Orcs, Vikings, and Bias Within Survivor Narratives

When I say the word Viking to you, chances are it conjures a very particular image in your mind. You probably picture a huge warrior with a flowing beard, bellowing battle cries while he lays about with his ax, slaying men, burning towns, and stealing anything not nailed down. Even if you have enough historical literacy to know they didn't have horned helms, or that they may have had red hair instead of blonde, this image of the defiling raider is firmly etched into our collective consciousness.

And while this sort of individual certainly existed in the historical record (a Viking is, by trade, often a pirate after all), this one aspect has grown to encompass an entire people in the minds of a lot of us. Even if you were a trader, a farmer, a skald, or a normal sailor, there was the fear of what the most dangerous and violent of the Norsemen had done when one laid their eyes upon you.

Which brings me to orcs, and how we could have some fun examining them.

She was huge! Ten feet tall, with blood dripping from her tusks!

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What Contact Do You Have With Them, Really?

Despite the vast reach of Viking longships, which ranged from the shores of North America all the way to the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire, from the frozen Russian steppes to deep into the Muslim world, the Norse people weren't some huge players on the world stage in the way that empires tended to be. They were relatively small in number, came from a remote, frozen place, and though they did some very notable things (the raid on Lindisfarne and populating the ranks of The Varangian Guard as examples), they weren't some massive influence that was going to take over the world.

Probably the biggest thing about Vikings that has survived (we're talking specifically about the raiders and pirates, not Norse people in general) was the legendary fear they produced. Their raids were ruthless, they ignored the conventions that so many other cultures followed, and the sheer maneuverability of their ships meant they could turn up nearly anywhere. If there was water nearby (and even if the water was miles away) it meant the Vikings could reach you. And in the dark, with the fires barely holding the night at bay, it was easy to imagine dangerous pirates with minds full of murder and robbery, their hands tight on the hilts of their weapons as they drew ever closer at the behest of their strange, foreign gods.

Hope the waterfront property was worth it!

Because I've had orcs on the brain ever since my latest Species of Sundara dropped where I talked about several of the varieties of these creatures that populate my setting (available for both Pathfinder Classic and Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition), this has been a natural connection that I figured might be of-use to players and GMs alike.

To be clear, I'm not saying to pattern orcs off of the culture and/or pop culture we associate with the Norse (there's more than enough GMs and designers who've taken a stab at that already). However, as orcs and characters of orc heritage have grown and changed over the years we've had to re-imagine them, and expand on their place in our worlds and our games. Original orcs were the Tolkien model of monsters who served dark masters, and this is very much in line with the outlandish myths of Vikings told by those who survived their raids, or who merely observed the carnage left behind. The idea that the children of orcs with other species could only have been the product of violence or threats of violence is also much in-line with the sorts of tales told about the brutality of the Northmen.

As we expanded orcs further, we've seen that their violence toward towns and cities may be for more reasons than sheer wickedness, or raw personal gain. They might have been pushed off their old lands, and are fighting against resettlement. They might be fighting against prejudices that have led others to shun and mistreat them. They might even be fighting for the families and communities that those on the other side never even thought about, because to them there are no children or civilians among orcs; they're just a nameless, faceless hoard of roaring warriors because that's all they've ever seen, or all the legends have told of them. Yet much like the Norse people there was a vibrant, shifting, ever-changing culture that went beyond the Ulfbehrt and the Dane ax, and that was more than golden armbands and berserkers. Those things were a part of it, yes, but they were by no means what defined the whole of who they were. There were multiple nations, holds, and smaller clans within the larger whole, and examined on that small scale you could see stark differences between the myths of their culture, and who they really were at ground-level.

For GMs and players alike who want to bridge that gap between the orcs of older RPGs who were brutal, savage raiders at the behest of a violent, one-eyed god of battle and death, and newer RPGs where orcs are diverse and varied, each with their own cultures and interior life, this strategy might be worth thinking about.

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