ORCS ARE CREATURES FROM Tolkien, and specifically Tolkien, who created them as fantastic creatures of dread, and large numbers. Certainly, JRR Tolkien worked in veins of antiquarianism, and everything he wrote was a meta-reference to some Old English or Celtic or Norse forebear, as anyone who's got bored by his books knows, but the forebears of orc-dom in British, Irish, and Northern European myth are not the orcs of modern myth. Traditional goblins are solitary, intelligent, skilful, tricky. Hobgoblins are humorous, though the butt of the joke might be you. Elves will definitely steal your baby, and fairies will definitely trick you. Demons, though certainly folkloric, relate specifically to the rules of Christianity and formal religion. The orcdom of uncountable ugly barbarian numbers, who are enemies and only enemies, and who have been made massively popular in the Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K games franchises, appear to arrive fresh, culturally whole, in the late 20th century. Or did they?

Samantha Hancox-Li has a fascinating and provocative article, 'The Crisis of Gender Relations' which deals with what she sees as real crises of modernity, or of a 'patriarchy bargain' gone wrong. It's excellent, it's frustrating, it's right in many structural ways, such as thinking clearly about birthrates, and societies that don't seem to want to reproduce themselves. (Thom pointed out this describing 'emergence' as a bargain is a bit of Rousseau-style natural philosophy, which is a good point). It's I think wrong though in the mythological ways, getting the human archetypes mixed up, and therefore wrong in the most important conclusions. Asks Hancox-Li:

What happens when the fundamental things no longer apply? What is a man to a girl who can buy herself flowers?
The knight saves the princess from the orc. That's a story about cool sword fights and glimmering dragons, but it's also a story about men and women and what they are to each other. A good man is a knight and not an orc; a good woman is a princess and repulsed by the orc's advances.
But what happens when the girl picks up the sword and kills the orc herself? What happens when she goes ahead and rules the kingdom without a man at her side?

But the 'knightly' myth is not a myth about who needs who. It fascinates me how myths translate themselves across the Atlantic and across history. ‘Knights saving princesses from orcs’ is, absolutely, an instantly recognisable trope and key to gender relations in the 21st century, I agree, but it comes from nowhere European or feudal. The great European gender mythology, of chivalrous love was also a mythological story about men and women and what they mean to each other, but it was very different that above, since a chivalrous knight battled fundamentally with other chivalrous knights, and would be debased by combat with the unworthy. Chivalrous lovers were not bargainers, and didn't enter into a negotiation, certainly not an unequal one, least of all with one another. Orc-slayers for hire come from somewhere else.

The mythological bargain Li describes of patriarchal violence and male necessity is, in image, a lot closer to our own times. Orcs, of disgusting hordes of savages, and of the salvation from them that comes from trustworthy male violence, is another mask on the well-known story of the 19thC cavalry saving kidnapped white women from native Americans. Those stories were immensely popular and fascinating to [white] North Americans and were the base of a huge volume of 'gone native' literature, fictional and semi-fictional. There is a history of kidnapped women, enslaved women, rescued women, from the very beginnings of colonisation on that continent, and a parallel one in Australia, all to do with the fascinating-terrifying otherness of Aboriginal people. Shipwrecked women, abducted women, women alone in the hostile land. As we've become more aware of what genocide was and is, the overt story has disappeared, but it was foundational to white ideas of masculinity and femininity in both places. The Western as a film genre might have declined but its trope endures.

The core of the myth environment of the Western is the necessity of men, and the really big questions of its stories are to do with how and why men are needed at all. Westerns are full of male characters whose flaws, as the whole town proves in High Noon, to be worse than villainous, unnecessary. The most Western movie of them all, Ford's The Searchers, centres on the hunt for women and belonging, amongst profoundly orcish Indians, and the critical question isn't what happens to the patriarchally-bargaining men when 'the girl picks up the sword' herself, but when the girl, even more shockingly, declares herself to be Comanche. This is not a threat of female empowerment on the frontier. It's an upending of the whole table underneath the D&D game. It's only the unimaginable--that a Tolkien princess might decide to down swords and run away to Mordor to be an orc--that's a fundamental threat to the necessity of men.

As Hancox-Li says rightly, 'our ability to build new narratives depends, in the end, on those narratives being embraced by both men and women'. Because I think her narratives are wrong I think her argument's limited, too. But I'd offer a counter-narrative about male necessity, and maybe an escape from some of the ills she's pointing out, in the myth-narrative in one of other greatest Western films ever made: Toy Story. Woody and Buzz begin as rivals, the cowboy threatened and jealous, the spaceman self-deluding and ridiculous. Both of them confront the big problem of their own existence (and yours, and mine): what if nobody needs them? For Woody it's the question of newer, flashier, toys, for Buzz it's the down-to-earth reality of being down-to-earth. When Hancox-Li asks, when her princess slays the orc, making her knight redundant, that 'A dream evaporates—and now what does his worth consist in? Can he find a way to be something worth wanting for his own sake—a man who is wanted even despite not being needed?' I suggest yes, there are well-known ways. To spoil the story of a thirty year old film, Woody and Buzz solve the problem by realising that they are necessary, mostly, to one another. Toy Story is (of all things) an oddly subversive movie that attacks that patriarchal 'bargaining' at its weakest point, of respect and friendship. Can we need one another?

« Flats /