orcs and goblins- what's the difference???

[deal_with_it]

Originally Posted by Thalion

Orcs and Goblins are the same thing...

Tolkien changed the word in LOTR because the Hobbit was written for children who would need a reference to what he was talking about...but when it came time to write the LOTR, he used Orc because he didn't want readers to have that "fairy-tale" misconception about his goblins being little hob-goblin, trickster type characters...he wanted more of an understanding that they were a perversion of Elves and evil, foul things; the word Goblin does not portray that because it already had been used much in fairie before The Hobbit and people had preconceptions as to what Goblins were...

While it may be easy to think of Orcs as bigger, badder and meaner than smaller Goblins, they are in fact the same creatures, only described just slightly differnetly in the LOTR and the Hobbit because the latter was written for children...(additionally, the Hobbit was written first and Tolkien hadn't incorporated all of his previous ideas concerning Middle Earth into it yet)

Yeah thats true, Being for kids, thats probably why the dwarves were so wimpy and there wasn't much in the way of battle scenes