine explorers where they’re down a mile or two and there are these knocking sounds coming from God knows where . I don’t easily get creeped out but something about this did it.
Tolkien’s orcs (and goblins, he uses the words interchangeably) lived in mountains. Notably Goblin-Town in The Hobbit. Here’s the song “Down Down to Goblin Town” from the Rankin-Bass movie from The Hobbit (1977). You know you want to listen to it. They tried using men’s choirs for all the goblin-songs to make them menacing, but they only succeeded in making them sound bad-ass. Go ahead and crank the sound up.
Fun fact: One of the singers of this song is none other than the legendary Thurl Ravenscroft himself. That’s right, the voice of Tony the Tiger is on the bass part.
You go my lad! Ho, ho my lad!
Just like I said - the peoples who invaded Europe from the east. We’re agreeing with each other.
Also also, before I get accused to trying to cancel Tolkein:
“His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from. And if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there… in peace”
This just means that these peoples should stay in their own lands (which is about as common a racist trope as you can get).
Gary Gygax and his stupid, unbalanced RPG should have died out long ago. There were better RPGs in the 1970s, for fuck’s sake. Today’s gamers have no excuse whatsoever. Hopefully that cash grab by making D&D into an app will kill it off, like a stake through a vampire’s heart.
Tolkien’s orcs weren’t black people. They were Huns and Mongols - people from the east, from the distant landmass of Asia.
They’re what medieval miners imagined were making all those weird noises underground. For whatever reason, mines emit all sorts of sounds and you can’t tell what’s making them or where they’re coming from. I’ve heard some tapes from down there and it’s creepy AF.
Oh, Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, that one.
The secret to understanding the Gygaxian mode of thought is not the Wild West. It’s the Wild East. Used to be, western culture’s frontier was in the east, in the marches, basically around modern-day Poland and Lithuania and so. The “Drang Nach Osten”, the drive to the east, was the original civilizing crusade. They would build military forts, attract settlers, make productive farms out of wildland, and so on. Out of the east came civilization’s greatest threats: Atilla the Hun, Ghengis Khan, and a thousand other, forgotten invasions. If civilization could expand far enough, it could eliminate these threats by occupying their land. Gygax the medievalist was obviously familiar with these tropes (which, to his credit, are still to this day unknown to most Americans - but Europeans know them innately).
Joke was on the Europeans, though. Asia extended further east than anyone ever thought possible. The North American continent, however, was not so large and the madlads actually did it.
Tolkien famously hated allegory. He had a rant that was basically, “Does every book have to be a fucking allegory? Why can’t I tell a story and it’s just a story? Jesus, people.”