Orcs vs. Goblins in LOTR: What’s the Difference?

Tolkien left his stamp everywhere on modern fantasy, and orcs are no exception. Tolkien’s orcs and goblins are some of the most famous monsters of all time, giving kids nightmares since they put meat back on the menu. But it can be hard to tell the difference between goblins and orcs. Are orcs just really large goblins, or are goblins small orcs? Is there a metaphysical difference, or is it all culture?

Every Tolkien-inspired setting has its own answer: in Dungeons and Dragons, they’re separate creatures. But in Tolkien’s own writing, it’s not so easy; like with so many other things Tolkien, the answer to this question changed over time.

What Is An Orc?

Orcs are monsters about the size of a human, with fangs, bow legs, and flat faces. They have sallow skin and long arms. They’re brutish, malevolent, and love to destroy things. But, they’re also rather cunning, with a yen for building complicated machinery and siege equipment.

Orcs don’t have a language of their own, speaking “debased” pidgins of whatever languages they come across (a sure sign, in Tolkien’s world, that they’re ontologically evil!). In the books, this tends to mean Westron, the language Tolkien translated as English, or the Black Speech, the language that Sauron invented.

In Tolkien’s works we mostly only see orcs as servants of evil — as Sauron’s minions in Mordor, or as Saruman’s creations in Orthanc.

(Side note: Tolkien’s physical description of orcs is explicitly racist, and he used some really unfortunate language to refer to them that we won’t repeat here. Different adaptations have handled this with different degrees of success — there’s a reason a lot of 80s depictions of orcs just straight-up made them pig-men.)

What Is A Goblin?

Goblins are monsters that are slightly smaller than a human, with fangs, bow legs, and flat faces. They have sallow skin and long arms. They’re brutish, malevolent, and love to destroy things. But they’re also rather cunning, with a yen for building complicated machinery and siege equipment.

Like orcs, goblins speak horrible mishmashes of all the languages they’ve encountered; in The Hobbit, this is mostly Westron, translated as English.

We do see goblins living “naturally” in the Misty Mountains — they have their own King, and they seem to have been living there for quite some time.

(Side note #2: just like the orcs, Tolkien’s original depiction of goblins is explicitly racist. And just like the orcs, adapters have tried to get around this, with varying degrees of success.)

So, Is An Orc Just A Big Goblin?

Not exactly.

Tolkien wrote his stories over the course of his entire life, and he changed his mind about a lot of things as he wrote. Sometimes he’d change the name of a place, a person, or a concept, because he found a better one or because his ideas about language changed. Sometimes, he’d inadvertently step on a theological rake, and spend hours and hours thinking about the consequences.

In the case of goblins and orcs, Tolkien did both.

Tolkien’s Moral Dilemma

The goblins in Tolkien’s works were originally inspired by the goblins from George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, a children’s story from the 1800s. MacDonald’s goblins were meant to be seen as inherently evil, degenerate creatures, the descendants of robbers who’d fled underground to flee justice. Tolkien borrowed them for a lot of his early work, especially The Hobbit (which was originally a story he told to his kids).

These goblins were fine antagonists for a children’s story… but Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and he started to think the theology behind creatures that were always evil was kind of messed up. If a creature can think and reason for itself, then that creature is a moral agent: it can choose to do the right thing. That means it must have a soul, and that means that killing it is wrong. If a creature can’t choose to do the right thing, then it’s not a moral agent, and killing it is fine… but it’s also not able to think or reason, and the goblins clearly are.

So, for decades Tolkien went back and forth on what goblins even were.

Were they creations of Morgoth (Sauron’s boss, who’s basically the devil)? If they were, how did he make them? Tolkien believed that evil can’t create anything good on its own — creation is a gift from God, and Morgoth is pure evil.

Were they elves (or men, or Maiar) who’d been corrupted somehow? If so, wasn’t it unethical to kill them? They were still people, and they still had souls.

Were they messed up beasts or evil spirits, with no moral sense, who could be killed without qualms? That didn’t line up with their behavior in the books. Goblins know right from wrong, they just don’t live up to their principles.

The Origin of Orcs

During this time period, Tolkien went round and round, trying to figure out what to do about the problem of evil in his work.

At one point, he changed the word he used to refer to the malevolent beasties from “goblins” to “orcs”. The word “orc” came from Old English, where it was (part of) a word for evil spirits or devils.

It’s possible that Tolkien chose this word during one of the stints where he decided orcs were evil spirits? It’s also possible he just liked the sound and wanted to detach his orcs from MacDonald’s goblins. Either way, the name stuck, and he used it thereafter.

So, Are They Orcs Or Goblins?

“Orc” and “goblin” are basically interchangeable words when you’re talking about Tolkien, and he switched between them based on time, place, and his current opinions on where they came from.

The fandom convention is usually to use “goblins” to talk about the creatures in the Hobbit, and “orcs” to talk about the creatures in Lord of the Rings, for clarity’s sake. If you want to call all of Tolkien’s man-shaped servants of evil “orcs” or “goblins”, you absolutely can — but you run the risk of people not understanding you.

At the end of the day, language is about communication; we use words to get concepts across to other people. Are they orcs, or are they goblins? It depends on what you want to communicate.