Read in paperback.
Themes
Through a critical lens.
- Monstrousness especially of orcs
Quotes
Similarity to Mongolian tropes
Gaerradh [an elf] caught the guttural sound of the orc shamans chanting spells. She held her fire, searching quickly for spellcasters. Few orcs ever studied wizardly magic, but priests devoted to the dark and savage gods of their race often accompanied the warbands. She spotted one fellow, a chanting war priest with the ceremonial eye patch worn by the servants of one-eyed Gruumsh [god of the orcs]. She aimed carefully and shot him through his remaining eye, cutting of his chant in mid-syllable.
The description of the orc spellcasters as ‘shamans’, accompanying ‘war bands’ and issuing ‘guttural sound’ bears more than a passing resemblance to Mongolian stereotypes. We see all these tropes borne out in the recent computer game Ghost of Tsushima.
Implicit in these depictions are the barbarism and cultural inferiority of the orcs-as-Mongols.