Tag: Good post OP!

nobodysuspectsthebutterfly:

@noitemsfoxonlyfinaldestination
reblogged your post “Quick question. Are orcs cowardly by nature?” and added:

can orcs love

nonjoking serious question

like what if an orc were raised by humans or something

Well… almost certainly not. Probably. Um. It’s complicated. You have to remember, Tolkien’s depiction of good and evil isn’t exactly nuanced – no, wait, that’s not true, when it comes to humans and elves and dwarves, it’s very nuanced, especially in the Silmarillion. But Orcs are a different matter, as they were made by pure evil to be pure evil. In fact, Tolkien’s initial concept of the Orcs was that they weren’t even people, but made by Melkor/Morgoth out of slime with hearts of stone. But he later changed his cosmogony and concepts to say that Morgoth couldn’t create life, only warp what had been created by Eru Iluvatar (God), and that’s when Tolkien developed the story that Orcs had once been Elves, captured and tortured and transformed by Morgoth.

Still, even though that’s the story that was published in the Silmarillion after Tolkien’s death,
and is about as canon as LOTR gets (IIRC it’s related in the movies during the creation of the Uruk-hai),

Christopher Tolkien later admitted that his father was never really happy with that concept. You see, there’s a certain element of Christian theology deep in LOTR because of Tolkien’s faith, not on the level of allegory (as in Narnia) which Tolkien disdained, but it’s there because Eru is God and Arda is our world. So the idea of souls being good creations of God, but tainted by original sin, Morgoth’s (Satan’s) corruption, is something that Tolkien had to reconcile in his worldbuilding. Orc origins and their potential for evil (or good) were part of that.

Keep reading

This is probably the most thorough explanation of Orcs in canon I’ve seen so far, if anyone is curious.

The trouble with orcs is that Tolkien himself had several reversals of opinion on his own canon and a choppy relationship with How Much Catholicism Was Too Much Catholicism to add to his fantasy story, so the final word on the matter of orcish origins, free will, and redeemability is essentially “???”. I think this post covers all the bases of what we DO know from the source material, and asks all the right questions, including ‘What Would Terry Do?’, which I appreciate.

*(I myself take the canon on orcs to be more of a suggestion than law, or at least, I prefer to think that most of the information we learn about orcs in-narrative comes from unreliable and biased sources– as I do with most things Strictly Evil in Tolkien.)