Where Did Elves and Orcs Come From? How Folklore and Invention Became One Template

The 1974 Dungeons & Dragons boxed set offered players a choice of four races: human, dwarf, elf, and hobbit.^[1] But starting with the sixth printing, around 1977, the word “hobbit” quietly disappears from the rulebook and “halfling” takes its place.^[2] The reason was not literary. It was a warning from the people who held the rights to Tolkien’s work.

That small episode leaves a question behind. When we take the look of a fantasy race for granted, how much of it is old folklore, how much is someone’s invention, and how much is just a product specification? This article lines up the elf, the dwarf, the orc, and the hobbit from oldest to youngest and checks each in turn. The lineage of stories about crossing into another world has its own article, When Did the Isekai Begin?, so here we look only at the peoples who live there.

Elves: The Neighbors Who Brought Illness

In Anglo-Saxon medical texts, elves are not graceful forest dwellers. They are a reason you might be sick. Bald’s Leechbook and the medical collection that accompanies it, both from the mid-tenth century, name a condition called “elf-disease.”^[3] Lacnunga, a collection of medicine and charms copied around the turn of the eleventh century and now in the British Library, contains a charm against a sudden stabbing pain in the side. It opens with a herbal recipe: feverfew, red nettle, and plantain boiled in butter. Then comes the line “They were loud, yes, loud, when they rode over the (burial) mound” (in Alaric Hall’s translation), and the noisemakers turn out to be “those mighty women.” Near the end, the charm lists the arrows of gods, the arrows of elves, and the arrows of witches side by side.^[4] Medicine and magic shared the same page.

There is a counterargument, though. Alaric Hall, who has studied elves in medieval English, argues that the popular notion that “elves shot invisible arrows to cause disease” was largely inflated by scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his view the Anglo-Saxon evidence for it is thinner than usually assumed.^[5] So the careful statement is this: the link between elves and illness is clearly attested, but the image of the arrow-shooting elf includes some layers of paint added by later researchers.

In the same period, elves were sometimes grouped with monsters. The Old English epic Beowulf ties the monster Grendel to the biblical Cain, and around line 112 says that from Cain’s line came giants, elves, and orcneas.^[6] Inside a Christian worldview, in other words, elves stood outside God’s order. The last word in that list will come back later.

Turn to the North and the elves split in two. In chapter 17 of “Gylfaginning,” part of the Prose Edda compiled by the thirteenth-century Icelander Snorri Sturluson, the light elves (Ljósálfar) are fairer than the sun and live in Álfheimr, while the dark elves (Dökkálfar) are blacker than pitch and live underground.^[7] This sharp black-and-white scheme is recorded, in effect, in only one place: Snorri’s text. Some scholars therefore suspect that it was less an old folk belief than Snorri transposing the Christian pairing of angels and demons. Others argue that it grew out of an indigenous idea of light and dark as two faces of the same beings, and the question remains open.^[8] It is a curious thing to remember when “dark elves” later come back to life in games.

How Did Elves Get Small, and Then Big Again?

One fact stands out: the height of elves has never been consistent.

By the time of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, fairies had shrunk so far that, in one speech, “all their elves, for fear / Creep into acorn-cups and hide them there” to escape Oberon’s anger.^[9] Michael Drayton’s 1627 poem Nymphidia went further and imagined a fairy palace with walls made of spiders’ legs.

Tolkien disliked this trend. In “On Fairy-Stories” he guessed that the diminutive elf or fairy is “in England largely a sophisticated product of literary fancy.” There were indeed small inhabitants of Faerie in the old stories, he said, but smallness was not characteristic of that people as a whole. He also noted that Drayton’s poem stands near the head of a long line of flower-fairies and butterfly-fairies.

Tolkien even offered a guess about when elves shrank. It seemed to him to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves. That was the age when Hy Brasil, the enchanted land in the western sea, ended up as nothing more than Brazil, a place named for a dye wood. With nowhere left to go, the elves hid in flower petals. Tolkien admitted the guess was uncertain, but he was clear that the tiny fairy was not an ancient belief. It was a comparatively late fashion.^[10]

The shrunken elf soon found new work. The 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” called Santa Claus himself “a right jolly old elf,” though the word there suggested a small, mischievous, fairy-like fellow rather than a laborer. One early attested scene of Santa putting elves to work appears in an 1857 poem in the American magazine Harper’s Weekly, “The Wonders of Santa Claus,” which says: “He keeps a great many elves at work.” The cover of Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1873 showed a workshop where Santa directs elves in making toys.^[11] A being who once brought illness had become a laborer making gifts for children. Why elves, of all creatures? There is no firm record, but we can guess that small, nimble-fingered fairies suited the world of children and toy shops. As the dangerous neighbor turned into a cute worker, the elf moved from something people feared to something that helps them.

Tolkien swam against this current and made elves tall again. The elves of The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) are as large as humans or larger, a beautiful and noble people who are not easy to approach.^[12] In the same essay, he argued that fairies are not supernatural at all; if anything, they are “far more natural” than humans. He wanted to restore what had been shrunk into cuteness. When later fantasy games and novels say “elf,” the image that comes to mind is not Shakespeare’s fairy but this one.^[10]

The elf had one last modification: the long ears. Yutaka Izubuchi, who designed the elf characters for Japan’s Record of Lodoss War, said in a 2018 interview that in his mind elves simply had ears like that, and named Kira from the 1982 film The Dark Crystal as an influence. The long ears seem to have taken hold in his 1988 novel illustrations and grown longer in the 1990 anime OVA. He also acknowledged that his design for Deedlit, the dark elf with brown skin and white hair, became the standard that followed.^[13] A British poet, an American magazine, Tolkien, and a Japanese designer each left a hand on one race. The woodland sprite of English forests went out to the world with its ears stretched in Japanese art.

Dwarves: Not Originally Small

The dwarf begins with far more dignity than the elf. In “Skáldskaparmál,” part of the Prose Edda, the gods’ most precious treasures are made by dwarves. The Sons of Ivaldi made Sif’s golden hair, the ship Skíðblaðnir, and Odin’s spear Gungnir. Then Loki wagered with the dwarf Brokkr, and Brokkr’s brother Sindri (also called Eitri) produced the golden boar, the ring Draupnir, and Thor’s hammer Mjölnir.^[14] The dwarves were smiths whose craft even the gods could not imitate.

Yet nothing in these accounts says they were short. Early Norse sources do not mention the dwarves’ height, and descriptions of them as small multiply in later legend and folktale. The linguist Anatoly Liberman noted that among dwarf names are ones meaning “big enough” and “tall.” He reads the dwarves as beings who were originally of lower rank than the gods and who, after the spread of Christianity, came to be pictured as small in body too.^[15] The same pattern had applied to elves: lower status turned into smaller size. The two races trace similar curves. Elves shrank from near-human size to creatures hiding in petals, and dwarves shrank from craftsmen of unmentioned height to short miners.

By the time of the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White,” the seven dwarfs are miners who head into the mountains each morning to dig for ore and gold.^[16] The gods’ smiths had moved into the mountain as small miners. How this scene carried on all the way to the Disney film is covered in The Evolution of the Grimm Fairy Tales, so for this article it is enough to remember that smith and miner are both “craftsmen who work metal underground.”

Tolkien also took dwarf names from the Edda. The names of the dwarves in The Hobbit, and of the wizard Gandalf, overlap with names in the dwarf catalogue of Norse myth.^[17] In that sense Tolkien’s dwarves are less a newly invented people than descendants who borrowed the names of an old family of smiths. He even intervened in the spelling. In a letter of October 1937, just after The Hobbit appeared, he confessed that the plural “dwarves” was “a piece of private bad grammar, rather shocking in a philologist,” and he considered the historically correct form to be “dwarrows.”^[17] But “dwarves” was not Tolkien’s coinage. It was already in use before him, and it is more accurate to say that his fiction made it widespread.

Orcs: A Word That Appears in the Record Once

The orc’s roots lie in that single line of Beowulf mentioned above. For Tolkien, an Oxford scholar who taught Old English, it was the text he knew best by profession.^[18] The orcneas listed among Cain’s descendants in this poem, preserved in a manuscript made between the late tenth and early eleventh century, are the ancestors of the orc.^[6]

Orcneas is usually glossed as “demon corpses,” but the meaning is not certain. A common explanation links the first element, orc, to Orcus, the Latin god of the underworld, but there is little to settle the point, and Tolkien himself doubted this etymology. In an April 1954 letter to Naomi Mitchison, he wrote that his word “orc” was “derived from Old English orc ‘demon’, but only because of its phonetic suitability.”^[19] It is a name chosen for its sound rather than its meaning. For medieval scribes, meanwhile, the descendants of Cain were beings driven outside the order of humankind. The notion that a monster inherits “an evil bloodline” can be read as connected to Tolkien’s orcs, who are conceived as corrupted beings.

The word’s journey to becoming a people also involved changes of name. In The Hobbit (1937), the creatures are mostly called “goblins,” and “orc” appears only once. By The Lord of the Rings, “orc” has settled in as the name of the race.^[18] For comparison, “goblin” comes from a word used for a demon in twelfth-century Normandy, and “troll” is from Old Norse, where it covered demons, giants, and werewolves alike.^[20] Both are old names, but neither had hardened into the framework of a single race the way “orc” did, which came later.

The Question Raised by Letter 210

There is a sentence that cannot be avoided when discussing orcs. In June 1958, commenting on a proposed film treatment of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote to Forrest J. Ackerman. It was not a text meant for publication; it was a private letter responding to a movie-production idea.

“squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.”^[21]

Scholars read it differently. One side sees evidence that Asians served as a model for the monsters, and points out that in 1958 Tolkien was still using “Mongol-type,” a term from early twentieth-century race theory. The other side focuses on the qualifier in the middle of the sentence, “(to Europeans),” and holds that Tolkien was conscious that standards of beauty differ across cultures and did not mean that any people was inferior.^[22] What the sentence does show is that Tolkien’s orcs can be read as overlapping with real-world appearance stereotypes. Whether that overlap was intended, or prejudice of the era seeping in unconsciously, is still debated.

Pig Faces and Green Skin

Tolkien described the orc’s appearance only as “ugly,” which left a wide blank for later hands to fill. It was games that drew a pig’s face into that blank. The 1977 Monster Manual said that orcs “appear particularly disgusting because their coloration – brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen – highlights their pinkish snouts and ears.”^[23] Many observers argue that this description and its illustrations fixed the image of the pig-faced orc.^[23]

Green skin is murkier. There are recollections that the practice of painting orcs green spread in the early 1980s around the miniature games of Games Workshop in Britain. But those recollections amount to testimony from a personal blog, and accounts differ on which group started it, so nothing can be confirmed.^[24] Patrick Wyatt, a producer at Blizzard who worked on Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994), has said that Warhammer strongly influenced the game’s visual direction. Blizzard originally wanted to make a Warhammer-based game, but the licensing talks fell through and it turned to a world of its own. That game can be seen as one of the things that spread the look of the computer-game orc.^[24]

Warcraft III (2002) tried to turn this template upside down. The orcs had originally been a clan-based, shamanistic society, then fell to demonic temptation, and the story follows their leader Thrall as he recovers their true identity. It was an attempt to make orcs beings with a history rather than innate evil. Even so, it did not escape criticism. Jessica Langer analyzed the racial arrangement of the sequel, World of Warcraft, as resembling a colonial-era gaze, and some critics read the narratives of races like the orcs as a repetition of the old “noble savage” stereotype.^[25] At the same time, there is also a view that giving orcs their own culture and honor reduced prejudice.

Hobbits: The Youngest Race

Of the four, the hobbit is the youngest. The Hobbit was published on 21 September 1937.^[26] The word is generally held to be Tolkien’s invention. It was later discovered that “hobbits” appears in a list of spirits in volume 2 of the Denham Tracts, published in 1895. That material was collected by Michael Denham between 1846 and 1859. The list names bodiless ghosts and bogeys and does not resemble Tolkien’s hobbits, and there is no evidence Tolkien ever read it.^[27] The same list also includes “hobgoblins,” which shows that similar-sounding words already existed among the hob- names for fairies and goblins. Even so, that was a coincidence of an old tradition happening to hold the same word; the hobbit we know today is Tolkien’s invention.

And yet this youngest of races was the first to lose its name in D&D. As we saw, the name “halfling” was the result of legal pressure. The usual account is that TSR’s 1975 board game Battle of the Five Armies, which lifted straight from Tolkien’s work, caught the attention of the rights holder’s legal team.^[2] The more plausible account is that the pressure came not from Tolkien’s family but from the company that had bought the merchandising rights, and as a result the hobbit became the halfling and the ent became the treant.^[2] Elf, dwarf, orc, and goblin, on the other hand, were not words Tolkien made up but words from older lore, so they could stay. What decided which names to keep and which to drop was not folklore but trademark law.

A Box That Turned Lore into a Table

What stands out about the 1974 boxed set is that races had become items to choose from. Human, dwarf, elf, and hobbit were originally beings from different eras and regions, but in the rulebook they became options set side by side in a single table.^[1] The table also borrowed heavily from the names and settings of Tolkien’s novels. Gary Gygax, who created D&D, denied for a time that Tolkien had any direct influence, and it was not until 2000 that he said Tolkien’s work had a “strong impact” on D&D.^[2]

So the order ran: denial of the influence, a name change under legal pressure, then later acknowledgment. The names changed, but the framework stayed. The big picture of elves in forests, dwarves in mountains, and orcs arriving in hordes was organized by Tolkien, turned into a table by D&D, and then copied across novels, games, and comics.

Imagination Through a Funnel

Set the four races side by side and a common thread appears. The elf went from a bringer of illness to Santa’s helper and then acquired long ears. The dwarf went from the gods’ smith to a miner in the mountain. The orc was a sound that had appeared once in a manuscript, and the hobbit was a name that did not exist before 1937. Lore carried across thousands of years and fresh inventions now stand shoulder to shoulder.

For readers of English, the trail has one more local layer. “Elf” and “dwarf” are not imports: both descend from Old English words (ælf and dweorg), so an English speaker who writes them today is using the same vocabulary the Anglo-Saxon scribes used.^[28] The elf of Santa’s workshop has never left the family calendar, either. The Elf on the Shelf, a children’s book and toy launched in the United States in 2005, sends a “scout elf” back to Santa each night to report on how children behaved.^[29] And Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films (2001-2003) gave a worldwide audience live-action elves, dwarves, and orcs, so for many viewers the screen, more than the page, is now where these peoples get their faces.^[30]

What gathered them in one place was not chronology but one man’s study and one box of rules. Tolkien arranged the names and the mood, and D&D converted them into numbers and options and distributed them around the world. Along the way some parts were trimmed, some swelled, and some names were erased for legal reasons. And yet the halfling, renamed in name only, remained the hobbit in every detail of the setting. The oldest lore comes to be read as a specification made within a few decades, and that specification is then accepted again as “the way things originally were.” The fantasy races we believe have “always been that way” are, in fact, old stories read backward through a template built in the twentieth century.