An orc, in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy fiction, is a race of humanoid monsters, which he also calls "goblin".
Beowulf's eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas, "ogres and elves and demon-corpses", inspiring Tolkien to create orcs and other races
Tolkien wrote that his orcs were influenced by the goblins in George MacDonald's 1872 The Princess and the Goblin. Illustration "The goblins fell back a little when he began, and made horrible grimaces" by Jessie Willcox Smith, 1920
Peter Jackson's film versions of Tolkien's orcs have been compared to wartime caricatures of the Japanese (here, an American propaganda poster).
An ork from Warhammer Fantasy
Tolkien's legendarium is the body of J. R. R. Tolkien's mythopoeic writing, unpublished in his lifetime, that forms the background to his The Lord of the Rings, and which his son Christopher summarized in his compilation of The Silmarillion and documented in his 12-volume series The History of Middle-earth. The legendarium's origins reach back to 1914, when Tolkien began writing poems and story sketches, drawing maps, and inventing languages and names as a private project to create a unique English mythology. The earliest story drafts are from 1916; he revised and rewrote these for most of his adult life.
Tolkien went to great lengths to present his work as a collection of documents "within the fictional world", including preparing facsimile pages from The Book of Mazarbul to support the story (it was intended for The Lord of the Rings) and to bring readers into his fantasy.
