Friday 30 August 2019

Anti-Cruel Discrimination and the Bestiary of Flukes

"Summon all our people to meet me here as speedily as they can. Call out the giants and the werewolves and the spirits of those trees who are on our side. Call the Ghouls, and the Boggles, the Ogres and the Minotaurs. Call the Cruels, the Hags, the Spectres, and the people of the Toadstools. We will fight..." 
-The White Witch, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Chapter 13) 
Cruels and Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and Ettins. In fact here were all those who were on the witch's side and whom the Wolf had summoned at her command... 
-The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Chapter 14)

If D&D had been less influenced by Tolkien and more by CS Lewis, its bestiary would have looked very different. No goblins or orcs, but plenty of boggles. Evil sprites. Incubuses, ettins, werewolves and efreets as major villains rather than rare encounters. Orknies (meaning nuckelavees?) and wooses (woses?). "Cruels" and "horrors" (whatever they are) running amok - not to mention the people of the Toadstools.

The familiar and iconic entries in the D&D bestiary - orcs, goblins, kobolds, bugbears, ogres and the rest - are really there by fluke. Yes, some were made up by D&D designers. Most weren't, though. They were simply pilfered from other sources. They could just as easily have been overlooked for others in that process. Gary Gygax might have decided not to have orcs, but redcaps, say, and our modern game would be something rather different as a result. (Can you get a half-redcap?)

Want a different tone to your campaign setting and you could do a lot worse than starting off with a copy of the Monstrous Manual and just crossing out and replacing all the iconic monsters and going from there. Redcaps instead of orcs, bogles instead of goblins and nockers instead of dwarves and suddenly it's a different game. Try it with the book or folkloric tradition of your choice and see what you get.

21 comments:

  1. Orknies are surely Beowulf's Orcneas ("demon-corpses") and so share a source with Tolkien's orcs. The wooses are woses, and the ettins are Beowulf's eotenas (source of the ents!) - though of course "ettin" has a folkloric life of its own since Anglo-Saxon times. (I blabbered on about all that here: https://hobgoblinry.blogspot.com/2018/03/narnia-is-most-d-setting-out-there.html)

    Very good point about substituting the words. I'd say, though, that what Gygax did was split out synonyms and accord them different meanings that those words didn't really have previously (the split of Tolkien's synonymous "goblin" and "orc" being the most obvious example: D&D's goblins *are* Tolkien's orcs in a way that D&D's orcs - certainly by the time of the Monster Manual - are not).

    I always think (and may have said in these comments before - if so, apologies) that the list of "giant-class" creatures in D&D is a kind of counterpart to the character-class level titles. In very early D&D (and certainly in Chainmail), kobolds, orcs and goblins were acknowledged as pretty much the same thing; the arbitrary divisions seem to have hardened subsequently.

    I'd be willing to bet that Lewis's inclusion of orknies, wooses and ettins was a wink at Tolkien - perhaps a literal wink at one point over a reading at the Eagle and Child.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are probably right about that.

      Delete
    2. Damn, that is insightful. Thanks for that comment! I'll have to think about that.

      Delete
    3. Lewis was no Anglo-Saxonist and probably wasn't making an oblique reference to Beowulf's orc-neas. Remember that "orc" is both the root of orc/ogre through Latin Orcus -and- also the name of a sea monster (hence, the root of orca) from the very same etymology. "Orknie" to me sounds like a nuckalavee or kelpie, or what's variously called in Germanic languages a neck, näkken, nøkk, or (in Beowulf) nicor. I could be wrong, but it's my best educated guess.

      Delete
    4. The thing is, I can't imagine that Lewis got through all those Inkling meetings without knowing *exactly* where Tolkien got his orcs from. But there's more than that: Lewis took a degree in English at Oxford as well as one in Classics. And to do that, he would have had to have studied Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon (I'm not sure if it's still compulsory today, but it was until fairly recently).

      Given his fascination with mythology, his friendship with Tolkien (and exposure to the development of Middle Earth) and his Oxford English degree, I think it's inconceivable that Lewis didn't know the ylfe/orcneas/eotenas passage. The presence of ettins and wo(o)ses in the same list certainly supports a nod to Beowulf and Tolkien (I think Gawain and the Green Knight has both of those).

      Also, "orcneas" is closer phonetically to "Orknies" than the sea-monster orc/orca. My guess is that "Orknies" is an attempt to Anglicise (i.e. render in *modern* English) "orcneas" just as "ettins" is an update of "eotenas".

      Delete
  2. Also: it's an interesting fact, now I think of it, that Narnia has no elves. Beowulf's iconic list of Cain's descendants includes ylfe (elves), orcneas and eotenas: elves, demon-corpses/orcs/orknies and ettins/ents/giants. Lewis substitutes wooses/woses for elves.

    I wonder if he had internalised Hugo Dyson's celebrated response to Tolkien's reading to the Inklings: "Not another fucking elf!".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wonder if that's due to CS Lewis having more of a protestant attitude to Christianity, and a convert's piety to boot. He wouldn't like the idea of another race being created in God's image. Just a thought.

      Delete
    2. That sounds highly likely. And perhaps LIlith, Jadis and their ilk had already occupied that slot for him in a decidedly evil way.

      Delete
  3. Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
  4. In the earliest D&D materials, Gygax appropriated monster names without very much description at all, talking more about their game attributes (like low-light vision for goblins and, of course, hit dice) than their physical descriptions or habits. From there, hobgoblins are just bigger goblins with better morale, and kobolds are just smaller goblins. Gnolls are described as "[a]cross between Gnomes and Trolls (...perhaps, Lord Sunsany [sic] did not really make it all that clear) with +2 morale"

    Only with the AD&D Monster Manual, and perhaps increasing impetus to distance from both Tolkein and Arneson, did the "giant-class" humanoids get at least detailed artwork. Kobolds acquired horns, tails, and scales, taking the first step toward their later dragon-connected lineage. Gnolls grew tall and acquired hyena heads.

    Surely if Gygax's chief inspiration for such creatures was merely their hit-die niches, modern world-builders should feel justified in "reskinning" such creatures as they wish.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Of course they should!

      Yes, the animal people (kobolds/dogs, orcs/pigs, hobgoblins/mandrills, gnolls/hyenas) came later - though I think some of those tropes were established in D&D artwork before the Monster Manual (in some of the early supplements - certainly pig-orcs were).

      Delete
    2. I think pig-orcs actually originated with the Minifigs lead miniature line before Trampier also depicted them as such in the Monster Manual. The actual description in the Monster Manual gives no physical details though, other than of coloration, and I think pig-orcs were always somewhat contentious.

      Delete
    3. The Minifigs orcs were based on Dave Sutherland's illustrations, as were the gnolls. But Sutherland had illustrated a couple of D&D publications with pig-faced orcs before the Monster Manual: Swords and Spells and the original Basic set.

      Gary Gygax said somewhere that he'd envisaged them as much less pig-faced: upturned noses and tusks rather than full snouts. His description actually sounds a lot like Citadel's take on the orc in the 1980s.

      Delete
    4. When I first read LOTR I imagined orcs to be vaguely crocodilian.

      Delete
  5. The "10 Monster Setting" Challenge that was going around for a while was pretty much doing exactly this! I really fell in love with that whole concept, and I made four 10 monster settings; link to the original challenge in that link (I've also done some spin-offs on this concept).

    ReplyDelete
  6. I've actually done a little of what you advise myself, when building a setting with a folklore drawn from non-epic British fantasy, and the general medieval/Renaissance British idea of mysterious countryside beings, the Longaevi.

    So talking badgers and small fey and scary larger fey (my Kind Masters, who get into everything I create) and so forth, plus a singular Psammead and the like...

    ReplyDelete
  7. A lot of people don't realize just how much you can alter your D&D setting just by picking monsters from Fiend Folio and Monster Manual 2 instead of the classics.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey presto, you have a Michael Moorcock setting.

      Delete
  8. Ever read the Matt Wagner comic MAGE? It's a pretty nice Americanized British Isles and folklore beyond cosmology - and the mention of Redcaps makes me think of the Mage versions, little shirtless guys with big metal stomp boots.

    Its super heroes, but D&Dized (or other : I gotta admit, probably Pallidium Fantasy Roleplayized) superheroes.

    They do a nice job with different names for the same critters (rather than the D&D ever different word ever used for somethingis a different race: Says the Hercules analogue : Titan! Says the King Arthur analogue : Ogre! Says the Coyote analogue : G-g-giant!

    ReplyDelete