Ork

On a winter night in the high valleys of Tyrol, a shepherd hears his name called from a rockface where no one is standing. The voice is friendly. It knows the way down. A man who follows it walks in circles until dawn, or off a ledge, while somewhere above him a low laugh rolls back into the stone. The thing that called is an Ork, and it had been unsettling these mountains long before the word came to mean anything green or tusked.

Long before the Ork haunted alpine passes, its name belonged to a god. Orcus was the Etruscan and Roman lord of the underworld, a punisher of broken oaths who shared his name with the realm he ruled, the way Hades did among the Greeks. The Romans eventually folded him into Dis Pater and Pluto until the three blurred together, yet Orcus kept something the others lost. He was a god of the countryside, honoured in the fields and hills rather than in the temples of the cities, and country gods do not die so much as go feral. When his cult faded, Orcus lingered in the mouths of rural people as a bogey of the dark, a name to frighten the disobedient. From that long afterlife came the Italian orco, and by a slower road through French fairy tale, the ogre.

What the Ork looked like depended on who feared it and where they lived. In one telling it is a giant, a misshapen slab of a thing that eats travelers whole. In another it is small, dark, and bearded, nearer to a kobold or a dwarf than to any monster. The storytellers of Verona gave their Orco Burlevole a body covered in coarse horsehair and hooves where its feet should be, and lodged him in caves and abandoned houses at the edge of town. No single face survives, and the absence is the point. The Ork is what the mountain becomes when it wants something.

In the Alps the creature kept a working relationship with the people who lived beneath it. A hunter climbing after chamois might find the herd already spooked, warned off by an Ork that guarded the high animals and spoiled the chase for reasons of its own. A herdsman who crossed one could lose a cow overnight to a sudden wasting sickness. In fog it could turn a known path into blank scree and walk a traveler in circles. In this mood it ran close to the Aufhocker, the folkloric weight that leaps onto a walker’s shoulders and grows heavier at every step until the legs fold.

Down in the wine country the same being wore a gentler coat. There an Ork might keep a cellar, minding the casks and doing quiet kindnesses for a vintner who treated it decently, behaving for all the world like a house-spirit. Slight it, and the goodwill curdled at once. It is the oldest bargain in folklore given an alpine accent. Feed the thing in the dark and it feeds the household back; forget it and it remembers.

The Orco Burlevole cared less for cattle than for humiliation. He could take any shape and throw any sound, and he could bend a victim’s sense of place and hour until a short walk home became a whole night lost among the same three fields. His pleasure was the prank, elaborate and bewildering and almost never fatal. When the trick had run its course he would show himself just long enough to claim it, then vanish in a stink of sulphur with a shout of Te l’ho fatta, roughly I got you, leaving nothing damaged but a person’s dignity.

By the Renaissance the orco had grown teeth. In Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, printed in 1516, he is a blind giant who cannot see his prisoners but smells them out, keeping a flock of captured men and women the way a farmer keeps sheep and feeling along the walls for anyone who tries the door. A century later Giambattista Basile packed his Pentamerone with uerchi, shaggy ogres of the same stock, and it was these man-eaters, by way of Basile and Charles Perrault, that the word ogre finally settled on. The blindness matters. It is the flaw a clever captive can work, and more than one folktale hero walks out of the orco’s larder by turning the monster’s own senses against it.

The word had already surfaced far to the north. In the opening movement of Beowulf the monster Grendel is set in a bloodline of creatures descended from Cain: eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas, ettins and elves and orcneas. Editors gloss that last word as demon-corpses, orc from Latin Orcus welded to neas, the dead, which makes an orcnea something like a walking body out of hell. A tenth-century glossary lists orcus flatly as goblin, spectre, or hell-devil. Whatever the poet pictured, it stood with the giants and the restless dead.

German verse kept the name breathing as well. The medieval poem Virginal sends the hero Dietrich von Bern against a mountain-dwelling monster called Orkise, a single dreadful adversary rather than a race, drawing on the giant and the demon at once. Dietrich kills it. A monster assembled out of other people’s fears is also, conveniently, built to be beaten.

The last turn came in the twentieth century. J. R. R. Tolkien took orc directly from that line in Beowulf, choosing it, he said, for its sound while doubting aloud that it owed anything to Latin Orcus. What he raised on the borrowed word became the massed soldiery of modern fantasy and has very nearly buried the older creature under it. The green skin and the jutting tusks are inventions barely a century old. The Ork that came before them was harder to see: a death-god gone to seed, a helper in a cellar, a friendly voice in the rocks that knew a man’s name and wished him gone from the mountain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Ork the same thing as a Tolkien orc?

No. The folkloric Ork is centuries older and quite different: a shapeshifting mountain demon, ogre, and household spirit rather than a soldier in an army. Tolkien borrowed the Old English word “orc” from Beowulf for its sound, and the green-skinned, tusked creature most people picture today is a twentieth-century invention built on top of that borrowing.

Where does the name “Ork” come from?

It descends from Orcus, the Etruscan and Roman god of the underworld and punisher of broken oaths. As his rural cult faded he survived as a folk bogey, and his name passed into the Italian orco (a man-eating ogre) and the Old English orc, and fed the French ogre popularised by Charles Perrault.

What did the Ork actually look like?

There is no single description. Sources variously make it a giant misshapen man-eater, a small dark bearded being close to a kobold or dwarf, or, in the Verona tradition, a trickster covered in horsehair with hooves for feet. The inconsistency is characteristic of the creature.

Was the Ork evil?

It depended on the region and the story. In the high Alps it could be a dangerous demon that sickened cattle and led people astray, in Verona a harmless if maddening prankster, and in the wine cellars a helpful spirit that only turned hostile if it was insulted or ignored.

Related Entries

Ogre, Grendel, Grendel’s Mother, Ettin, Cyclops, Jötunn, Troll, Draugr, Kobold, Alp, Drude, Krampus