I recently became somewhat disillusioned with the generic names "Half-elf" and "Half-orc" as race names. I just think that eventually members of those races (or those around them) would have created names. A Half-vampire is a Dhampir. A Half-dwarf is a Mul (in Darksun). We have Aasimars, Tieflings, Ifrits, Oreads, Sylphs, Undines, Changelings, Sulis, and Skinwalkers, all of which are either human-descended or even half-humans.
So, my question to the community is has anyone ever encountered a book/movie/TV show or setting which gave half-elves or half-orcs actual names? Has anyone ever given names to these races? (and if so, what were they?)
As far as I know, there is no precedent for half-orcs or half-elves having their own unique race names in mainstream fantasy literature. Well, at least no precedent that has transcended any specific work.
Half-elves are straight out of Tolkien, such as "Elrond Half-Elven" from Lord of the Rings. The only other non-Tolkien half-elf character I can think of is Tanis Half-Elven from the Dragonlance novels, although that's a direct D&D tie-in.
As far as I know, half-orcs were invented as a playable race for D&D back in the 1970s. I can't think of an example of a half-orc character not tied to D&D (directly or indirectly).
I played in a campaign once where neither elves nor orcs were playable PC races. The PCs were members of an oppressed human minority in a world dominated by the Aedoni (human/elf hybrids; culture based on the Roman Empire) and the Bokhara (human/orc hybrids; culture based on the Mongols under Genghis Khan.)
I recently became somewhat disillusioned with the generic names "Half-elf" and "Half-orc" as race names. I just think that eventually members of those races (or those around them) would have created names. A Half-vampire is a Dhampir. A Half-dwarf is a Mul (in Darksun). We have Aasimars, Tieflings, Ifrits, Oreads, Sylphs, Undines, Changelings, Sulis, and Skinwalkers, all of which are either human-descended or even half-humans.
So, my question to the community is has anyone ever encountered a book/movie/TV show or setting which gave half-elves or half-orcs actual names? Has anyone ever given names to these races? (and if so, what were they?)
Half-Orcs and Half-Elves originate from Tolkien, Half-Orcs were known as Uruk-hai or Goblin-men and Half-Elves are known as the Eldar (as they are more closely aligned with their Elven heritage) or Edain (human heritage).
The Uruk-hai aren't specified as being orc/human hybrids in Lord of the Rings, although Treebeard speculates that may be how Saurman bred them in The Two Towers. That said, the Uruk-hai don't have orcish sensitivity to light. Tolkien also used "goblin" and "orc" interchangeably.
According to The Silmarillion, the Eldar were the Elves, and the Edain were the Men who came to Beleriand and allied with the Elves. I don't recall there being a word Tolkien used for half-elves. He did make plain that such individuals were rare.
In Middle Earth for instance Two and exactly TWO family lines had Half-Elven within them
This isn't necessarily true. Luthian and Beren, Idril and Tour, and Elwing and Earendil (although really Elwing and Earendil are half-elves themselves) are the most famous human-elf couplings, until Aragorn and Arwen and they are the only ones in the main genealogies of the great elf families, but there are likely others. Earendil Imrahil the Prince of Dol Amroth was rumored to be descended of a companion of Nimrodel and given that, probably some others existed as well, although your point of them being very rare is valid.
Regardless of whether it's two, six, or twenty couples in Tolkien's works, it's safe to say that half-elves are a handful of remarkable individuals, not a race to themselves.
It would depend. If they have a community, I could see this happening. But often they are just individuals and not a race onto themselves. Now if a bunch of half elves or orc got together and breed true, over time they would get a culture identity and not really be "half" anything. They would be say Holrum villagers, of Hormic or whatever.
But as it stands, in most settings they are not a race of people at all.
If we were to take Golarion as the setting, yes, half-breed races are rare, but they are common enough that people know what they are, and they on occasion form communities (and do breed true), would anyone be interested in spit-balling some name ideas?
How about horc and helve?
Given how half-orcs tend to face a fair bit of bigotry, I can see 'horc' as being a derogatory term - at least in its origins.
^ I love Horc as a derogatory term, and given the mindset of many orcs/half-orcs, I see them taking that as their own.
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This character is a High Orc from Andoran. Don't call her a half-orc, please, she's a whole person, not half anything. Besides, her father's more-or-less human, but his great-grandfather had some orc in him, does that make her a quarter orc, a five-sixteenths orc, or what? Nah, the orc-blooded of Andoran aren't going to settle for that kind of nonsense. It's a new age of equality, haven't you heard? We're the High Orcs, the best of both races come together. Green Pride!
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This character is a High Orc from Andoran. Don't call her a half-orc, please, she's a whole person, not half anything. Besides, her father's more-or-less human, but his great-grandfather had some orc in him, does that make her a quarter orc, a five-sixteenths orc, or what? Nah, the orc-blooded of Andoran aren't going to settle for that kind of nonsense. It's a new age of equality, haven't you heard? We're the High Orcs, the best of both races come together. Green Pride!
That's good I like that.
This character is a High Orc from Andoran. Don't call her a half-orc, please, she's a whole person, not half anything. Besides, her father's more-or-less human, but his great-grandfather had some orc in him, does that make her a quarter orc, a five-sixteenths orc, or what? Nah, the orc-blooded of Andoran aren't going to settle for that kind of nonsense. It's a new age of equality, haven't you heard? We're the High Orcs, the best of both races come together. Green Pride!
You look moldy. Why are you proud of that? Also, what are you high off of? Can I buy some from you?
In Golarion, "half-elf" refers to any human/elf hybrid. If you have direct ancestors of both races, you're considered a half-elf. There are enough of these people to constitute a "people," but I see them as being part of one culture or the other, without having much of a cultural identity of their own.
Ditto half-orcs.
But, if you want them to have racial enclaves and a cultural identity of their own, go for it!
Well, let's see -- maybe I can help with half of this. Elf is Enhanced Life Form, so a hybrid of an Elf and a Human is a Partially Enhanced Life Form, or Pelf.
In the Neverwinter Nights persistent world I still play on (yes, some people still play that), at one point a group of half-orcs insisted on being called "oran." It's a combination of orc and human.
None of those half-orc characters are around anymore (some of their players still are), but characters still intermittently refer to half-orcs as oran in-game.
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Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton wrote a series about half elves back in the 90s. Read first one and thought it was pretty good and might be good fodder for a half breed centric campaign.
As for names, I could see half breeds having subculture code for non half breeds; something like muggle, mundanes, them, much like some 're nontypical subcultures have terms for the majority.
"Us," might be a term half elves and orcs might use for themselves, only the word coming from the less common culture.
Bastard, freak, gaijin, n word equivalent terms might be good models for naming half orcs/elves.
As for what it might be like to be a half something would be a lot like theaspergers spectrum; being not quite in toon with the surrounding culture and having to find/create your own niche, thus tending forward chaotic alignments.
{. . .}
As for what it might be like to be a half something would be a lot like theaspergers spectrum; being not quite in toon with the surrounding culture and having to find/create your own niche, thus tending forward chaotic alignments.
Toon? Well, now that you mention it, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are rather chaotic . . . .
{. . .}
As for what it might be like to be a half something would be a lot like theaspergers spectrum; being not quite in toon with the surrounding culture and having to find/create your own niche, thus tending forward chaotic alignments.Toon? Well, now that you mention it, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are rather chaotic . . . .
Heh, Bugs is clearly a Bard with the Trickster Mythic path...
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Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton wrote a series about half elves back in the 90s. Read first one and thought it was pretty good and might be good fodder for a half breed centric campaign.
As for names, I could see half breeds having subculture code for non half breeds; something like muggle, mundanes, them, much like some 're nontypical subcultures have terms for the majority.
1. there has to be a significant population.
2. there has to be enough clustered in the same region to develop a culture. In Golarion, the only place that happens is Krages, for half-elves, there is no known significant half-orc town, and Krages keeps itself closed to all strangers, so we don't know more than that about their culture.
Krages is the only town with a half elf majority, not a significant population, which other cities (Westcrown off the top of my head, Absalom and probably Oppara have half elf populations in the hundreds. That's certainly enough for sub cultures, with their own slang, code words, and terms to come about. Think about to groups like, neopagans, deaf people, gamers, and you get what I'm describing.
there is no known significant half-orc town,
That's not true. In the lands of the linnorm kings, there's the town of Averaka, populated by mostly half-orcs. On the pathfinder wiki, it even says 'the town is a haven of half-orc culture'.
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Half-elves in Eberron call themselves Khoravar. They mostly breed within themselves. Likewise, in the Forgotten Realms Halflings are known as Hin.
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That's a level of granularity that's generally not seen when you only have a couple of pages if that much to describe a city in a region guide book. And you're also making a ghetto assumption by race, when half-elves in Absalom are probably determined by the cultures of their human parents, so most likely just exhibit the culture imparted to them by said human parent. A half-elf raised by a Taldan parent will most likely have Taldan cultural mores rather than a "half-elven" one.
I'm not making a ghetto assumption. I am pointing out that people walk around with more than one label. Typical Taldan has the Taldan cultural trait, but they also have male/female, human/other, noble or commoner or middle class, urban or rural and all sorts of variations on this all of which play a factor on who we become.
Some of us have traits which can make a huge difference in our lives, things like genius or mentally retarded, bastard, freak, insane, prodigy, or whatever. To get at what I'm describing, look at some fictional characters. Think what 'bastard' does to Jon Snow, or 'Ice Sorceress' does to Elsa of Arrendale. Basically they are so big that they significantly alter who they become.
Half blood (or plane touched) is one of those potentially big things, which changes how the world looks at you and is very likely the most important thing about you in the eyes of others. It can lead to opportunities or painful misunderstandings.
For a Taldan half elf, it could be being chosen to perform as an actor because they look fey/elven. It could also mean being married off when the calander says you're 18 but you are emotionally 13. It could mean peers question if you're "really" one of us. Or it means they live a relatively normal life, but one where the family probably makes a point to make your life as normal as possible.
And in communities where there are at least more than one half elf, it means to some degree or another, two or more half elves share one more adjective and one of those "big" life altering ones. And people with the same or simular big life altering adjectives in their lives tend to compare notes, often ignoring social barriers to do so (and often being allowed to), come up with their own terms of comparision. They are more likely to know each other or know of each other.
They all may be Opparan Taldan half elves and there may not be more than a couple hundred in Oppara (or Westcrown or wherever) but they will come up with adjectives to describe themselves. They are more likely to marry each other because they are from a small field of people who "get" certain things. They'll share certain things like doubts about their place in society, make up adjectives, or whatever.
They won't ghettoize themselves. But they won't (and can never be) Joe or Jane average Taldan either. That half part of them is their definition and prevents it, whether they like it or not.
In my game the half-orcs were called gray orcs and the full orcs were called green orcs.
the thing about Aasimars, Tieflings, Ifrits, Oreads, Sylphs, Sulis, and Undines is that they are not half of anything they have a touch of the other worldly running through their blood that will randomly pop up in their families down the generations. While Half-elves and Half-Orcs are literally half-human and half something else because humans seem to be able to breed with almost everything and create viable offspring
Some of these races may be played as half-something. There's a half-fiend template, but there's no reason why a tiefling couldn't be played as a half-demon who happened to favor her human parent. There's no half-elemental or half-genie template, so an undine is probably the best way to represent a child of a marid and a human, for example.
The names they would take would obviously be of either elven, human, or orcish derivative. Half-elves and Half-orcs do not have cultures of their own, so they have to borrow.
This. Half-orc and half-elf are obviously exonyms, names given by outsiders.
(Real world example: "Germany" is an exonym. "Deutchland" is the endonym; it's what the Germans call themselves.) It's not clear that there's a large enough community of half-elves to give themselves an endonym. I'd argue, in fact, that the absence of "Half-elven" as a language suggests that they simply use the language of the oppressors. (And elven-speaking half-elves are probably described as "half-human.")
And in communities where there are at least more than one half elf, it means to some degree or another, two or more half elves share one more adjective and one of those "big" life altering ones. And people with the same or simular big life altering adjectives in their lives tend to compare notes, often ignoring social barriers to do so (and often being allowed to), come up with their own terms of comparision. They are more likely to know each other or know of each other.
They all may be Opparan Taldan half elves and there may not be more than a couple hundred in Oppara (or Westcrown or wherever) but they will come up with adjectives to describe themselves. They are more likely to marry each other because they are from a small field of people who "get" certain things. They'll share certain things like doubts about their place in society, make up adjectives, or whatever.
They won't ghettoize themselves. But they won't (and can never be) Joe or Jane average Taldan either. That half part of them is their definition and prevents it, whether they like it or not.
But they also won't be unified enough to come up with a single word for what they are. It's not enough to be different; you have to be different in a culturally-uniform enough way to have a word for it.
Think about people who have allergies to peanuts. They're common enough that every school has a couple of them, and active enough that most schools have got policies to address them. They've managed to get peanuts removed from the snacks most airlines pass out. But they're still not unified enough for us to have a word for them; instead, they "adopt the language of their oppressor" and describe themselves as "hav[ing] an allergy to peanuts."
A more scientifically interesting example is Nicaraguan Sign Language, which "spontaneously" appeared in Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s, only when a deaf community established itself. Deafness itself was nothing new, but what you didn't see were the deaf people from one village communicating with the deaf people from another. People used gestures to communicate with their families and friends, and you'd see occasional idioglossia among deaf siblings, but nothing more widespread.
NSL only started to appear when schools for the deaf appeared, and for the first time in Nicaraguan history, dozens of deaf people could meet and communicate in one place.
Of course, that's not what would happen to half-elves. Half-elves would simply speak the "normal" language of the community around them. But the normal language would include the term "half-elf" (or in elven-speaking communities, "half-human").
There's no half-elemental or half-genie template, so an undine is probably the best way to represent a child of a marid and a human, for example.Copulation with a fire elemental has.... issues.
And copulation with a dragon doesn't?
Fire immunity is a thing that can be acquired.
Presumably the dragon in question has taken humanoid form to do so.There's no half-elemental or half-genie template, so an undine is probably the best way to represent a child of a marid and a human, for example.Copulation with a fire elemental has.... issues.And copulation with a dragon doesn't?
Not all dragons have Shapechange.
In the Midgard campaign setting, half elves are referred to as Elfmarked. Half orcs don't really exist in the setting however, since Orcs are almost exclusively underground dwelling and almost completely unknown to the surface worlds.