From Glazer’s Creek to Orc’s Drift — Intertextual colonialism in Warhammer
I swear to god, not all of my medium articles are going to be about Warhammer. It’s just that the subject is something I find fascinating and I think this is a good platform for me to express my thoughts and ideas about the game. So, let’s talk about orcs.
CW: Discussions on racism and colonialism.
Orcs are a popular and problematic part of the speculative fiction genre. Most of the problematic parts come from their racial coding. Ever since J.R.R. Tolkien used them in Lord of the Rings for the first time, they have been mired in unfortunate coding to real-life ethnicities. Tolkien described orcs in a letter as akin to “least lovely mongol types”, squat and dark with slanted eyes*. Tolkien-esque fantasy soon became a staple of the genre, an entire race of people that could be killed without the moral dilemma rising from committing racial genocide. Orcs appeared in Dungeons & Dragons and adventurers by the thousands continued massacring the facsimiles of real-life people that, as writer N.K. Jemisin put it, “can be slaughtered by the thousands without conscience or apology.” Jemisin explains how most fantasy races are already humans + something, (human+fish=mermaid, human+magic=elf, for example), but what are orcs then? Jemisin argues that it’s human+otherness, indescribable thing that makes them different from us, the presumed white reader. And to Jemisin and many others, that otherness is racial.
On the other hand, that otherness is something that makes them interesting to some. If we use modern D&D as a base here, there really are only a handful of options to play “other” in a fantasy setting. As writer Reuben Williams-Smith says, in fantasy worlds such as Faerun there are “dark skinned people, but they are not Black, not in a sense of being a minority in the world.” Role-playing games can be safe spaces to explore very different themes, and much like Joshua Hoffner likens playing tieflings to role-playing queer otherness, there is similar element in orcs and half-orcs for role-playing otherness in fantasy setting. For me personally, I have found comfort in playing orcs in D&D. I am quite big and tall with a low voice, and as a transgender person those are two things that’s are often used to misgender me in real life. Orcs are often tall, wide-framed and deep-voiced, yet they can be beautiful and more than what people presume they are based on their appearance. I played with this idea earlier this year in a photo series project “Trans Icons” which I modelled for in, where my iconography was based on orcs. Whether using orcs as specifically racial other in a more positive way is something one should do is a different question which I am not equipped to answer in any meaningful way, and it’s not really even the topic of this post so we really should move on.
In James Mendez Hodes’s massive twin articles “Orcs, Britons and Martial Myth”, Hodes mentions that the masterstroke of the Games Workshop’s game developers was to code their orcs as white rather than POC. According to Hodes, “unlike many efforts to rehabilitate orcs by stripping out culture or inventing wholecloth, GW leans into completely divergent cultural association, solving orc’s cultural problem actively rather than passively.” Orcs in Warhammer do have some racial coding, for example the Savage Orcs, which have been described as “savage lunatics” whose “brains have been baked by the scorching sun of the Southlands.” But Hodes isn’t talking about Warhammer Fantasy orcs, but Warhammer 40,000’s Space Orks, or just simply, orks.
Orks in Warhammer 40,000 can be described as “space football hooligans”. Since their inception in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader back in 1987, orks have been strongly codified as English football hooligans with too many guns. They are beings full of rage, but that rage is aimed towards wanton destruction and vandalism, stealing stuff and driving around the space in their ramshackle spacecraft. Orks are not mammals, but fungoid creatures that spread throughout the galaxy via spores. Ork dialect is an exaggerated version of Southern English slang (words like “git”, “gob” and “bad’un” for example), and their visual identity is…well, it’s kinda all over the place nowadays but one of the strongest is English skinhead culture of the 1970s and 1980s, with their Dr. Martens boots, jeans, suspenders and check pattern decorations. Skinheads were also known for football hooliganism. There are also some references to more explicit fascism and Germany in general, such as the old models for “Stormboyz” and helmet designs that look, depending on the sculpt, either like WW2 German helmets or the classic WW1 Pickelhaube-helmet. But as Stir notes in his youtube video on the subject, orks are “the least fascist faction in Warhammer”, being just rough lads that like setting places on fire without really discriminating against anyone. Orks like to fight everyone, even amongst themselves.
There is also popular theory that the greatest ork war boss, Ghazkull Mag Uruk Thraka, is based on Margaret Thatcher (try saying Ghazkull’s last name fast, it makes sense), with him even having the title “Iron Ork”, who united warring ork klans under his banner (much like Thatcher united various right-wing groups under hers), but this is just a reading, which has been denounced by some of the studio writers, so who knows. However, orks in Warhammer 40,000 are not entirely without their problems, as there are definitely some classist themes in their coding, being illiterate brutes who speak in working-class jargon and can’t help but fight amongst themselves. During Rogue Trader era these elements of satire were all over the place in Warhammer, and later orks drew influence from the popularity of Mad Max 2: Road Warrior and these explicit class themes and coding have moved from the spotlight.
But as the title of this post indicates, there is a racial element in Warhammer orcs and how they are used in games and stories that’s mired in the colonialist history of England. In 1985, Citadel Miniatures (which is a subsidiary of Games Workshop) published a supplement to Warhammer Fantasy Battles called “Blood Bath at Orc’s Drift”, designed by Gary Chalk, Joe Dever and Ian Page. In this supplement, four scenarios lead up to a major battle where humans, elves and dwarfs protect a supply outpost in Orc’s Drift from a marauding orc army. In White Dwarf #222, published in 1998, a Warhammer 40,000 battle report was published under the title “Last Stand At Glazer’s Creek” by Jervis Johnson, Paul Sawyer, Adrian Wood and Graham Davey. In it, a small band of Imperial Guard Praeteorians defend Glazer’s farm against, you guessed it, a marauding ork army. Last Stand At Glazer’s Creek was recreated in 2018 in the June issue of White Dwarf, with orks once again attacking Glazer’s Creek, this time protected by the Ventrillian Nobles Imperial Guard regiment.
Both of these are inspired by the same film, the 1964 British war epic Zulu, which depicts the historical battle at Rorke’s Drift where roughly 140 British colonial troops fought against a massive Zulu army during the 1879 Anglo-Zulu war. While in the case of Blood Bath at Orc’s Drift this is evident from the name alone, in the battle report of the Last Stand At Glazer’s Creek this is stated outright by scenario developer Jervis Johnson, who cites the movie as an inspiration. Zulu is considered a classic film, and I’m sure there is some well-written analysis on its merits both as a historical piece and how it reinforced the colonial mythology of the British Empire, but that’s not what I’m interested in. I’m interested in how its intertextual influences can be seen in how the orcs and defenders are depicted in both of these examples.
In Blood Bath at Orc’s Drift, the setting is in the land of Ramalia, where elves, dwarves and men have united under the banner of King Laeron, and their lands are outright called “colonial principalities” that the orc king F’yar tries to reclaim after his loss at the Goblin Wars of Ramalia. This culminates in the titular battle, where most of Laeron’s army has been called elsewhere and a small band of soldiers are left at Orc’s Drift to man the supple base. This base is led by elven soldier Brommedir and dwarf leader Osrim Chardz, stand-ins for real life soldiers Gonville Bromhead and John Chard who led the defense in Rorke’s Drift. In Orc’s Drift there are also wounded soldiers left from earlier skirmishes, much like in Rorke’s Drift, as well as a religious man called Snart, who is most likely a reference to the Swedish missionary Otto Witt, who was stationed at Rorke’s Drift.
In Last Stand At Glazer’s Creek, 24th Praetorian Imperial Guard Regiment’s 3rd Platoons is stationed at a farmstead in Glazer’s Creek. Platoon had been left behind to guard the farm while the rest of the regiment went to attack the Big Toof River, where most of them were annihilated (referencing the Battle of Isandlwana, where the Zulu nation defeated the British army in a surprising victory). Once again there is a hospital with wounded soldiers. Pratorians are led by Captain Caine, whose name is a reference to actor Michael Caine who played Bromhead in Zulu. There is also “Hooky”, a ratling sniper whose description of cowardliness bears similarity to the film’s version of Henry Hook; “a thief, a coward and an insubordinate barrack-room lawyer.” The biggest reference to the film is in visuals, since the currently out of production Praetorian Imperial Guard were modelled to look like Victorian era British troops with pith helmets.
In both of these scenarios, orcs take the place of the Zulu army. In Blood Bath, orc warlord F’yar is described as a spiteful and cowardly leader, who assassinates King Laeron with a “poisoned codpiece”, wanting to “claim the lands of those white-faced, plough-pushing dungheads.” In Glazer’s Creek, no such motivations or characterizations are given to Warboss Grishnak or his army. They are just an ork army who had come to kill everyone at Glazer’s Creek, as it is what orks do. The Battle report text, however, keeps on reinforcing the “ferality” of the orks as to how they are fit for this scenario. A Special rule for the orks in Glazer’s Creek is “Feral Ork Rule”, which makes them better at melee combat and worse at shooting, reasoning that the “orks who made up the attacker were a rather primitive lot who weren’t much good at shooting.” Thus the racial coding is added to the orks via intertextual referencing, and black people fighting for their independence are represented in this homage by blood-hungry, dim-witted and feral monsters. It’s also worth mentioning how often orks specifically are identified by their skin tone, with the term “greenskin” being a derogatory term used to describe orks by the Imperium.
The whole idea for this post came to be after reading White Dwarf #466. This issue announced the retirement of Jervis Johnson, a veritable legend of the wargaming community who wrote dozens of games for Games Workshop. There he listed his favorite battle reports (a format he had spearheaded together with Andy Chambers) over the years and one of them was Last Stand At Glazer’s Creek. Now, I am a huge fan of Jervis Johnson’s writing in general, his game design philosophy is something that I admire greatly, and he has earned his status as the grand old man of the Games Workshop game designers. And I don’t think any less of Jervis due to Last Stand At Glazer’s Creek; I don’t believe he intentionally and maliciously designed the scenario to recreate colonialist fantasies, but it’s also important to point out when old colonialist and racist ideas appear in abstract forms of codified otherness. It’s easy to point out when something is overtly racist or colonial, but the abstract forms of these can be harder to figure out, even by the minds that created them. One of the more insidious forms of colonial influence in wargaming media is based on language. As Dragos Nica states, terms like “savage” are inherently tied to colonialist mindset, where it was used to “dehumanize indigenous peoples and to advance and normalize their erasures.” Exactly how many times in Warhammer orcs, ogres, lizardmen or chaos hordes are called “savage” is something that is impossible to calculate, but it’s common enough that it’s even hard to point out. That’s the insidiousness of normalization of colonialist language.
Wargames like Warhammer are not made in a vacuum, where real-life politics and history wouldn’t affect them. In the case of Warhammer 40,000, especially the politics were once very much a part of the game, being a satirical dystopian nightmare future of Britain after Thatcherism. And as the Warhammer community is known for its problems with far-right voices and issues of racism, it’s important to learn from the past and refrain from colonialist language and racist imagery in the future as well. The aforementioned “savage orcs” are still a part of Games Workshop production line, after all.
Aasa T
References:
Hodes, James Mendez. 2019. Orcs, Britons and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They’re Not Human. https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2019/6/30/orcs-britons-and-the-martial-race-myth-part-ii-theyre-not-human
Hoffner, Joshua. 2019. Role-Playing the Other: Tieflings are Gay. https://nerdarchy.com/roleplaying-the-other-tieflings-are-gay/
Jemisin, N.K. 2013. From the mailbag: The Unbearable Baggage of Orcing. https://nkjemisin.com/2013/02/from-the-mailbag-the-unbearable-baggage-of-orcing
Nica, Dragos. 2017. Stop Calling People ‘Savage’. https://theestablishment.co/stop-calling-people-savage-7746984d565d/index.html
Williams-Smith, Reuben. 2018. That Orc-Ward Moment: Racial Coding Dungeons & Dragons. https://www.autosave.tv/2018/09/24/that-orcward-moment-racial-coding-in-dungeons-and-dragons/
DawnStir. 2020. Top 5 Satirical Factions in Warhammer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7JsScYMuuU&t=564s&ab_channel=DawnStir
White Dwarf #222. 1998. Last Stand At Glazer’s Creek: A battle report by Jervis Johnson, Paul Sawyer, Adrian Wood and Graham Davey. Games Workshop.
Page, Ian, Chalk, Gary & Dever, Joe. 1985. Blood Bath at Orc’s Drift. Citadel Miniatures.
*= I am not accusing of Tolkien for being a racist, he was a product of his times and he has expanded in his writing enough on the subject of race that I don’t think he had any ill will towards specific groups of people. I added this because the more easily aggravated Tolkien-fans are already writing replies in Twitter to this post.
