Orcs: grim, slimy, generally bald. They stink, they lurk. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, they are harbingers of evil, the dull-minded minions who carry out Sauron and Saruman’s infamous plans. Derived—according to Wikipedia, at any rate—from Orcus, the demonic-looking Roman god of death, and the subsequent Old English cognate orcneas, a fae race condemned by God, the orc is the embodiment of all that is emphatically bad in the black-and-white world Tolkien created, the world from which the bulk of modern, western fantasy descends.
[Tolkien, Peter Jackson, World of Warcraft, and the evolution of the orc...]