Some of Haeck's points seemed almost philosophical, worth noting as possibly having applicability beyond the world of role-playing games. You need orcs because you need a force of chaos.
Every D&D world needs a force of chaos to prevent the great nations of the world from simply conquering your setting and filling all the corners of the map. Exploration is a core tenet of Dungeons & Dragons, and chaos that keeps the forces of order in check make it possible for the heroes to explore the untamed wilderness and long-lost dungeons. Orcs are one way of keeping civilization from pushing too deep into uncharted territory, or at least forcing the settlements in that territory from developing into major cities.
And you need orcs because you need the power of the gods -- other gods.
Orcs are connected so closely to their pantheon that they are almost like a divine plague let loose upon the world. The Monster Manual even describes their clans as plague-like, as a tribe of creatures like bloodlust personified. . . . Orcs are a perfect way to introduce your characters to the power of gods beyond those that they worship.
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Shortly after reading that, I checked a few blogs, including Vox Popoli, where I found a link to an article called "When Orcs were Real," which presents an argument by Danny Vendramini that ogres and trolls and all their equivalents in other cultures represent a racial memory of Homo neanderthalensis.
The real question is why -- why does every civilization have similar myths? Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous?Because the legends were real. The orcs were real.
The article outlines the latest view of Neanderthals as savage carnivorous apex predators, as smart as us and much more powerful, that preyed on humans and almost drove us to extinction -- forcing us to develop into apex predators ourselves and drive them to extinction.
I don't think the "racial memory" theory quite works, though. As the article says, every culture has legends about monstrous humanoids, but Neanderthals only ever existed in Europe and West Asia. Africans in particular have zero Neanderthal DNA in their genomes and, as far as we can tell, zero history of interaction with Neanderthals. If Vendramini's hypothesis is correct, we would expect "orc" folklore to be absent in Africa. It's not, though; see "What's a ghommid?"
I do like the idea of calling Neanderthals "orcs," though. "Hobbit" has already taken off as a nickname for H. floresiensis, so why not?
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When I lived in Maryland (age 8-11), my siblings and I all took it for granted that there were "orcs" living near our home, sometimes coming into our basement. We left them gifts -- berries mostly, and sometimes distinctive-looking pebbles -- and as often as not these disappeared. At one point we tried to open communications by leaving out slips of paper with runes on them. (We couldn't read the runes, but figured they might be able to.) The notes always disappeared, but we never got any notes in return. Not that we could have read them anyway.
