Christopher MacLachlan

Why are Ukrainians calling Russian invaders ‘orcs’?

The scene of devastation left by Russian soldiers after their withdrawal from Bucha, Ukraine (Getty images)

Ukrainian victims of Russia’s war have taken to calling their invaders ‘orcs’. The word is familiar to JRR Tolkien readers as the name given to the monstrous anthropoids in his epic novel ‘The Lord of the Rings’. In all Tolkien’s stories of the wars in Middle Earth, orcs are violent, destructive and untrustworthy, wreaking wanton havoc wherever they go. It is not hard to see why the people of Ukraine use this name for the invaders of their land.

But although Tolkien made the word his own, its origins are, as he acknowledged himself, much older. Orcs first appeared in a tenth-century glossary written in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and, more famously, in line 112 of the Old English poem Beowulf: ‘Eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas’.

Today’s ‘orcs’ wreaking havoc in the towns and villages of Ukraine appear to have this in common with their fictional predecessors

In both cases, the word appears as an item in a list of the names of creatures. In Beowulf, it can be translated as ‘ogres and elves and monsters’. But apart from that context there is little to explain what orcs were (or are). One possible clue linguists have picked up on is that ‘orcneas’ combines the word ‘orc’ with another word ‘neas’ that seems to mean ‘corpses’. 

Its origins then suggest a possible link to the undead. But the elusive search for the meaning of the word is likely to be what attracted Tolkien to it in the first place. Tolkien was fascinated by words in ancient languages, including Old English, for which there were no definite meanings; he enjoyed trying to puzzle out clearer definitions. In this he was part of the scholarly tradition of philology: the academic study of the roots and derivations of words and languages. Undoubtedly he was drawn to the word ‘orc’ by the obscurity of its meaning.

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