The Wild Folk
When did the Wild Folk first appear in Europa? That has been one of the most-debated questions among historians for many generations, and I shall certainly not pretend to be able to answer it here. A proper investigation of the question would require detailed knowledge of the sources, which are extremely difficult and tricky.
Rather, here I shall simply report the view that is usually presented in the textbooks, with an occasional cautionary note or alternative interpretation. The reader who is interested in examining the question in detail must be content to explore on his own.
Old photo of a Gnoll tribesman -
probably from around the southern Baltic
The Catastrophe Theory
Probably the most common belief is also the oldest: that the Wild Folk appeared due to some catastrophic event: that they were summoned by a conjuror, or that there was a rent in the space-time fabric, or that they came from some far-distant land bent on conquest. This last interpretation was largely abandoned with the discovery of Nova Terra.
The first scholarly position put forward, by E. Simianus in the 24th century, was that the Wild Folk had always been present, somewhere in the steppes of Asia, and that climate changes plus internal politics gave rise to the Orcish Horde, which drove all others before it. That was the rod that drove the beasts forward. Pulling them at the same time was the great wealth and decreasing vigor of the Roman Empire, providing an alluring destination.
Halforc warrior in full battle dress
More recently, scholars like J. Lagerglocke have argued that the creatures had always been in the West but that we have been misreading the sources. They argue that the so-called mythical creatures of the Greco-Roman world (and even of the Egypto-Babylonian) were in fact representations of Goblins, Orcs, Trolls and so on. The literary motifs of the day caused authors to represent the monsters in stylized ways so that for a long time we did not recognize them as such. These theories have been largely discounted, but they surface from time to time, in varying exotic forms.