Orc Lore: Poetry About the Gods

"ONCE"
...Orc Lore is The Silmarillion to my
"UPON"
...Fellowship, and it was written to be
"A MOONFUL"
...heard, written to be said
"NIGHT"
...out loud, by
"THERE WAS"
...a fire
"A..."
...someone who loves
to let themself dream.

Long story short - These are epic poems I made up for my fantasy books! They are... Well, first and foremost, they're poems about the gods in my fantasy world.

The world of my book, MOONTHREAD, has Orcs, and Emotion Magic, and Curses, and Spells, and a world with a lot of "little gods," meaning deities who behave like humans. The magic system is actually based on the Enneagram, where each type has its own little god, that gives Orcs (but not Humans) magic, based on how they feel. As you can imagine, STRESS is a big ingredient in how powerful the caster's magic can be.

Bigger the emotion, bigger the power.

These poems are like the flood story in Gilgamesh and the Bible, but for my fantasy world. In my little Paracosm, they are Voluspa... One is even a play on the forms of Enheduanna's hymns (poem 6, the Dust Prayer, or the Prayer to the little god of Time, of yestereves and tomorrows... Rowan's god. If you've read book 2, you'll know Rowan, and how she comes to know this prayer.)

But not all of them are so serious. Some of these poems are like, "What would the story of Little Red Riding Hood look like in a world where you're an Orc?" Which is how I came up with Poem 2, "Mother Death (or, the Little Wraithling)."

For anyone who's curious about where writers get their ideas, this particular idea came to me like this -

[Writer's block.] [Idea time.] [Starts to write a poem... Scribbles... Mutters, scribbling... Writes 10 pages in a single sprint.] [Bathroom. Food. Pet cat, feed, play.] [Starts saying memorable lines to cat.]

"Yeah, I kinda like that... I feel like I should call it... Kinda fun to do poetry again, huh? I'll call it... The First Warfather."
[nods. Charlotte agrees.]
"Yeah. That's kinda catchy! War-father..." That particular poem started my whole process of writing this collection of poems. The seed of that poem was, "Okay, so... Orcs, right? Orcs. Famously barbaric... as in they are barbarians on game night... What's a barbarian? Someone who gets magic from their anger. Well, in this world, all the magic comes from the gods, so... Anger god... (This fits perfectly! I was kinda looking for a magic system that I could base on the Enneagram, and this works out on a narrative level too, since Anger is one of the big 3 Stress Types...) Okay, so... Anger god, gives barbarians anger magic... Chiefs, probably. Violence. What if that's only the men though? I don't see a lot of girl orcs; I wonder what that would look like... Maybe we could start somewhere stereotypical, and sort of roam into areas with a variety of cultures... Each of those cultures would probably have some poetry, right? Right... Yeah... Poems. Maybe I'll do like... I dunno. Maybe I'll do a poem for the first Barbarian? (Which in my world get elevated to chiefs, called Warfathers in a lot of the Desert and Jungle tribes that are fighting all the time in my world at the time of my trilogy of trilogies...) Warfather god... Yeah! A story poem, that could tell the story of...
"The First Warfather! Let's do this."

They're poems to be read aloud. They're poems for each other. They are reminders that Shakespeare wasn't writing for readers, but writing for the ear, because the voice is where the soul lives. And the truth isn't in what the words mean, but in how (when we speak) we get to share our souls with each other.

ORC LORE is The Silmarillion to my Fellowship, and it wasn't written to be said out loud, by a fire... At night...
"ONCE UPON A MOONFUL NIGHT..."