#tharks

ORCS!

While Tolkien was drawing on some linguistic antecedents, Orcs in fantasy originate from The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings, where they’re brutish soldiers of various forces of evil.

Initially lacking redeeming quality, Orcs have become a darling of pop culture, their thuggish nature explored from many angles across TTRPGs, video games, comics, novels, and more.

Now, when you picture an Orc, you no doubt imagine something akin to the Warcraft or Warhammer franchises: statuesque, green skinned humanoids with protruding underbites and looming tusks, often locked into a primitive, itinerant lifestyle, eschewing technology beyond what they pillage from other races.

Interestingly, none of this is in Tolkien.

In Tolkien, “Orc” was essentially another word for “Goblin,” or perhaps unusually large Goblins. Far from statuesque, Gollum (a (former?) Hobbit) could easily be confused for one. The Uruk-hai, a new, stronger Orcish offshoot were described as Orcish in appearance but only as tall as a Man, not taller.

Tolkien’s Orcs are described as deformed, but nothing as specific as green skin or tusks is specifically mentioned (Tolkien saved in-depth sensory detail for trees, and occasionally beards).

Far from being savages, Tolkien’s Orcs were–in his grand Romanticist narrative–stand-ins for industrialization. They were destroying the forests to build grand weapons of war, and soot-covered Mordor evoked the smokestacks of 19th century london.

In many ways the conflict of LotR can be interpreted as Tolkien pitting the noble myths and tales he studied up against his real experiences in WWI.

(the thought amuses me of a firmly medieval fantasy setting, except when we zoom in on the Orcish Badlands they’re all shelling each other from the trenches)

But while none of these traits are in Tolkien, there is a source where they are central.

The Green Martians, or Tharks, first appeared in A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, published in All-Story Magazine from Feb-July 1912, well before any of the kids Tolkien decided to tell a fairy tale to were born.

The Tharks are described as 15 foot tall nomadic savages, favoring mighty beasts and weapons salvaged from the more civilized races of Barsoom. They have green skin and tusks, as well as six limbs (interestingly, the middle limbs are described as functional as either crude arms or secondary legs, but art always just depicts four arms)

Culturally, the Tharks are clearly meant as extensions of the Apache raiders encountered in the early chapters of the book set in Arizona; i.e. some California ranch-owner’s idea of wasteland savages. Nomadic, inhuman raiders redeemable only when breaching their primitive traditions.

The parallels are almost uncanny, and I’ll admit I’m honestly not sure where the crossover occurs. Early editions of D&D–another driver of fantasy trends–depict orcs as pig-people, which is probably how tusks became so iconic. They later added gray skin, which persisted officially until the current edition.

Somewhere between there in ‘74 and Warhammer in the early 80s is when the pseudo-Barsoom look took over in broader culture, and at this point there’s no getting around it. Even the more recent Tolkien film adaptations can’t entirely escape the expectation of modern Orcishness.

Turning back the clock a bit, Tolkien notably was never entirely sure where Orcs came from. His first idea was that they were molded from clay by Morgoth, a dark mirror to Adam, but being a Catholic at heart, he disliked the idea of Evil being a creative force.

He flip-flopped for the rest of his life, whether Orcs were corrupted men/elves/hobbits, uplifted beasts, even (according to one post I saw) soulless bodies remotely piloted by demons. He could never quite square the need for unfailingly evil mooks with his own feelings on Good & Evil.

Personally, I find particular resonance in the parallel between what D&D used to call an “always chaotic evil” race and the very Catholic concept of Original Sin. Was Tolkien merely dancing around the idea that the Orcs only needed to be Saved?

I can’t say what Tolkien would think of modern Orcs, either their merging with an earlier, American space alien, or our attempts to humanize what was supposed to be fundamentally inhuman. But I think his insecurity speaks to the same source as our fascination.

Who among us hasn’t struggled with what it means to be good? Or to be evil? And if we are made to be evil, what does it mean to strive against that purpose or to surrender to it? Can we abandon the precepts of predestiny? Or do we reject that they were ever there?

Stare deeply into that Jungian shadow and tell me…

Is it green? And do you want it to be?

Oh this bastard

And some skeches

There is an infectious misunderstanding regarding how OD&D deserts work, and I believe it’s because Gygax and Arneson were terrible at communicating their creative intentions without editors.

As you can see, there are twelve entries in the Random Encounter table for Deserts, 1-6 being the sort of encounters you might expect, with nomads, wizards, and even Islamic Dervishes, apparently. It’s where the (Martian) encounters come in that people get confused.

Because Zero Edition’s flavor tastes the most of Sword and Sorcery, and even Sword and Planet, out of all (“official”) D&D editions, and the foreword insists you must be familiar with Conan, John Carter of Mars, etc., and these encounters include Tharks and other Martians of Barsoom, the common assumption I’ve seen among Zero Edition scholars is that this is meant to be an optional rule where you can basically turn your deserts into Mars!

This is not the case. RAW in Zero Edition, your deserts are not Mars.

Let’s scroll down a page to other random encounters:

As we can see here, we are provided with random encounter tables that are explicitly optional- it is optional to turn your swamps and mountains into Lost World type havens of prehistoric life, and your forests into fae realms of Greek myth.

What you may also notice is that the Martian-Desert encounter tables are not listed as optional at all. They are mandatory. And yet, the Mars part of the table is in parenthesis. Why?

I do not claim to have access to Gygax and Arnesons’ ghosts (and forced them to get along for an interview together), but I think I have an idea.

This bad boy was published by TSR in 1974, the same year as the Brown Books. You probably don’t hear about it as much because of how tragically low the number of Barsoom fans are, and because the Burroughs estate hammered down hard on TSR, harder than Tolkien’s. Any future references to Barsoom in D&D were eliminated.

Here are the random encounter tables from this book:

Something we notice is that these tables are ALL d6 tables, and that they lack the most common environment in Barsoom- deserts! What gives?!

Wait a minute…

There are only 6 (Mars) encounters provided in Zero Edition! Could it have been TSR’s intention that you cross reference this encounter table with their Barsoom setting book?

It wouldn’t be the first time early TSR would do something like this. Recall that in the Brown Books, they constantly reference the combat system of Chainmail, but never reexplain it in case 13 year old Timmy who never played that game in his life picked up the cool dragon book. Of course, they go into more detail explaining the alternative combat system based on d20 rolls, and that since has become the favorite core combat system of Dungeons & Dragons.

So that’s it? My deserts aren’t Barsoom and Gygax and Arneson couldn’t just tell me that themselves? Yes, but don’t weep yet my friend, because I’ve made an inference from the fact we have the Barsoom supplements at all, and because of the optional Arid Plains table.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series is about a man named John Carter, a veteran of the American Civil War, who is magically transported to Mars, referred to by the natives as Barsoom, its lower gravity granting him superior strength and dexterity, including very high jumps. He randomly encounters monsters, makes allies with the big green men he encounters, and marries a princess after helping her city state win a war with its rival. Classic sword and planet/ sorcery stuff.

This series is highly important to the genre of fantasy and science fiction. Superman was directly inspired by John Carter’s physical feats, Star Wars’s plot of rescuing a princess from an evil space empire is ripped right from A Princess of Mars, and Avatar is literally just a knock off of John Carter of Mars. It’s no wonder Gygax and Arneson wanted to pay it homage in their game.

I think it’s more than homage though. Gygax NEVER wanted to introduce an official setting for D&D, only ever alluding to his home Greyhawk campaign early on; he figured people would be more interested in making their own worlds. But he provided maps for Barsoom.

If we look back at the optional Arid Plains, it’s full of Barsoomian animals, even Tharks, those angry Green men who love John Carter, whom they call “Virginia”. As John Carter himself was first teleported to Barsoom from a cave in a plain, we have to ask ourselves: does this imply that this arid plain is in fact a gateway to and from Barsoom?

John Carter Tharks anyone? Just me? Ok...