Up next in 10
While Kobolds are unassuming little creatures, their presence in fantasy lore ranges all the way from traditional folklore all the way into modern day Dungeons and Dragons and World of Warcraft. With the help of staff writer Eric O'Dea, Joe and Matt delve deep to discuss the history of these little critters, from their origins as sprites or brownies or the fae all the way up to "you no take candle." They also discuss the evolution of creatures in general, like vampires, and how they are imagined in different ways in different cultures, and how they shift in pop culture media.
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0:00
[Music]
0:10
hello and welcome to Lur Watch a round table free form discussion about luring your favorite media I'm your host Joe
0:16
Pres one of several lower focus folks from Blizzard Watch And I've got my well normal marvelous co-host with me today
0:22
Matt Rossy How you doing today Matt Marvelous
0:28
Uh the enthusiasm is just actually the second postredit scene
0:35
Uh and then joining us today is a friend that you may have noticed from our last
0:41
week's live show for the or recording for the regular show Uh Eric Eric say hi
0:46
to everybody Hey I am thrilled to be here on Lore Watch with you guys I've
0:51
been listening a long time and it's uh kind of cool and surreal to be here talking with you Yeah Eric uh turns out
0:57
has been doing a lot of uh tinfoil hating and a lot of lore writing for the
1:02
website and had mentioned uh that he was interested in potentially coming on the show So I figured what's a better time
1:08
than now Uh and with that said uh if you friends at home we have a a theme that
1:14
we're going to be going for the next two episodes here Uh if you have an idea for a theme or questions you want answered
1:20
be sure to send those in to us at podcastbizzardwatch.com specify the show that it is for and if
1:26
it's a theme Obviously we kind of we have an idea of where it's for Uh as well as any special pronunciation for
1:31
your name Uh if you want to hit us up on Discord we have the Q and Podcast questions channel which is open to everybody Same rules apply And if you
1:38
are a Patreon supporter you can go ahead and hit us up on the Patreon Q and podcast questions channel where we tend to look there first for any questions or
1:45
themes And you can also send us messages on Patreon and we will make Liz do work
1:52
But this episode was actually spawned by a question we received uh from somebody
1:57
by the name of Red Bandit 1213 Uh hello all troll Hunter of
2:02
Skywall here Question for Lverw Watch Why are cobalts so vastly different in media Warcraft has them as rodents DND
2:09
is mini dragons And after watching Delicious and Dragon recently they had a cobalt that looked like a husky And this
2:16
spawned a conversation topic of there's a lot of different representations of different races and fantasy like what we
2:24
consider staples in all swarmms of media and in real life folklore And I figure
2:30
we'll start with Cobalts which uh Matt will probably go into professor mode here in a second but I'm going to do my
2:36
best to kind of give a quick overview But I remember cobalts as originally
2:41
being a name for a household spirit in Germanic folklore And it was sort of an
2:48
catch-all term for all manner of beings that were essentially small and like
2:54
mischievous Uh there are different versions of them that I remember from it but they were always small little
3:00
humanoids Uh maybe akin to almost like goblins kind of but goblins were their
3:06
own thing I think that's correct I mean it's a Yeah it's it's more or less correct Basically if you ever heard
3:12
of like any of Grim Fairy Tale where there's somebody in the house who does who makes the shoes when the guy can't
3:19
make the shoes that's a cobalt Um they're effectively like genus Lokai
3:25
type spirits Um the thing about cobalts and the thing about I think talking about this subject because we're going to talk about it with a bunch of
3:30
different things There's three main reasons this happens The first is for
3:36
lack of a better word folkloric expansion Um as somebody t you know
3:43
there somebody has a story about weird little critters that live in his basement and help him make shoes He
3:48
tells that story to somebody else who tells that story to somebody else The story changes as it's told And
3:55
effectively through what is kind of a process of translation/ adaptation you
4:00
get more and more different kinds of cobalts because this guy's now telling a story about guys who live under a hill
4:07
and who are mining all the gold and if you go in there they'll kill you Whereas this guy's still telling the story about
4:12
the shoe makers and this guy's telling a story about little people who live out
4:17
in the fence and you know don't want you to steal their lucky charms Um there
4:22
that's one of the things that causes this kind of change The second is what I like to call uh I'm going to put my spin
4:29
on it And that's just straight up somebody like takes the word cobalt goes
4:36
okay cool I don't care what the mytholoric aspects of this were I'm going to say they're dog people or I'm
4:42
going to say they're they're lizard hybrid people or I'm going to say they're just weird rat people Uh and
4:50
that's that's how you get there Um and the third way is something I call
4:56
literal translation drift Uh which is similar to but distinct from the folkloric one because the word
5:04
cobalt is actually the root the the Germanic word cobalt is
5:11
cobalt as in the element cobalt They named the element after the
5:18
the spirits And as a result a lot of stories of cobalts as they were cobalts changed
5:26
into like more like dwarves and other under the hill gnome
5:32
types And in this way you get all the different variations that we now see
5:37
practically every version you mentioned uh in your question Red Baret those are
5:43
all I'm going to put my spin on it changes That's literally people had only
5:48
ever heard of these things from D and D anyway And in Dn D they were kind of like lizard dog people Originally they
5:54
were kind of lizard/dog people in Dn D And so when you see cobalts that are
6:00
look like dogs that's somebody taking the dog half from Dn D and and running with it Um the ones in WoW are basically
6:09
that except they made them less like dogs and more like kind of like covetous rats I don't know why they
6:16
did that but that's definitely a choice that they made The first edition Monster Manual Cobalts are fascinating cuz you
6:22
can see where it comes from both and it's split off The that illustration has
6:28
like dragon horns and elfie ears and scales and a dog snout It's like you
6:33
could It's fascinating to see exactly where the branches happened because you could go either way Yeah A lot of you
6:39
got to remember with a lot of this stuff that we're going to be talking about um a lot of Monster Manual Real quick I
6:45
would also like to point out it actually comes before that too cuz before the monster manual while you can see that if you ever pick up chain mail uh which is
6:53
uh basically the fantasy supplement that Gary Gyax made in 1971 which you can
6:58
tell it was very much inspired by The Hobbit You also have the cobalts show up there uh where they're an offshoot of
7:05
essentially goblinoids uh and they care share a lot of the same features uh with
7:10
slightly more intelligent and I remember them riding giant badgers because that was a thing they just rode badgers into
7:18
battle Um but think of mine too like a lot of these things get changed and
7:23
brought because these people were desperate for new monsters Mhm And as a
7:29
result you basically had people running through folklore books Uh I remember the
7:34
first time I heard of a penhalligan which is a kind of vampire spirit that
7:40
leaves its body behind and takes its head neck and intestines out to drink people's blood That's from like Malaysia
7:47
and and the Middle not the in the uh you know the you know Asiatic Islands
7:53
Australasia I think it's called Yeah Australasia That's from those those areas And there's a bunch of different versions of it I first came across it in
8:00
in a freaking monster manual Uh the questing beast um the paraton which is
8:07
like a big deal if you if you've read like you know um various you know the
8:12
Atlantis uh books and so forth I first came across it in the Monster Manual because they were desperate for monsters
8:18
So yeah you're going to see a lot of stuff coming from that
8:24
And you also have the animators who you know have some reference material to go on So if all
8:31
that first edition monster manual illustrator has to go on is the description from chain mail and it says
8:37
you know their voices sound a little bit like dogs barking then they draw them looking like a dog Yeah Well I'll put a
8:42
I'll put a dog's note on it and then it like it iterates from there So it's sometimes it's a conscious decision
8:48
Sometimes it's just one person making one decision that causes that split It's
8:54
fascinating It's got to look like something And um we've also got goblins in this so I can't make them look too
8:59
much like goblins otherwise people will not be able to differentiate them Yeah there's a lot of different ways it comes
9:05
across But cobalts is a good example because it gets wild how how varied they
9:12
can get from game to game from that original Germanic route Um whereas elves almost always have
9:21
something that goes back to Tolken Like almost if you've got elves
9:26
in your game they almost always don't they don't go to Normith you know they don't go even go
9:32
to like Celtic Gaelic stuff They usually go straight to Tolken which is which is funny when you start
9:39
considering and I we we can probably do a whole thing about elves here Uh and maybe we segue into that Um but then you
9:45
start considering not just the how everything in popular uh culture is really hearkening back to the Tolken but
9:52
then you start looking deeper at it and how many other representation of elves there's been just culturally right Like
10:00
going to Norse mythology and and this is one of the things that I thought was really fascinating to me is I had a
10:05
friend who never really knew anything about elves aside from what they had
10:10
seen in like Lord of the Rings in D and D And so they thought that's just what elves were And then they played God of
10:16
War and they played God of War for the PS4 and they got to see Alfar and they
10:23
got to see how like and again the game wasn't 100% accurate to Norse mythology
10:30
but it was pretty close uh with some liberties as far as like what Norse
10:35
considered elves to be because uh there there what is it there two in in Alheim
10:40
there is or alpha there is two distinct flavors of them light and dark elves So
10:46
if you ever see light and dark elves in uh any of your games or even in some of your uh D and D supplements you can
10:53
thank the Norse for that because that came way first Um yeah but the other problem is that
11:00
I'll let you go but there's nothing to mention Go ahead Um well one of the things that they sort of
11:06
hinted at but didn't do in God of War because they ended up having their own kinds of like the own kinds of dark elves in at least the Norse myths as in
11:15
books like you know Sterlson's books or uh you know the Haval or what have you
11:21
the there are there are like d light elves and and dark elves The light elves
11:27
are the Vanir Mhm and the the the isa
11:32
the the high elves is another word for them So there's like high elves then light elves but then the the dark elves
11:39
are the dwarves Mhm Like what you call an el like what they call dark elf They
11:44
literally meant dwarves Like the guy who makes Thor's hammer Brock and Etri in
11:49
the myths not just in in the uh game Brock and Etri are called dark elves
11:54
Dva and I can't pronounce the words crap I'm sorry for anybody who's from actually a Nordic country going "Oh my
12:01
god." Um but that that root is the root of
12:07
Tolken's dwarf elf rivalry The reason he has that in there is because in Norse
12:14
myth the darker and the dark and light elves they weren't called that because one was good and one was evil They were
12:19
called that because one lived out in the in the sun in the forests and the other
12:24
mind They were digging in the ground But of course everything's dark They don't see anything It's it's so there's
12:33
elements of it that that get they just get changed by the sheer passage of time
12:39
um the adaptation of it which is f fun because if you then go to like say keel
12:44
Celtic mythology the elves still kind of exist except they're they're more
12:49
commonly known as she like beans means it's the word that we that
12:56
became banshee in folklore It doesn't mean ghost that screams at people It means a kind of of higher alien
13:06
intelligence similar to the word Alfar which is what the Norse used for it If
13:11
you look at the stories of like the the sons of Mill versus the Toatha de Dan that's a lot of what we draw Elvish
13:20
culture from in in our when we use them more so even than Tolken We just don't know that we're doing it Mhm Uh in a lot
13:27
of cases and and it is elves are fascinating because you can you can look at like how some places just make them
13:34
they got pointy ears they live a long time and that's it and not really that different otherwise Whereas otherwise
13:40
you get to like the point where I feel like Michael Morco's um melanins are
13:46
elves They're just really alien elves Mhm And it's a interesting way to move
13:53
from that concept where it's very similar to the Tuata de Dan where you've got the you know um I'm not going to be
14:01
able to say his name and it's going to drive me out of my mind Uh Natada uh Noata of the Silver Hand who who
14:07
literally loses his hand and thus can't be king of his people because the maimed man couldn't be king because the king
14:13
and the land are one If the king has a wound he can't be king because the land
14:18
will now have a wound So they have to get a new king and in order to get around that they they go and get Natada
14:24
a silver hand Like the the the weaponsmith the unchecked makes him a silver hand All of this is stuff that
14:31
you see over and over again in Elvish stuff to the point where I think the Hellboy movie is a really good example
14:37
of this where when they depicted Natada that he's basically just an elf Like they didn't they didn't do any of the
14:42
Noden stuff They didn't tie him in to the gods or King Lud who smashed machines But that's all there and it's
14:50
kind of another reason why you have elves who are constantly hostile to anything but magic because that aspect
14:56
of them has carried forward And it is I elves are really so different almost
15:02
everywhere I think every time Dungeons and Dragons has done a new world they've done something really weird with elves
15:07
They I was going to say elves elves have so many flavors I mean look how many different kinds of elves we have in World of Warcraft I can barely keep
15:13
track of them and they keep adding new ones So it seems like almost a feature of elves that they can split up And
15:19
maybe it's because they're so longived and some of them say you know we're going to go live over here And then when they run into each other again a
15:25
thousand years later it's like oh wow your ears are much longer than mine and pointier and your skin's green now But
15:30
there always seem like no matter what kind of media it is there always seems there's not just elves there's always forest elves and high elves and dark
15:38
elves Yeah And that does to a certain degree go back to Tolken again because he does that with the the uh the men of
15:44
Numor and the elves that they descend from They have originally the one kind of elf and then they split into factions
15:50
I remember the one that Galadriel's uh elves are a different kind than
15:58
um the one I'm going to forget his name but we even played him in the movie Oran Yeah Or he his his people are a
16:05
different kind of elf He's actually the halfb brotherther of the human who
16:10
became king of Numor because they both chose I cho he one chose to be an elf the other chose to be human effectively
16:18
one chose to be mortal and one chose not to be So he's actually related to
16:23
Strider like that he's not just taking him in out of the goodness of his heart The the kid's like his nephew 10 20
16:29
generations removed So it is it is interesting to see how these little weird things come
16:35
up I do like the fact that almost every like dark sun elves
16:40
Joe uh yeah so dark sun elves are uh
16:48
interesting right uh so they're in they're depicted in dark sun which is a
16:54
lot of people either love or take it it's probably my favorite D&D setting just for various reasons which we we'll talk about another time u but they're
17:02
nomadic race of herders raiders peddlers ers and thieves um is the best way to
17:08
really describe them Uh but they're pale and they're thin and they're uh they're
17:14
very like almost like barely humanoid in the fact that like they're more skeletal in nature as far as like how they look
17:20
Uh and each tribe of them each grouping of them is ridiculously different
17:27
culturally This is also one of the few descriptions that depicts them as tall as they are In this version an average
17:35
elf stands between 6 and 1/2 and 8 ft tall And that is the only time in D and
17:41
D that we see an elf depicted this like tall And combined with their slender
17:47
builds they are incredibly alien as far as like their
17:53
appearance to the other races Um their skin is weathered because they live in
17:59
the desert and they're are nomads So they have almost like this leathery like aspect to them Uh they don't really tend
18:06
to have major cities Um they just like find different places to settle down And
18:13
because of this you don't have like the same
18:18
beautiful interpretation of elves that you do in other media So they're not these like courtly stately figures that
18:26
are prim and proper and wield magic as if it was an art form No these are hardy
18:33
nomadic warriors that are uh vicious as they are hardy Uh they are a deadly
18:39
force A single elf warrior noted that it could uh cross better than 50 miles a
18:44
day through the desert They're made for a different type of of just environment
18:51
They don't use beasts of burden uh for for personal transportation Uh they they
18:58
just they're all about this like sort of self-reliance and they're also referred to as savage and they tend to be more
19:07
worldlike They will barter um but they weren't they're don't really care about
19:12
dealing with other races as much And it was I remember it just being a very
19:18
extraordinarily unique interpretation of what an elf would be
19:24
until I started going deeper into some of the other bits of like real world lore like going back to uh some of the
19:31
Norse interpretations uh while Matt you know pointed out that the light and dark are basically the ones that live in the
19:37
sun and the ones that live in the ground there's also interpretations that whether they're accurate or not that
19:44
they were almost hiveike that they were almost insectoid in sort of like their
19:49
collective like reasoning and their collective like community where yes they were extremely magical beings but they
19:55
all sprung from the same font They all sprung from the same great ancestor and
20:01
as a result we're all one people all sort of unified and uh of one mind and
20:08
like that is also another really fascinating possible idea for them
20:14
because you don't generally think of that with elves right you most people if you tell them to to name an elf they're
20:19
going to name like Legolos or they're going to name Drizz Darden or they're going to name some other major pop
20:26
culture one and a lot of them are not going and know that like these other variations of them
20:32
exist It's absolutely fascinating People often like go see Shakespeare's
20:38
um plays and they never really understand that the Oberon and Titania from those plays are essentially the
20:45
lords of the ferry and the fairy are intended to be and are rel where the
20:50
elves come from It's this it's from the same root word um you know the the
20:56
alan but the word fairy comes from that as well um partially because Norse people invaded Celtic countries and so
21:02
their different conceptions of weird weird alien fay creatures sort of merged
21:07
together and since the Romans traveled throughout the length of Europe the stuff they thought got mixed in um and a
21:16
lot of that works for like we already mentioned to a degree where dwarves come from dwarves are unique in that they are
21:21
very much a a Norse interpolation Mhm They they come from the Norse And what
21:28
we see of them is either almost straight out of Norse myth or it's straight out of Tolken's version of Norse myth Um
21:35
that's pretty much everything you see about dwarves It's either what Tolken said about Gimley or it's in some eta
21:41
somewhere Um like the whole deal where they can't they can cut off Loki's head but they can't touch his neck so they
21:48
just sew his mouth shut That's a That's Brock and Etri That's an original dwarf
21:54
thing That's That's if you want to know how dwarfs think that's it Yeah Elves and dwarves are the big
22:00
example of how Tolken is kind of like this giant filter of before that there's
22:07
you know elves and dwarves in various mythologies but the you know the things that he picked moved forward and so many
22:13
people after that you know were inspired to create Dn D and so many other media
22:19
using that thread from Tolken's interpretation and all these other
22:24
things that exist outside of it are kind of bleeding back in now because it's easier to look up what the myths might
22:31
be from like you know the Polynesian islands or other places in the world that you know Tolken didn't include cuz
22:38
he maybe didn't even have access to it And now that we have the internet there's all these ways that you can go out and get
22:45
uh this mythology from around the world and plug it into your game So when you think of you know elves as what Tolken
22:53
decided they were like yeah they kind of like what our modern idea came from him
22:59
but there you know he was pulling from something else He was always pulling from something else And
23:04
there what he was pulling from was what he had available to him Yeah So many cultures have that kind of slightly
23:11
alien outsider being who is like a spirit of the woodlands that very many cultures have
23:18
different versions like theu from northern Africa that all end up feeling like elves to us you know bec because
23:26
there's there's a a niche for that in in the mythologies of various countries as
23:32
people encountered certain situations they came up with myths for them and one
23:37
of those myths is the strange strange confusing appalling somewhat alien fa
23:43
folk type beings And And there's so many different games out too I mean like I
23:49
was just thinking of Changeling um the one from White Wolf Mhm And thinking about Changeling led me to
23:55
Exalted which definitely has pretty crazy ideas on this kind of thing And there's just so many And then you get to
24:02
video games where think about like Morowind or or even Oblivion but
24:08
Morowind really when they have the Dunmer and they have the Altmir and
24:14
they're just they're not they are different in terms of their coloration but they're also just different And
24:21
what's really funny is there's the third group which again are are essentially dwarves Uh what are the ones that have
24:28
the mechanical ones I can't remember They're all gone but we find their ruins Yeah the the dwarves The Yeah What's the
24:35
name for the something Myrr I know it's something my because I know that they're effectively Dur No the Dun or the dark elves Dur the dark elves Yeah I can't
24:42
remember but I was just playing I was just playing Oblivion too And that's probably why I can't remember it But
24:48
there's a the way that The Elder Scroll does it The Elder Scrolls like um
24:54
Kingdoms of Amalor very deliberately doesn't have dwarves in it Mhm But it has the the stuff dwarfs did in it The
25:02
Dweemer Yeah Yeah You you go through their ruins You go through that you get you get their artifacts and their
25:08
weapons and stuff But yeah there's elves The dwarfs are gone Yeah There's a whole thing about it I think that you find out
25:15
magic thing happened and literally they all vanished But it it's just interesting to me that like one of the
25:21
biggest uh fantasy franchises out there has just gotten rid of dwarves whereas D and D is like you know
25:29
D and D ones and you know World of Warcraft was like oh hell no we're not losing our excuse to have Scottish
25:35
people yell around I'd like to solve it eventually I'd like to have Elder Scrolls 6 give us uh actually find out
25:41
what happens to the dwarves Uh but but that's is you know we so far
25:47
we're talking about dwarves elves talked about cobalts briefly Should we finally move on to the ones where token has the
25:54
most and yet least influence and talk about orcs Yeah You know what Go for it I think I think that's uh that's not a
26:00
bad transition Okay Orcs Um on one level orcs are almost entirely an invention of
26:07
Tolken Uh the word comes from the the Latin uh word orca which is also
26:14
sometimes used as orcas And you see it before Tolken you see it in the poetry
26:19
of of of William Blake where he has a character named Orc who is a violent
26:25
rebel against all things because he is he wants freedom and he includes he
26:30
wants freedom from concepts He wants freedom from the shackles of morality He wants freedom
26:35
from everything He's essentially like a spirit of America in his in Blake's America the Prophecy And in a weird sort
26:43
of way if you want if you want to get a good idea of a of a mo semi-odern coralate to Blake so you can understand
26:49
his writing Jack Kirby with his new gods is very similar to what Blake was doing
26:56
All of like characters like Renra and Orc are part of Blake's mythology of new
27:01
gods And so it's useful to look at orc because the word comes from you know for
27:08
one example is the Latin orcanus Doesn't that mean like underworld or evil Something like that Or killer Yeah
27:15
Orcanis The animal orca Orcanis Orca is called It's not called a It's called a
27:21
whale killer not a killer whale We often call them killer whales nowadays but the name literally means whale killer It
27:27
kills whales Now is it a whale Yes But it's it kills whales That's what it does
27:34
Um so the concept of the word orcs that's where it comes from initially And we know Tolken knew this Um Tolken was a
27:43
linguistic Yeah He was a linguist He was not just not just a linguist He was one of the finest best philologists of his
27:49
generation and possibly one of the best ever to live I would argue that talking as a writer of fiction is okay but as a
27:58
study of languages he may be Earth's premier genius He I mean he just wanted
28:04
to write a story so that he could put his own language into it Yeah That's how he ended up with The Hobbit Yeah His languages were actually so elaborate
28:12
that it's not like when you had Cllingon and a bunch of people had to come along to explain oh wait we need a word for
28:18
this That's what happened with He laid it all out directly Yeah Tolken did the whole thing himself and and he borrowed
28:24
from such interesting concepts Uh but to get back to the the orc thing the word
28:30
orc isn't used that often in Tolken Uh he talks about them in a general sense
28:36
but when you see them he has various names for them like Urokai and that
28:42
means essentially high orc It's not just you know your rabble The rabble you see
28:47
in the Lord of the Rings are more akin to goblins than they are to what we think of when we hear the word orc When
28:53
we hear the word orc we're thinking of urukai Mhm Mhm These big massive
29:00
terrifying forces of nature Um but all of that that's that's a
29:06
Tolken idea but it's not like he just invented it because we've had concepts
29:11
for things like boogeymen and bug bears and hobgoblins and goblins and red caps
29:18
If you ever heard of a red cap it's kind of like the opposite of a good time It's a fairy story where you run into this
29:25
fairy creature wearing a red hat And a red hat is just a wool hat that's completely soaked through in blood
29:31
because the thing is a murder machine And all these different things existed before Tolken And he's sort of
29:38
like if you look at Norse mythology um one of the things you've got there is
29:44
which actually even comes up in Skyrim uh those weird bone dead bone people the joggers That's something that's been in
29:51
Norse mythology for a long time There's the idea of going to like forware lands and there's just monsters waiting to
29:57
fight you Um the giants from you know the joten from Norse mythology they're
30:03
all basically portrayed like that as well And it I mean Greece had it Uh the ancient Romans had it to the point where
30:09
they had words for it again like orc It comes from you know it comes from Latin
30:15
And it is just fascinating to me how the concept of goblins as we have it now is
30:21
refined through Dungeons and Dragons more than it's refined through Tolken In Tolken goblin is just another word for
30:27
the lesser orcs It's just okay You can be a like you can be one of those creatures or you can be
30:34
one of the big powerful ones And in Tolken orcs are
30:40
elves who made the bad who made a bad deal with the guy who was Sauron's boss
30:46
Morgoth I think Well kind of I was going to Sorry Go ahead Eric No you're going
30:52
to go They were Yeah they were originally elves that were like tortured in the dungeons of Morgoth right Well
30:58
the So that's the thing with Tolken right And this is one of those weird things Um it's inconsistent because if
31:05
you go to the early works it depicts them as being pure creations of Morgoth
31:10
uh made to mimic the forms of the children of the Uluvatar Um and then in the Simmerian they go back and they
31:18
mention that they might have been the east elves that were then tortured and bred by Morgoth And then there's other
31:25
references to the Avari uh the elves who refuse to go to Aman and then naturally
31:30
turn savage and wild So all of these are references that are made inside of
31:36
Tolken's work but there is no definitive origin or all of them could also be
31:41
valid And that's the problem I honestly think my thing with Tolken is I think he does this because he's not writing any
31:47
of these from the perspective of he's not writing them like this is true He's writing them like this is a book
31:53
that you will find if you go to Middle Earth and it says this He's like Herodotus was with actual mythology
32:00
except he's making up his mythology too But everything you you hear like when
32:05
you you originally hear about them you're hearing about it from this guy's perspective cuz he wrote a book Now
32:11
you're listening to this person talk This person is telling you his perspective And and that's something you
32:16
find so much in Tolken that it becomes the sylmerelion becomes almost impossible to
32:22
read because it is almost joyician in its like references and illusions that
32:29
you probably don't know Like you've not read the original um you know Haval in
32:36
the original Norse have you He did So he knows when he makes an when he names it
32:42
Illu Ilitar was it how I can never say the name the the high god the one of
32:48
that is the music of the spirit type guy when he made
32:54
them that's a later introduction you he's not even in the initial story
32:59
because most people aren't even supposed to know he exists and that's the thing about Tolken Tolken knows this stuff
33:06
he's making references to the original works but But he's also hiding them within the story Orcs are fascinating
33:12
that way because on the basis of them they're just big dumb monsters But if you go into the
33:18
mythology of them the the mythology he invented there's a tragicness to them Much like the Witch King of Angore Mhm
33:25
the Witch King is cursed by himself ultimately It was his own choices So if
33:32
that story about the elves being tortured is true it's one kind of tragedy If it's just what happened
33:38
because they refused to do what they were ordered to do then it's another kind of tragedy But orcs are therefore
33:44
useful idiots in any story where you want to have an army of monsters that you don't have to think about Yeah
33:51
There's there's also that's been how they were for a very long time oddly enough until the 1970s and 80s And now
33:58
the interesting thing I want to go a little bit further back too because there are other depictions of what are essentially orcs without the name of
34:04
them but are often like orc adjacent that share that same thing They're usually a name uh given to something
34:12
that is just viewed as evil morally corrupt or questionable in some like
34:19
malicious way Like if you go back to some of the original accountings of uh the Mongolian hordes and you look at
34:26
some of the descriptions from the people that they invaded uh they describe them much in the same way uh of this sort of
34:35
like orcish uh appearance this orcish um presentation right This is where you get
34:41
that idea of like the mongrels the mongrel hordes Um and the reason I bring
34:46
that up is because when you get to Tolken which again is sort of like the birthplace of a lot of fantasy aspect
34:53
for almost everything that comes after it and sort of the blueprint um go back
34:58
to Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and look at what they describe as orcs and look
35:03
at how varied they look there That's from the books The books describe them
35:09
in various different forms of physical appearance in the same universe Uh
35:16
almost applying to the term that orc wasn't necessarily a race but something
35:21
that was just these are the misgrants castoffs and the malicious like dregs of
35:27
whatever civilization there was like these were potentially like I said earlier like all these things could be
35:33
true that these are elves that went wild or these are elves that decided to mate with beasts and these are the beastmen
35:40
Um these are you know maybe things that mutated over time or were born of magic or born of slime magic born of nature
35:48
gone wrong or Morgoth um or the you know
35:53
sit there and actually created uh these things All of these things can be true and all of these things are very well
36:00
may be true The interesting thing I think afterwards is how everything that came
36:06
after Tolken sort of like Eric said that Tolken was like the filter Here it was
36:12
not necessarily that he was the filter He's sort of like the the font of which everything is then later filtered and
36:19
distilled down because orcs as represented across all media is so
36:24
wildly different right Like we can talk about D and D and their evolution of of
36:30
how they were in just D and D where they went from being these evil beings of
36:36
just like this you know they're going to eat you That's what they're going to do That's what they do Uh they beat up goblins and they run things uh they're
36:43
the big nasty That's what you're going to go and fight You're going to go kill orcs and you're going to go kill goblins to being a player race now where people
36:51
want to play as them because they're not necessarily just you know evil and their
36:57
description of being big and powerful and having uh skin various shades of like green hue that has now gone away to
37:06
being various different builds Like they're just humans They're humanoids with a different sort of uh origin story
37:13
in Dn D They come from different aspects I feel like we you and I have been talking for a while so I'm gonna poke
37:18
Carrick and see if he has anything he wants to say Yeah I mean I I read the Sylmerelion
37:24
when I I picked it up when I was like 15 expecting oh a cool another prequel to Lord of the Rings I'll get some more
37:30
information Maybe maybe it'll give me more about like the orcs and stuff like that And it really reads more like notes
37:36
and filling in like you said it's all references and like a lot of like you
37:42
know you read the Lord of the Rings and there's like three pages of a song and
37:47
the Sylmerelion is a lot more like that than you know anything action Um the
37:54
fall of Gondolind isn't even like described anywhere besid it's just referenc Yeah it's just it's a bunch of
38:01
thoughts this happened Anyway here's here's 2500 words about this word that I
38:06
like And like it wasn't 2025 He didn't have subreddits knocking on his door
38:12
being like "Hey give us more details Fill this in You have to clarify this." So now we're at the point where you know
38:19
where other people have picked it up and they're building on it and they're doing other things with it with the series
38:24
that are coming out and things like that But it's yeah it's interesting the the the the things that he came up with and
38:31
moved forward the things that he filtered through him and the I mean we have orcs in World of Warcraft and
38:37
they're literal aliens and so they didn't come from anywhere and they started as more of the evil like oh
38:44
they're the invading horde They're like the bad guys You can play as them at first when really they're the Dror
38:50
Yeah And and we find out that they didn't even get their green skin from that's not how they naturally were They
38:56
started out as more of a you know peaceful brown Yeah So that's they like
39:04
they had that done to them almost Um so it's it's it's another interesting like
39:09
you started but then with even within one media you don't have a paragraph about orcs that tells you here's what
39:15
they are and then you carry that forward I mean I guess you you kind of have to have enough of a series or a show or a
39:22
video game to evolve the the race but with 30 years of Warcraft we've they've
39:29
gone from one thing to something else completely different And yeah people do want to play orcs Who wouldn't want to
39:34
roll a giant big green skin dude Bruce Banner But uh one of the things I wanted
39:40
to mention quickly too is like we we've talked about it like as in something Tolken invented and how he there are
39:46
plenty of other there's plenty of things he drew from uh this goes to the point one of the things I wanted to to mention
39:52
is in Norse mythology there's the concept of the kan who are not north
39:57
sorry Gaelic um this is basically British it's mostly England and Ireland and mostly really it's the places in
40:04
England that used to be like parts of Wales when Wales was the whole country essentially And the Quran are just like they're the
40:13
kind of things where they're constantly being beaten by riddles and and weird
40:18
ideas It's very similar to Feneris where you know in order to beat him they have to make a rope out of fish's breath and
40:25
you know the songs of of midwives and so forth It's that kind of thing
40:32
And it ties back into why the the the orcs ultimately they exist to be fought
40:40
It it's kind of like the old idea the old saying about dragons Dragons don't exist you know to to be beaten They
40:45
exist to be fought You know they they you know the myths are not there to show us killing them It's to show that we can
40:52
stand up against them sort of thing And orcs are fantastic for that But then as
40:58
time passed humans have this really weird ability to kind of adopt the worst
41:05
thing Well refuse to be empathetic one second and then suddenly be completely drowned by it the next Like humans can
41:14
look at orcs and be they're horrible evil monsters and they must be destroyed And then some humans like but really I
41:19
mean they're not that different from us Uh how you know what couldn't we talk to them Maybe we could maybe we should work
41:25
this out And we even do that in our fiction And it's kind of to a certain degree I
41:32
actually like where orcs have gotten to And it is fair to give World of Warcraft some credit for it Um because in the '9s
41:40
when Blizzard decided to make its orcs like the the other oppos the the other
41:46
really popular understanding of orcs I feel has to be mentioned here is the game workshop version Yeah We're We're
41:54
fungus Well I'm gonna make Joe talk because it depend it depends on it depends on what version So there's 40k
42:00
and fantasy which are two completely different things So uh we can talk about the Warhammer 40k interpretation which
42:06
is in my opinion a very I don't want to say it's a unique version because it definitely draws on some of the
42:11
influences we talked about Um but Matt's right in Warhammer 40k they are fungus
42:18
Uh their entire culture is based off of this generation via spore And this is not to say that they are not a living
42:24
like breathing evolving race because they are But they don't breed They
42:31
simply exist And their origin is actually rooted as a creation of uh
42:38
essentially the Warhammer equivalent of the first ones the slan Um these are
42:43
supposed to be the in fantasy they used to be a race of um fish people frog
42:50
people Um sorry for those of you out there that know what that is Um and then they eventually they turned into uh a
42:57
subset of race of like magic users but in 40k they were ones that were
43:03
essentially ordering the universe and were among the first great races to exist in the universe and wanted to
43:10
fight against what was coming called the great devourer This may sound familiar to you if you've played uh World of
43:16
Warcraft at all recently in the last like 5 years Um they developed a race of essentially
43:24
giant super beings uh that were super intelligent super hardy and were
43:30
supposed to be almost impossible to be destroyed And they eventually uh over
43:37
the course of like eons of war decades of war millennia of war before the universe that we know it in the the 30k
43:44
universe where where man goes through the stars before that happens They eventually die and are spread apart and
43:52
reborn and die and spread apart and reborn and die and spread apart and reborn until eventually they turn into the orcs we know When an orc dies in 40k
44:00
uh their body releases all these spores uh basically across the planet where they will lay in dormant uh gestation
44:08
for x number of years It could be 10 years it could be a decade it could be
44:13
millennia Eventually orcs are born Uh and they start out as sort of what they
44:18
call savage orcs Orc's intelligence in 40k is also based on their collective
44:24
and size which I think is really fascinating The more orcs you have the
44:30
smarter they get And part of that is explained through genetic memory that is coded into them Uh different flavors of
44:37
them whether they're weird boys ones that are incapable of using magic or mech boys that understand mechanics or
44:44
uh doctors and I'm using that term loosely who understand how to apply cybernetics These are all genetic
44:50
specializations that unlock in their core memories and their genetic memories as there are more orcs to support it and
44:58
their magic is and their ability to manipulate reality is based off of how
45:04
many there are Orcs are a very strong psychic race in 40k in which if they
45:10
believe something strong enough and have enough of the what they call log juice behind them which is basically just a
45:17
bunch of of boys or enough of them that believe this it becomes true such as red
45:23
things go faster purple things are sneakier yellow things are luckier like
45:29
things like that Um this also extends to what they do as far as like their daily
45:35
lives where this vehicle it it works but it works because the 5-year-old who
45:41
built it otherwise known as the 40k Orc believes it works In the books one of my favorite things that they ever did was
45:47
during the 90s uh there's a section in the Imperialis Codex where they talk
45:53
about trying to take a bunch of orc technology from a a battle that they had and try to reverse engineer it because
45:59
that's what humans do That's what the Imperium does And as they would open up the engine bays of these vehicles they
46:06
find a rock with an engine painted on it And 20 minutes earlier this thing was
46:11
driving across the battlefield no problem or they would open up a gun that had been firing with endless ammo and
46:18
just find a stick with boom written on it And it's because the orcs believed that this was what was happening Their
46:26
collective psychic power made it manifest And the last thing I think that is really interesting about them and
46:32
I've gushed about this for a while as they get older they get bigger
46:38
As they get bigger they get more powerful to the point where they view
46:44
the largest as their leader naturally And that largest leader has the ability
46:50
to do things that others can't Uh such as move through time fight themselves
46:57
fight gods Um and this is all canonical This is all stuff that has absolutely happened
47:05
Uh they're they're really really fun Uh like if you ever get a chance to read
47:11
about Gazool Mog Thraka go for it Gazool is probably one
47:16
of the largest oldest biggest ones who actually went through space and time to kill himself and start a massive wag Uh
47:23
because he is the chosen of uh Morc andor or uh Morc andor Orc Gork And uh
47:31
yeah Yeah he's gonna he likes himself a good fight But yeah it's it's it's an interesting interpretation and I don't I
47:38
don't know anywhere else that has viewed orcs as such
47:43
a unique thing than Warhammer 40k They're
47:48
just fighting I will point out that according to various wig wiks I've just been on including the Sigmar one
47:55
technically speaking all green skins in fantasy reproduce via fungal spores M so
48:00
they're all essentially 40k orbs They're just 40,000 years earlier and less
48:07
matured as a race Well and that that gets a little complicated because technically that depends on whether it's old world new world or the world that
48:14
revolves uh the diversion split from the old world uh which is what Blood Bowl is
48:20
based on where there are female orcs Um because they evolve into that way and they do not reproduce by spores They
48:26
reproduce traditionally Um yeah which you know which you know you could still say is technically a kind of spore
48:33
reproduction One has a half spore inside and the other one puts some spores in there Sure Um but regardless it is one
48:40
of the fascinating things about orcs is that as we went through that period of time uh from talking on and and like
48:48
there's characters like like one of my favorite um fantasy authors is James Branch Cabel who wrote a book called
48:54
Jurgen which is just utter nonsense it it is almost unreadable uh by by modern readers
49:01
because it doesn't have anything approaching a narrative It's like it's more like Alice in Wonderland or the Oz
49:07
books than it is you know the stuff we have nowadays for fantasy But one of the
49:13
things it has is it has the it has you know the the monster people
49:18
And another one comes to mind is Lloyd Alexander um his Iron Ring stuff where
49:24
they have just this you know these bleak spirits that are you know trying to to kill everybody They're not really
49:31
depicted as anything So there are a lot of these things in stories but the thing
49:36
Tolken did by making them codified the way he did is he gave people cart blanch
49:41
to just use that Um and it's kind of funny that orcs are literally everywhere now Like you
49:48
you can find them in so many different fantasy things Like there's so many different D and
49:53
D worlds where they have orcs on them of like Eberon where it's orcs that are like all druids and nature spirits
50:01
There's just a ton of this kind of stuff and it is it's wild to me to see it because it it does really all come from
50:07
his initial conception in a way that other stuff doesn't Now when when we
50:13
have things like this where you know you have stories like new media that comes out and the orcs are the pretty pretty
50:19
classic Tolken orcs and then there's other stuff like Warhammer where it's actually so far out that you can barely
50:27
even attach the word orc to it anymore Like you wouldn't recognize it Like you could give that whole description to me and if I didn't know you were talking
50:33
about orcs I would have to guess like a couple things before I was like "Oh orcs Oh yeah that that makes sense."
50:38
It's like a spectrum of how far you can go What do you two prefer when you're watching something new or playing
50:44
something new Do you like it when something kind of hits all the tropes
50:49
and uses them cleverly or do you like it when it turns it on its head or goes really far or does it matter It really
50:55
depends on the work I'm going to let Joe go but that's my initial response Yeah I mean it depends on the context for me
51:01
Both is fine Like I don't mind uh fantasy tropes when they're used properly or make sense or you know
51:08
whatever the case is U but I'm always fascinated by games or media that
51:15
attempts to reinterpret the tropes or give a new sort of rebirth to an old
51:21
classic And we'll probably talk about this a little bit in part two because um I I have an idea of where I want to go
51:28
with this and I think you'll both enjoy the journey Um but I like when people
51:33
are capable of sitting back and taking a look at it and saying "Okay well this is how dwarfs have been depicted in
51:38
everything I've read." Uh now they're going to be something completely different and this is the way that I
51:44
view them and we're going to go forth there and that's going to be the end of that Um as long as it's done well right
51:50
like as long as it's well thought out and uh given the proper time to sort of uh gestate gestate and like be like its
51:58
own thing then yes I I enjoy when people do that otherwise sometimes hitting the
52:03
classics there's nothing wrong with that uh although I do think it is really funny when people started losing their minds in
52:10
uh was it yeah the last Thor movie or or not sorry not the last Thor movie uh the
52:16
last Avengers movie where Thor got his new axe made uh and they like this is a dwarf He's huge And it's like yeah dwarf
52:23
can mean a lot of things It all depends on uh on on what you want to talk about or or where you want to go with that
52:28
origin So Matt well I was just thinking in terms of
52:34
like I don't know how to explain it Like if a story can basically highlight
52:42
and take just enough that you know what that thing is supposed to be but then it
52:47
completely subverts it I'm I'm kind of down I I I think that that's fun Um you
52:53
mentioned God of War earlier and one of the things I really love is Brock and Etri in the God of War games especially
52:59
in Ragnarok whereas like Brock is the for all that everyone Brock has a lot of
53:05
the classic dwarf stereotype attitudes but doesn't have a beard He's kind of blue and he's just he is he's less a
53:15
tacetern dwarf and more hey I see through your crap and and I love I love Brock I think
53:22
he's a great character but Etri is horrifyingly tragic and it's painful especially in
53:29
the second game to see the journey that Etri is on and they're dwarf enough that
53:35
you know what they are like you there's never any point where you go what are
53:40
those two They're weird You you know what they are but they're
53:45
like they're they're kind of like of all the weird places to get this from One of my favorite lines is is on this kind of
53:52
concept is from uh Mass Effect 2 from Mortyn where he talked about no hum you
53:59
know it goes it's down to genetic code All races have geniuses and idiots but with humans variability is so great you
54:07
can't know what you're dealing with until you you experience them Whereas with other people you can look at them
54:13
and make a a reasonable guess And I like it when you can't make a reasonable
54:19
guess I like it when you actually have to experience them to to understand Um I've been playing um Wilder
54:28
Myth recently which doesn't really have anything like that and it's kind of jarring to to do a game where there's
54:35
just humans you know what I mean Like I I feel like we need other people's just
54:42
to make it more interesting We haven't even talked about like some of the really weird ones Um but yeah we we
54:48
should probably talk about goblins too at some point We're pretty much running up on the next episode right Yeah So I
54:54
think this is where we're going to call it for this one in particular before we get into part two Uh so I'm going to go
54:59
ahead and do my spiel here because Blizzard Watch is made possible due to your generous contributions at
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56:01
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56:08
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