Demonizing the Enemy, Literally: Tolkien, Orcs, and the Sense of the World Wars
Department of English, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX 78666, USA
Humanities 2019, 8(1), 54; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010054
Received: 17 January 2019
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Revised: 7 March 2019
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Accepted: 9 March 2019
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Published: 12 March 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue War and Literature: Commiserating with the Enemy)
A seemingly inescapable feature of war is the demonization of the enemy, who becomes somehow less human and more deserving of death in times of military strife, which unsurprisingly helps to justify the violence against them. This article looks at the development, character, and role of the orcs—creatures that are in some senses, literally demonized—in J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings in connection with the ideological need to demonize the enemy in World Wars I and II. Yet, in creating an enemy whom the heroes could kill without compunction, Tolkien also betrayed his own sympathy for the devils, perhaps owing to his own experiences as a soldier. This ambiguity pervades Tolkien’s writings, even as his demonized orcs are dispatched by the thousands, thus shaping the sense of warfare and our experience of it according to the desire to simplify, and make more comprehensible, the martial narrative.
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Keywords:
J. R. R. Tolkien; fantasy; war; narrative; ideology
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Tally, R.T., Jr. Demonizing the Enemy, Literally: Tolkien, Orcs, and the Sense of the World Wars. Humanities 2019, 8, 54. https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010054
AMA Style
Tally RT Jr. Demonizing the Enemy, Literally: Tolkien, Orcs, and the Sense of the World Wars. Humanities. 2019; 8(1):54. https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010054
Chicago/Turabian StyleTally, Robert T., Jr. 2019. "Demonizing the Enemy, Literally: Tolkien, Orcs, and the Sense of the World Wars" Humanities 8, no. 1: 54. https://doi.org/10.3390/h8010054
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