Male and Female Orcs

[Galin]

Thanks for the link Rumil. One quibble however...

Originally Posted by Rumil

(...) And of course that orcs=goblins (in pretty much every respect save size perhaps).

Many people seem to think goblins are smaller than orcs, but there are large goblins in The Hobbit for example: 'Out jumped the goblins, big goblins, great ugly-looking goblins, lots of goblins, before you can say rocks and blocks.' (Over Hill And Under Hill), and even in The Lord of the Rings, Saruman's Uruks are referred to as goblin-soldiers.


But even without these examples (others could be raised) the real difficulty with the idea that 'goblin' has been reserved for smaller kinds is the matter of translation: I often use hund and 'dog' in illustration because there are all kinds of dogs, large, small, (whatever), and various kinds of orcs as well... and if one has two texts for example, one German one English, where the original German word hund has been translated with English 'dog' -- why would anything think that a 'dog' is smaller or larger than a hund?

The idea in theory (Appendix F 'On Translation') is that the above statement from The Hobbit ('Out jumped the goblins...') is a fully English translation of something in Westron -- but we know one of the original words here, because we know 'goblin' has been used to translate orc. The arguably confusing thing is: in The Hobbit the word orc has usually been translated with 'goblin', while in The Lord of the Rings, there are probably many more instances of orc than goblin (I never counted instances of orc! but I'm guessing they outweigh instances of goblin).

In theory this is due to the translator, and would be like Tolkien saying that he preferred the word 'hund' and so used it even in the English account along with dog. This is 'perfectly Tolkien' as an explanation too, as we know he was a lover of languages and like to create languages -- someone who is finely attuned to words, how they sound, and 'sound-sense'.

So whatever the numbers of 'goblin' or orc in both books, the explanation JRRT landed on was that one is an original word (Quendi), the other is an English translation ('Elves'). I note that JRRT published this explanation in a later edition of The Hobbit, only after Appendix F had appeared in print, thus after he had fully landed on the conceit that these tales had been translated from an original Westron.

This finally provided the answer to explain 'goblin' in both books, and is in accord with the examples from both stories.