Where did it all start???
 

It's a favourite in all fantasy games and books. Goblins, trolls, ogres, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, elves, they're all in those games and books. But, where did they all start? If any of you guys know, or think you want to make a guess, please post. I would like to know.

Theres actually quite some in-depth wikipedia articles about the various fantasy creatures. But you will find that Elves date back to Norse mythology and probably a few others maybe. But Orcs in particular...were practically "invented" by Tolkien as such. He was a huge influence on the fantasy genre with The Lord of the Rings. According to wikipedia he got the name orc from Old English... but the actual orc as a race was defined by him. Like I said...look on wikipedia and theres lots of info about their origins.

Orcs I believe, was a term keyed by Tolkien, but I may be wrong. I wouldn't be surprised if alike creatures were depicted in ancient stories. If we know anything, nothing we have is original :p

but, what about dragons? Sure they were lots of ancient stories about them. most of them bogus, but thats a hard one to explain.

1. Orcs, Created by Tolkien.

2. Elves, mabey from norse mytholagy
That's all we know.

"One fabled origin for goblin is in France, in a cleft of the Pyrenees, from which they spread rapidly throughout Europe. They hitched a ride with Viking ships to get to Britain. [1][2] They have no homes, being nomadic, dwelling temporarily in mossy cracks in rocks and tree roots." Wikipedia source(Gooblins Origins in folklore)

ok... thanx for yor help, but, what about dwarves, and gnomes the little people?????

Dragons are fantasy, but were speculated to be real as well. It was some time ago, and I think scientist have finally figured that a dragon is a completely impossible creature.

why?

It has to be fed constantly to create fire, and it's too heavy to fly I think.

Fail. Orcs were described by previous authors in the 1800s.

Tolkien basically ripped off (Key term: Basically) a lot of mythology.

About dragons don't you think they were "created"(in our minds) from dinosaurs??

There was a special on Discovery I believe that did a mock up documentary on them as if they found fossils and tried to figure out how they lived and how their body worked.

Their interpretation was actually quite intriguing. They went into each myth and gave a scientific reason how it could exist. Such as fire breathing, flying, etc..

Dragons are creations of the modern evolution of the human mind, according to something I watched.

Dragons have wings, scaled, and have claws, talons whatever. As primitives, things that were scaled tended to poisonous, or dangerous in some way, a Komodo Dragon or a snake or any other scaled creature with sharp teeth or claws, the wings and the talons might come from a dangerous, bad-ass species of bird. My memory is failing me, because I don't think that was it. Whatever. As time went on, and our fear of these animals died, we kind of melted these unconscious instincts of survival together that told us to avoid these animals, creating a dragon.

Here's one to explain.. Dragons were featured in South American mythologies (such as Aztecs and Mayans) as well as dozens of oriental mythologies and were later featured in furthur oriental mythologies, Norse mythology, several other European mythologies.. Yet these races had as much as ten thousand years of separation from eachother.

Read the above post.

Trolls where a viking legend, I know that
Dragons are supposed to be creations of the devil acording to the medieval chuch, or gods from the chinese perspective
Orcs where created by Tolkien and other authors, which he got the idea from goblins, which are supposed to be fiends acording to the medieval church
Dwarves=migits, and were in viking legends
As an side note, I also have a book on Gnomes

Everything you refer to has its roots in Tolkien. After all, he was the first author to widely popularize the genre as a whole.

I saw that one. It was a really long time ago though, before I found this forum, or moved to this neighborhood. It was interesting, and Discovery has alot of specials like that.