Suite101 Nov. 29, 2002 article: Real orcs don't do windows

[Michael Martinez]

Real orcs don't do windows

While doing some research on the Uruk-hai, I came across an interesting fact: there were no Uruk-hai when Tolkien first wrote the chapter which introduced them. He hadn't conceived of them by that point. The original title for the chapter was "An Orc-raid".
Well, that doesn't sound very exciting, does it? In fact, by the time Tolkien had reached this point in the story, Uruks (much less Uruk-hai) had yet to appear.

Hang on, as Harry Potter might say. Let's back up a bit, and start over.

While most people know that "orc" rarely occurs in The Hobbit (Christopher Tolkien was able to find only one occurrence, for example, in the first edition of the book), you can still find a few "orc" passages in the second and third editions. What is significant about the rarity of "orc" in The Hobbit (and the near-rarity of "goblin" in The Lord of the Rings) is that the frequencies of these words represent a fundamental transition in Tolkien's thinking about the creatures which menaced Hobbits.

Goblins haunted Tolkien's imagination as far back as his school days. The oldest extant example of Tolkien's use of goblins in literature is the poem "Goblin feet", which was published in the 1915 Oxford Poetry:

Read the rest here
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/tolkien/96689