It is unclear where Tolkien originally got his idea for the characters of Orcs and Urak-hai from, however, he was not the first to tell stories of creatures named 'Orcs'.
In AD77, Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, wrote his 'Historia Naturalis' and within it, described a monstrous creature called an Orc/Orco. Carol Rose writes of this in her Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth and comments,
"It was considered to be a vast creature of the ocean with immense jaws full of huge teeth. It was not a whale but said to be much larger and to prey upon the whale. An instance of an Orc consuming a load of cowhides that had fallen overboard from a ship in Ostia harbour during the reign of the emperor Claudius brought terror to the seafarers. This monster, now named Orco, was later used, in the Italian work 'Orlando Furioso' (1516) by Ludovicio Ariosto, (1474-1573), as the sea monster that threatened Andromeda."
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