Kiddicraft KIDDIZ Figure Pack: Orc Attack KC1409

Kiddicraft's KIDDIZ Figure Pack: Orc Attack contains 78 pieces — five orc figures, each individually designed, with an assortment of weapons. Age 5+.

Tolkien found the word in a thousand-year-old poem

Orcs are so standard a part of fantasy that it is easy to assume they are ancient folklore. They are not. Almost everything about them comes from one author, and he built them from a single word.

Orcneas appears once in Beowulf, in a list of the monstrous descendants of Cain, alongside giants and elves. Nobody knows precisely what it meant — something like demon-corpses. Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon who spent much of his career on that poem, took the word and built a species around it.

He was never entirely comfortable with what he had made. His letters return repeatedly to the problem of a race that is evil by nature, which sat badly with his own beliefs, and he tried several explanations — corrupted elves, corrupted men, beasts given speech — without settling on one.

Everything since inherits the design. Dungeons & Dragons took orcs in 1974, Warhammer and Warcraft took them from there, and the green skin, tusks and crude armour that everybody now pictures are largely later inventions layered onto Tolkien's word.

So five orcs in a box are, at one remove, five monsters from a poem written down around the year 1000.

Five antagonists

A figure pack of villains is more useful than a pack of heroes, because most sets come with their own heroes and almost none come with enough opposition.

In the Herocraft range

Sets KC1502 (Orc Hideout) and KC1504 (Orc Battering Ram) are where these belong; KC1501 (Knight's Castle), KC1505 (Knight Outpost) and figure pack KC1410 (Knights) are what they are for.

Specifications

Pieces: 78 · Figures: 5 orcs with weapons · Series: Kiddicraft Herocraft · Age: 5+ · Compatible with leading brick systems