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Orc Looks

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Villains

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Alan Lee, Angus McBride, Count Orlok, Denis Gordeev, Description, Frank Frazetta, Hal Foster, Hildebrandts, Illustration, John Howe, Nosferatu, Orcs, Peter Jackson, Prince Valiant, Ted Nasmith, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Villains

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Two postings ago, we were discussing henchmen and, of course, orcs were among them.

While we were discussing, we began to wonder about orcs.  They appear numerous times in The Lord of the Rings, from pursuing the Fellowship in the mines of Moria

image1aamines.jpg

to attacking Boromir and capturing Merry and Pippin

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to forming the initial assault team on Minas Tirith.

image1battack.jpg

But what do they really look like?

Here’s the first description we’re given, a second-hand one, spoken by Gandalf:

“There are Orcs, very many of them…And some are large and evil:  black Uruks of Mordor.”

(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-Dum”)

Our first real view of them comes just paragraphs later:

“…a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail from head to foot, leaped into the chamber…His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red.”

If this orc-chieftain is representative, then, orcs are smaller than men, with dark skin and broad flat faces.  But is this a consistent description?

We next meet the orcs as casualties after the death of Boromir:

“There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

As we know from other references to “goblins”, Tolkien came to blur the words “goblin” and “orc”, where the earlier Hobbit has only the former.  Thus, that compound “goblin-soldiers” really means “orcs” and we see that word “swart”—“dark/black” (like German schwarz)—again.  To which is added “slant-eyed” and the detail “of greater stature” (than the surrounding dead orcs), emphasizing a second time that many, if not most, orcs are apparently normally small creatures.

So far, then, orcs, in general, seem to be dark-skinned and little, with broad, flat faces.  And their next appearance may add a little more:

“In the twilight he saw a large black Orc, probably Ugluk, standing facing Grishnakh, a short crook-legged creature, very broad and with long arms that hung almost to the ground.  Round them were many smaller goblins.  Pippin supposed that these were ones from the North…

Ugluk shouted, and a number of other Orcs of nearly his own size ran up.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-Hai”)

This suggests that there, in fact, at least two subspecies of orcs:  smaller ones (possibly from the north) in the service of Sauron, and larger ones, who are the followers of Saruman.

(There are also large orcs in Sauron’s pay, however, as we saw above in Moria.)

And we might add one more detail—at least one has rather menacing teeth:

“He stooped over Pippin, bringing his yellow fangs close to his face.”

With this much information from the text, we turned to illustrations:  how close are they to these bits of description?  There are many images of orcs on the internet and we ourselves have used a certain number of those images over the years, beginning with this from the Hildebrandts, which we believe must be one of the earliest.

image1hild.jpg

These are mostly very piglike, reminding us both of a wild boar (with a close shave)

image2boar.jpgand of a connection which we suggested some time ago with Jabba the Hutt’s Gammorean Guard—

image3gammoreangd.jpg

That green skin color, both on the Hildebrandt orcs and the Gammorean Guard, will follow orcs through the work of many artists, like Angus McBride,

image4mcb.JPG

and Ted Nasmith–

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although not in this image of the wounding of Boromir–

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and sometimes in the work of Alan Lee,

image7lee.jpg

as well as that of John Howe.

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In place of the piggyness, we see a kind of apelike quality in this illustration by Frank Frazetta

image9fraz.jpg

or this, by Alan Lee.

image10lee.jpg

In the Jackson films, the orcs can range from what we think of as rather batlike

image11bat.jpg

image12orc.jpg

to resembling Count Orlok in Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu,

image13nosf.jpg

image14orc.jpg

to being grossly human.

image15aorc.jpg

And then there’s an outlier in the illustrations of Denis Gordeev, who seems to have read a different version of The Lord of the Rings, as his orcs, whose faces are in the ape category, but who appear to be as shaggy as bears, though definitely “swart”.

image15bear.jpg

image16orcs.jpg

Thus, we mostly see images which don’t really match the descriptions in the books, the short (or almost man-height), black-skinned, flat-faced creatures of The Lord of the Rings, have mostly turned green, come in all sizes, and have faces which range from piglike to batlike.

But does JRRT have any more to say about the look of orcs?  In an undated letter from 1958 to Forrest J. Ackerman, he says of them:

“The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men.  They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned with wide mouths and slant eyes:  in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) less lovely Mongol-types.”  (Letters, 274)

The skin color has changed from “swart” to “sallow”, often meaning a kind of yellowish tint, rather like this image of Snape from the Harry Potter films.

image17asnape.jpg

Much of this description, however, seems to match, at least roughly, the earlier ones—except for the potentially racist tone of “less lovely Mongol-types”.  (We should always remember, though, that Tolkien was born in 1892, grew up in a world in which Britain controlled 2/5s of the earth’s land mass in colonies, and where a national poet like Kipling could refer to those colonized as “lesser breeds”.  This might at least explain something of his approach to non-Caucasian people, if not excuse it.)

Putting aside that tone for the moment, to try to understand what he had in mind in this description, what we come up with is something like this, from illustrations done for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant Fights Attila the Hun (1952)—

image17val.jpgimage18val.jpg

We admit that this is only a rough guess—Tolkien’s orcs, though supposedly derived from elves and therefore more humanoid than most illustrators make them, are probably smaller and perhaps more caricatured or exaggerated, but, at the same time, these figures suggest, to us, something of the barbaric look we believe that JRRT had in mind.

As we’ve seen, however, Tolkien himself seems to have changed his mind over time, turning his orcs from “swart” to “sallow”, although the general impression of smaller, broad creatures with flat faces remained pretty much the same throughout The Lord of the Rings.  So many of his illustrators, however, appear to have had anything from a slightly different to a very different view, making us wish that we could read their letters to find out just where their ideas came from.

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

ps

We do have an idea of where that green skin color came from—perhaps from a misreading of the text, in fact.  In “The Bridge of Khazad-Dum”, Gandalf, in the brief initial description of orcs we quoted above, adds “…but there is something else there.  A great cave-troll, I think, or more than one.”

Shortly after that, the Fellowship is attacked and:

“A huge arm and shoulder, with a dark skin of greenish scales, was thrust through the widening gap.  Then a great, flat, toeless foot was forced through below.”

This appears to be one of those “great cave-troll[s]” and perhaps that “skin of greenish scales” has been accidentally transferred to the orcs?

In a Pukel

09 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Maps, Medieval Russia, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, The Rohirrim

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balbal, Carnac Stones, Cherna, Denis Gordeev, Druadan Forest, Dunharrow, Easter Island, Eored, Ghan-buri-Ghan, Gondor, menhirs, moai, Pukel-men, Rapa Nui, Rohan, Rohirrim, Stonewain Valley, Ted Nasmith, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, Vsadniki, Woses

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

After their mustering and rapid journey to the aid of Gondor, the Rohirrim

image1rohirrim.jpg

have been stopped:

“Scouts had been sent ahead.  Some had not returned.  Others hastening back had reported that the road was held in force against them.  A host of the enemy was encamped upon it, three [4.8km]] miles west of Amon Din, and some strength of men was already thrusting along the road and was not more than three leagues [about 9 miles/14.5km] away.”  (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 5, “The Ride of the Rohirrim”)

image2map.jpg

And so they are camped temporarily in the murk which has fallen over the West—a sign of Sauron on the move.

As they remain there, Merry gradually hears a sound like distant drums and, when Elfhelm, the Marshal of the eored [Rohirrim unit of horsemen] in which Merry and his mysterious companion, Dernhelm, are riding, stumbles over him, Merry asks if it’s the enemy:

“Are those their drums?”

Elfhelm replies:

“You hear the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods…They still haunt Druadan Foest, it is said…But they have offered their services to Theoden.  Even now one of their headmen is being taken to the king.”

Merry follows Elfhelm and soon sees:

“A large lantern, covered above, was hanging from a bough and cast a pale circle of light below.  There sat Theoden and Eomer, and before them on the ground sat a strange squat shape of a man, gnarled as an old stone, and the hairs of his scanty beard straggled on his lumpy chin like dry moss.  He was short-legged and fat-armed, thick and stumpy, and clad only with grass about his waist.”

This, we find out, is Ghan-buri-Ghan, leader of the Wild Men, who, as Elfhelm has said, has come to offer his and his people’s aid to Theoden.

image3ghanburighan.jpg

(We note, by the way, that this Hildebrandt illustration has taken certain liberties with the scene as described in the book:  it appears to be daylight—no lantern—if Eomer is there, he isn’t seated, and there is more than one Wild Man–oh, and the Wild Man’s beard has suddenly sprouted.)

What Ghan-buri-Ghan offers Theoden is a long-forgotten road which would provide a way around the soldiers of Sauron who are blocking the direct route to Minas Tirith:   the path through the Stonewain Valley.

image4stonewainfalley.jpg

What caught our attention here was the connection Merry made between Ghan-buri-Ghan and something he’d encountered only recently:

“Merry felt that he had seen him before somewhere, and suddenly he remembered the Pukel-men of Dunharrow.  Here was one of those old images brought to life, or maybe a creature descended in true line through endless years from the models used by the forgotten craftsmen long ago.”

Dunharrow

image5dunharrowjrrt.jpg

was a mysterious place—

“…the work of long-forgotten men.  Their name was lost and no song or legend remembered it.  For what purpose they had made this place, as a town or secret temple or a tomb of kings, none in Rohan could say.  Here they labored in the Dark Years, before ever a ship came to the western shores, or Gondor of the Dunedain was built; and now they had vanished, and only the old Pukel-men were left, still sitting at the turnings of the road.

Merry stared at the lines of marching stones:  they were worn and black; some were leaning, some were fallen, some cracked or broken; they looked like rows of old and hungry teeth.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 3, “The Muster of Rohan”)

For a moment, this description reminded us of something one sees in Brittany, on the west coast of France, the so-called “Carnac Stones”, a vast field of Neolithic upright stones, now called menhirs (Breton for “long stone”) in long lines in and around the village of Carnac.

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And, just as the use or meaning of Dunharrow is lost, so is that of the elaborate construction of the Carnac Stones.

Once the Carnac Stones—and others like them, both in France and in Great Britain—came into our heads, we were whirled away to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and all of those puzzling outsized heads on less-developed torsos, the moai.

image8moai.jpg

It was not the size or placement of those figures like “rows of old and hungry teeth” however, which made us think further about Ghan-buri-Ghan and his stony cousins, but how the figures were carved:

“At each turn of the road there were great standing stones that had been carved in the likeness of men, huge and clumsy-limbed, squatting cross-legged with their stumpy arms folded on fat bellies.  Some in the wearing of the years had lost all features save the dark holes of their eyes that still stared sadly at the passers-by.  The Riders hardly glanced at them.  The Pukel-men they called them, and heeded them little…”

As the Rohirrim are translated as speaking among themselves a sort of Tolkien-adapted Old English, so “pukel” appears to be derived from “pucel” = “goblin/demon”, which suggests perhaps a quasi-religious or magical use, but, if they once represented spirits, they are now spiritless, with no ability to frighten.  Rather, as the narrator tells us:

“…no power or terror was left in them; but Merry gazed at them with wonder and a feeling almost of pity, as they loomed up mournfully in the dusk.”

The narrator’s elaboration then reminded us of something else:  balbal.

image9balbal.jpg

image9bbalbal.jpg

These are carved stone figures with a history probably as long as that of the Pukel-men.  They appear to be the product of Turkic peoples in Central Asia—with even older relatives, perhaps, to the west, as well.  Some may have been tomb guardians or monuments themselves—as with the Pukel-men, their origins and use/s are lost to us.  We ourselves have stolen them for use in our series of novels based in an imaginary medieval fairy tale Russia, called Cherna, “The Black Land”—but please don’t think “Mordor?”  In our case, the reason it’s named that is that it is steppe country with extremely fertile black soil.  So rich, especially as pasture-land, that it’s worth invading and fighting over, which is what the villains of our trilogy, the Vsadniki, modeled on the Mongols, do.

image10mongols.jpg

Unlike Pukel-men and menhirs and moai, however, there is no mystery about what the Vsadniki are up to with their stones:  every time they conquer a new land, they set such stones up at their new far-western border to say not only “what’s behind these is ours”, but also “and we’re looking at your lands next”.

image11balbal.jpeg

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

In the Tolkien volume Unfinished Tales, we find further connections between the Wild Men/Woses and carvings.  We use a paperback edition and this has somewhat different pagination from the hardbound, but, should you be interested, you can find it in either form in Part Four, I The Druedain.

pps

Here is a drawing of Ghan-buri-Ghan by Denis Gordeev, who has done a good deal of work illustrating a wide selection of JRRT’s fiction, rather as Ted Nasmith has, along with many other classics as well as modern fantasy fiction.

image11gbg.jpg

Gordeev has clearly been trained/trained himself in drawing as people did in that golden age of children’s writing and illustration, the 1880s to 1920s, and, once you get used to his very distinctive style, you may come to like it as we do.  Here’s Gandalf arriving in Hobbiton, fireworks and all, just to give you a taste.

image12gandalf.jpg

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