"An Orc child's "Happy childhood"" Topic

So, I have been having a discussion with a friend of mine about Orcs in Middle Earth.

I maintain that Orcs came in only one sex (JRRT seemed to think this as well, but he was known for changing his mind like other people change their socks), and that they were a genetic engineering project of Morgoth (Remember, Elven Females could decide when they would conceive, so this would have thrown a huge monkey wrench into Morgoth's plans to use conventional methods of breeding… Or would it?)

Anyway, in trying to see his PoV, I have been running through all of the possibilities that I can think of for how Orc Children could get raised by something that was as nasty, selfish, hate filled and cowardly as Orcs were made out to be.

•How many kids would they have at a time?

•If more than two or three, how did the Orc mother nurse them?

•Did the Orc mother have extra breasts if they had large numbers of children at a time?

•Would they care if one of their kids got sick?

•Were the children even raised by their parents, or did they just fall on the ground wherever, and they are "Precocious" (To use the Ornithology/Zoological term, this means that they are capable of caring for themselves pretty much from birth. Many birds are said to be Precocious rather than natal, as are Colts, Elephant babies, etc.)

•If they are precocious, how wide was the Orc female pelvis?

•Come to think of it, was the Orc female even sentient or a Sophont?

•Obviously, the Orc male would have more than one wife… Or would he?

•Assuming the Orc female was sentient, would she put up with another female?

•What would a "Happy" Orc home look like?

•At what age would Orc children "mature"?

And so on… Can anyone else think of any other questions about Orcish Life as a child, or how Orc society would be arranged such that children would even be possible?

Everyone knows that orcs come from spores.

Well, see, one day a Mommy orc and a Daddy orc look at each other and Daddy orc gets this gleam in his eye, and Mommy orc kicks him one right where it hurts the most and then…

Try to be serious guys, we already know the basics, the phueket and out come baby orcs… Then, come the questions I asked above… and these:

•If Orcs are supposed to be the ultimate expression of corruption and perversion in the world. Is it OK for men or elves to kill baby Orcs?

•If it isn't OK for men or elves (or Dwarves) to kill baby (or child) Orcs, then doesn't this mean that there are then Orcs who are not wholly corrupt and/or perverse?

•If there are then Orcs who are not wholly corrupt or perverse (meaning a "Corruption and perversion of life"), then how can it be said that Orcs as a whole are the ultimate expression of corruption and perversion in the world?

•What about women Orcs? Are they OK to kill without rhyme or reason too?

•How do mommy and daddy Orc manage to support these non-combatants?

Okay, slightly more on the serious side (to the extent this can be called "serious"), this reminds me of all the discussions we used to have playing D&D about whether or not it was "Lawful Good" to kill orclings. It also bleeds into a rather absurd internet site that condemns the concept of "evil" goblins as "demonization of the other." (Uhm… hello, isn't that phrase, then, "demonizing" demons? THEY'RE MADE UP.)

I'm actually coming to appreciate the concept of orc reproduction as some sort of clone/regeneration process, ala flatworms (cut 'em in half, you get two worms), which I believe you mentioned here on another thread, Cog Comp.

Another possibility is that orc women could be unintelligent— somewhat like Niven's concept for the puppeteer race. In a Tolkien mythos, if orcs are the opposite of elves, then orc women might not be able to choose— they might litter frequently, and not have any significant intelligence to speak of. They nurse merely on instinct, so that affection and child-rearing isn't an element, nor is any concept of family. They would literally be "baby factories," a de-humanizing and abhorrent concept that would seem suitable to Tolkien's concept of orcs being the epitomy of all that is inhuman, selfish, abusive and foul. One could also assume that the maturation period is extremely short, allowing "orclings" to quickly wean and fend for themselves. I can also conceive of a setting in which orclings are essentially ignored by mature male orcs, therefore creating a childhood marked by a violent struggle to survive and prove oneself, with a purely "survival of the toughest" approach. By the time an orc is the equivalent of a teenager, he has probably already slain many of his litter or creche— perhaps even killing from the moment of weaning. Since orcs are known to be cannibals, perhaps this is how an orcling acquires food— he eats his siblings.

This set up allows for a high level of breeding but a low level of adult population, "naturally" keeping orcs from overrunning other, slower developing species (but also explaining the orc tendency to raid other species' territories or even expand into them). It also allows for the possibility of D&D style "half-orcs" based on sexual reproduction (presumably unwilling, but there's no accounting for taste— rather like women who want to marry incarcerated criminals).

This would also create a society that was inherently selfish, with little or no sense of altruism, and based on "strongest man on top" heirarchy. Such a society would "value" ruthlessness, cruelty, violence and manipulation, and would therefore be "evil" to a percentage of population close to 100%— any sub-fraction merely being "weaker" individuals who have not yet been slain.

So you would have a thoroughly evil society that can still work cooperatively (rather like a criminal gang), is "evil" practically down to its infant state, and essentially irredeemable.

I'll actually postulate orcs as a three (or more) sex species, not unlike bees:

Orc "ruler" sex— all males, strong and violent, and the only orcs with male reproductive abilities. From this sex is formed the warriors and chieftains.

Orc "drones" sex— all males, but without the glandular ability to reproduce. Less violent, but subservient. From this sex is formed the orc craftsman and laborer classes.

Orc "cows" sex— all females, all capable of reproduction, but having nothing beyond basic animal intelligence. They are breeders only.

Orc "priestess" sex— all females, capable of reproduction, but highly intelligent— moreso that any other orc sex— but also rare. Orcs revere these females when they appear (the "priestess" toddler generally slaughters all others in the creche, including the cow who spawned it). They invariably become shamanesses, priestesses, or (rarely) warrior queens.

I think that covers bases, and allows for "traditional" orcs (both Tolkien and not) as well as D&D orc societies. It keeps the species "evil", allowing for Paladins to piously purge the earth of the beasts without either moral or ethical qualms.

BTW, it was Kzinti, not Puppeteers who have stupid females… The Puppeteers have three sexes, one that is kinda male, and another that is kinda female, and one that kinda gets eaten by the growing puppeteer fetuses as they mature…

Oh, and personally, I think that having Orcs actually breed like other animals is biting off more than can be chewed.

ANYTHING that humanizes them makes it essentially just as wrong to kill them out of hand as it does any other race.

This was why JRRT went to such great lengths talking, not about how they were the embodiment of evil, as that is trivial… All races at one time or another have embodied evil…

No, the Orcs embody the perversion and corruption of the good in other races.

They were created by perverting elve's ability to heal and withstand harships, they were spawned using everything that is anathema to other forms of life in ME, etc…

I just don't get how you can have an "Orc Society" that includes ANYTHING but adult males.

Some people may feel that is a sexist statement, but given male archetypes, Orc embody a corruption and perversion of those archetypes. Not the female archetype.

Also, allowing them to breed would be giving them the power of actual creation, instead of a corruption or perversion of creation.

You could go the 'Broodmother' route as in the Dragon Age game…

link

Okay, they are darkspawn rather than orks, but really they are just orcs with a little bit of zombie thrown into the mix.

The Broodmothers are just baby machines….feed resources in one end, get new warriors out the other. A fate literally worse then death for female captives of the Horde.

I assume childhood for an orc would last days or weeks rather than years and that childhood would involve being raised in a large group (in a pit) that was steadily whittled down as the strongest young killed and consumed the weaker siblings to supplement the meager rations supplied to the orclings.

yucky…

Prefer the Green Ronin pseudo-comedic version:

link

The species is genderless and has no recognizeable family structure and not much in the way of culture. Any ork that lives long enough (a few decades) starts to grow dozens of tumorlike embryos inside their flesh. This drives it mad with pain and causes it to stagger (or be driven) out of its village to eventually collapse somewhere, after which the "tumors" mature into implike ork spawn that eat their host/parent. After a year or two in the wild, the surviving feral imps have grown enough to instinctually seek out a group of adult orks and be "adopted" to complete their childhood education. Most adult orks are entirely unaware of the specifics of their reproductive process, and think young orks just appear out of the woods every so often. What little leadership they have comes from shamans who've discovered ways to manipulate the embryo formation process, either to prevent it in themselves (giving them "near immortal" status to the short-lived orks) or to trigger it early in tribe members they want to eliminate.

Green Ronin played this strictly for laughs (in the same dark comedy vein as Paranoia) but it's not bad when taken more seriously either. A Evil Magical Overlord might see the whole cycle as a great way to breed vast numbers of cruddy conscript soldiers quickly and steadily, and the horrible nature of the reproductive cycle certainly seems like something Sauron would find pleasing. With tighter controls (eg more shamans and privileged warleaders under Sauron's thumb) the process could produce something akin to a proper civilization and reasonably trained/equipped army rather than the forest-dwelling primitives in the original RPG.

Alternately, just say all orcs are functional hermaphrodites. In a culture that institutionalizes rape, the better a fighter you are, the less time you're forced to spend producing the next generation of fighters. Another nasty idea, very suited to the stereotypical life-hating Dark Lord type.

Eeeew, battle works, that last paragraph made too much sense and paints a deeply disturbing picture.

Anyone who has seen the movie's Scum or The Sureshank redemption should be able to extrapolate a deeply disturbing scenario.

There are some things man is just not supposed to know.

then how can it be said that Orcs as a whole are the ultimate expression of corruption and perversion in the world?

Bad press I always said.

•What about women Orcs? Are they OK to kill without rhyme or reason too?

NO! There would be no war brides if you did. 8-0

•How do mommy and daddy Orc manage to support these non-combatants?

Orc raiding parties ring a bell?

It also allows for the possibility of D&D style "half-orcs" based on sexual reproduction (presumably unwilling, but there's no accounting for taste— rather like women who want to marry incarcerated criminals).

See above.

There are some things man is just not supposed to know.

And Doc wins the thread!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Eeeew, battle works, that last paragraph made too much sense and paints a deeply disturbing picture.

Yeah, sick, isn't it? Just right for a truly evil Sauron type, since it corrupts so many positive things at once (love, sex, family, parenthood, family, etc). Also easy to see why Tolkein wouldn't bother to mention it – not a very heroic detail, and the villains are already villainous enough.

At one point I was thinking about writing some scifi with a heavily geneered human breed of hermaphrodite supersoldiers whose culture wound up working somewhat similarly. Not so much on the rape-them-pregnant thing but enforced pregnancy was the equivalent of a punishment detail for fouling up. Let them replace casualties quickly too, at least in generational terms since they were modified to have short gestation times, retain most of their combat effectiveness even late in their term, and if need be every single survivor could become pregnant simultaneously.

Would have been interesting to study the quirks of such a fundamentally inhuman culture. At the tech level required to do all that geneering, I suspect "tanked" fetuses would be commonplace, though – which makes for "emergency reproduction" rates limited only by the available machinery and child-rearing infrastructure. Not much advantage for the poor hermaphrodites there.

See, Doc, Those were JRRT's exact words too. From reading his letters and other work that isn't published… JRRT sure seemed squeamish about the dark side of his creation. He wished to have it there as a foil for the lighter side of his world, yet he obviously found the fact that he had even thought these thoughts to be most troubling (see case of what he did with a gift of a goblet with the inscription from the ring engraved upon it in black-speech, or how he refused to ever speak Black Speech Aloud). The guy was obviously troubled in his aspect as a God.

There is even some evidence that he tried to make the Orcs less evil before he died, but the work is so sloppy that it looks like poor JRRT may have suffered a bit of dementia. That work would have totally destroyed most of his earlier history and required the re-writing of the entire Silmarillion and much of LotR… So, it's hard to say what he would have done with Orcs…

And, yes, it is possible for one less constrained by a moral "high ground" to come up with all sorts of base ideas about Orcs and where they come from, but I am trying to constrain this to a purely Middle Earth setting in an attempt to understand an alternate PoV.

There is a very good essay called "The Unnatural History of Tolkien's Orcs" out there on the web which examines some of these questions. It also examines the 'half-orc' issues and cites some letters which indicate that Tolkien did opt for this solution, especially in the case of Saruman's creations. Ultimately it is clear that Tolkien was still working out some issues (of his ingenius creations of 'orcs') for himelf right up to his death. I think it will be up to us, the other hands and other minds, to find the solutions that work.

Orolin,

I understand that at this point, it will be up to us, my inquisition is just to try to understand if my friend has thought through fully what it means to have Orc's breed as normal people breed.

WRT Saruman, and the "Half-Orcs", I got the feeling that JRRT felt he had painted himself into a corner, as Saruman raising his army of 10,000 Uruk-Hai would have meant he would have had to been breeding Orcs for several centuries.

Oh, and yes, I have read that Article.

Can we assume that Tolkien's understanding of science and biology was on par with that of any other bookish Oxford literary don?
Maybe, he was just making it up as he went along?

The above discussion reminds me of people who search the Bible for proof that the value of pi is 3. (It's there, if you know where to look!)

We cannot depend on Dad's Notes to justify EVERYTHING. There were Orcs, and there were a lot of them. Far too many for Tolkien's hypothesis to account for.
Analyses of where they "came from" are a fine example of scholars with far too much time on their hands, and who must avoid what is under their noses.
Considering Orcs as the unholy experiments of Morgoth make as much sense as beliefs that a race colored differently than yours are spawn of demons. It's racism, pure and simple.

Tolkien was writing about the MYTHOLOGY of Middle Earth. He was on less sure ground trying to tackle the science.

I should note that I have found one reference to JRRT speaking of "Embodied Procreation" WRT Orcs… Yet, he later says that he refuses to consider either Orc women or children.

Now, this could just mean that they do exist, but that he just doesn't want to think about them (he had a habit of sticking his head in the sand). It could also mean that Orc women didn't exist, but that the Orcs used rape and kidnapping to get human women with which to breed (JRRT says that Elven Women will die if they are raped, which rules out procreation with Elven Women).

Orc children I have less of a problem with. I can see them growing VERY rapidly, and being ready for their first raid or battle by the time they are seven (5 to 10 years) years old.

That would make raising a hoard of 10,000 of them considerably easier. It would still take a long time, but it would be possible.

I agree with John's point about the folly of applying science to fantasy. But with Tolkien it is hard to resist because his worlds have such an Earthly tone to them. As an aside, I was was instantly put off by the size of the WETA and subsequent GW Mumak. No land mammal could reach such proportions due to some surface area/ heat dissipation concerns! For me this works for gaming because smaller versions of Mumak can be made from Schliech toys or some such at much less cost. But back to the disscussion: Some things can not be known for sure except that whatever the reproductive habits of orcs, there were always plenty of them. And Cog, weren't you saying elsewhere that Tolkien had a chop and plant method (perhaps Saruamn discovered this, too)? Maybe we too, should refuse to comtemplate this dark evil and continue to collect, paint and play with the coolest versions of these!

I'm going to have to disagree with the OFM somewhat, as I'm a firm believer in the concept that any imaginary world needs to have some sort of consistent "laws of physics," if you will, that underly the way things work. But these don't actually have to mesh with real world physics. (Terry Pratchett has a great deal of fun with this idea with Discworld, where the speed of light has great variance, depending on where the observer is located and how poetic the situation is supposed to be. )

In Tolkien's case, it isn't implausible for orcs to be the results of unholy experiments on elves that produces a breeding, corrupted race, nor is it truly "racism" as the behaviors and abilities of a made-up species are what the author says they are. "Racism" is when you view members of the same species and discount them because of racial (or "breed") appearance. It is not "racist" to say, for example, that alligators are dangerous, or that ebola is repulsive. They aren't of our species, and they do have characteristics that make both statements true. I know there are nitwits out their who whine about so-called "specie-ism" (though not, apparently, against viruses, bacteria, insects or anything that makes them think "Eeeewww, icky!"), but that remains debatable.

As for orcs, Tolkien says they are 100% evil, every last one of them, and therefore they are. We don't really need to come up with a rationale as to why— the argument "Morgoth made them that way" is quite sufficient within the world Tolkien created. We need feel no sympathy for them, nor mourn their deaths, nor think less of Gimli for walking up and dispatching a wounded orc lying on the ground, any more than if he had axed a wounded viper (even less, in fact). Anybody who says orcs represent a post-Victorian attitude towards other races is stretching. Maybe it's a possibility, but that's not what Tolkien says, nor is it the case in the setting, and one is getting entirely too wrapped up in esoterics and one's own self-righteousness if one presses the point. (In other words, get over it. It's a frickin' made up world, not ours.)

As for the science of Middle Earth, it isn't our science because it's not our physical universe. I don't care how "graceful" your species is, no creature with the size and muscular structure of Legolas can prance around on the top of loosely packed snow in a world with the same physical laws as ours. Therefore, there have to be other physical laws at work which makes the "science" of Middle Earth a specious discussion without acknowledging these "laws." Magic is part of the mix, and one has to consider then what Middle Earth's magic allows and what it does not.

Tolkien was not writing the mythology of Middle Earth, he was writing Middle Earth as a mythology for our Earth. The history and physics of Middle Earth are what he said they were. He had no need to tackle science, just to create a consistent set of rules.

Lastly, while I think Tolkien's notes are of great interest, I don't think they should be taken as gospel or as his final thoughts on the subject. Writers notes are what a writer does to develop his story. Some elements may appear in the story, some may not, some may be rejected by the writer flat out without the writer actually recording this choice. The only thing that is really pertinent are what the writer himself chose to make public, or publish.

So the canon for Middle Earth is actually as follows:

Fixed and unarguable: The information and material in The Lord of the Rings and its appendices. (Also The Hobbit, with the caveat that it is not the author's "final" word on the matter— The Lord of the Rings is.)

Useful and generally reliable: The Silmarillion. Though not published by Tolkien himself, this was apparently in a relatively finished state. Inconsistencies with The Lord of the Rings should be decided in favor of the version in The Lord of the Rings.

Other works: Should be taken with a grain of salt. Where they seem to conflict with the works published by Tolkien or clearly in a finished state, then Tolkien's final work takes precedence. These should be treated as speculative, as contributive works within the creative process and never the final word on anything. Letters clarifying the published works naturally have more weight, but one needs to discern between speculative rationalizations and hard decision making.

Lastly we need to follow the rule of "where the text is silent." If the published works make no mention of how orcs breed, then we cannot apply any "hard and fast" rules on any speculation one way or the other. We can only do our own "creative thinking." Tolkien indeed might have preferred some sort of asexual process so that Morgoth's corruptions could not breed— but then, Ungoliant and Shelob are clearly capable of breeding (as are the spiders of Mirkwood), so any objections on that point seem weak to me.

Actually, the GW Mûmak is way smaller than the beast presented in the movies… It is the contraption that GW have on its back that is way too big (I have been cutting mine down to smaller proportions, but then I also am gluing the crew directly in them so that they cannot be removed – i.e. without the bases on the figures, as the minis are being based for FoG).

Yes, Tolkien had originally planned on the Orcs to have been cloned (although he did not use that word, it is the essence of what was being done), but he also later made references to Orcs "Breeding by Embodied procreation.

As for "contemplating this dark evil"… I am going to do that regardless of the minis I paint and play with.

I agree with all that Parzival has said.

In combing my sources, I have found JRRT going every which way on the subject of Orcs. He was highly troubled by any aspect of evil in his world and hated having to dwell upon any of it.

Thus, it makes it rather difficult to have any kind of consistency in his portrayal of it or in his thoughts about the history of the evils of ME.

For instance, he vacillates on the Evil-ness of Orcs, going from "Wholly" to "Not irredeemably evil (but not by man or elf)".

I am also sure that at different times, he thought that the Orcs arose through different processes.

For instance, Morgoth could NOT have used Elves to Breed Orcs, because Elven women when forced to have sex die from it. He may have Bred Orcs from a mix of elves and men, as the original Orcs were the equal or superior to any 3rd Age Uruk-Hai… But, I think it more likely that Morgoth created the Orcs through the process that I described, but this doesn't mean that they couldn't breed sexually…

In fact, it may have been, during the 2nd Age, when Orcs were scattered and fading, that they used sexual methods of reproduction to maintain their numbers until Sauron arose to replace Morgoth and again began to "farm" Orcs.

Bible pi:

link

As is sometimes argued in our own world, a Creator implies no need for evolutionary origins: creatures as complex as Men or Elves may spring forth full grown. We know from Tolkien that is exactly the case with Dwarves -- a god made them in imitation of the Creator's works but could not give them life; the Creator took pity on him and blessed them with life but decreed they should be buried in caverns for an indefinite time before waking.

So here's what I postulate:

All of the races and creatures on Middle-Earth originally sprang forth fully formed. Fully mature examples appeared, as if sleeping, and woke up.

One of Tolkien's explanations for Orcs, the one adopted by Peter Jackson, or at least spoken in Saruman's voice in Petere Jackson's films, is that Orcs were perverted (or subverted) Elves. We also see in the film Saruman digging deep pits to unearth at least one full-grown Orc from a coccoon.

So … Morgoth hated the Creator and his favored creations, the Elves … so suppose he imprisoned Elves into coccoons, coccoons which denied them all access to the beauties of the Creator (sensory-deprivation coccoons basically but never mind). Eventually an Elf so imprisoned gives way to Despair, and expires him/herself, committing sucide. Morgoth's magic allows the consciousness to expire but traps the soul from leaving and forces it back into the body within a new, nascent consciousness … in addition subjecting it to processes which destroy all beauty and appreciation for beauty in it. The resulting creature when freed from its coccoon, is no longer an Elf, it is a being of ugliness, of hate, rage, and maliciousness … an Orc.

Are there female Orcs? No. In Elves sex is an expression of love which is beauty, so to suppress beauty is to suppress sex, or at least to suppress softer (e.g., female) traits. Thus all Orcs appear male. In actuality, the race does not reproduce sexually and thus Orcs have no sex.

Are there child Orcs? No. Even if child Elves were subject to this process, they are in the coccoon so long, all Orcs emerge as adults.

Can Orcs breed? Ah. That's a hard question with the above explanation. There are two possible answers.

The first is that no, Orcs cannot breed. This is why the species no longer exists on our earth -- they were eventually all eradicated. But in the different ages of Middle-Earth, when a Dark Lord would build a fortress, or Orcs would otherwise establish permanent dwellings, the Orcs would delve deeply into the earth in pursuit of coccoons never unearthed since Morgoth implanted them there. (Note this explains the pits Dark Lords always seem to have.) The full scope of Morgoth's perversion of the Elvish race has never been truly fathomed -- the Elves cannot abide to consider the matter, the Gods do not discuss out of either compassion for the creator's children, or out of embarassment at their own failure to prevent the atrocity, and Men and Halflings do not know of it. But suffice to say, since the Dawn of Time there has been a lot of Elves out there buried in torture coccoons and never dug up.

Or:

Yes, Orcs can breed. When sufficient Orcs gather and live in permanent habitations, they create gestation coccoons. These are buried and so never witnessed by other races. Where do the souls come from to populate them? Good question. Maybe they use prisoners of war. (Men think Orcs take prisoners for torture or as food but the truth is beyond their imagining; the Elves do not speak of it.) Maybe sufficient animals can be mashed together in a coccoon so that their souls, when released, combine into a greater soul. Or maybe this is how Orcs access the same process that arises when Men or Elves breed and produce a child with its own soul.

What about Treebeard's speculation that the Uruk-Hai seem to be Orcs crossed with Men? Saruman knew much about Men (Gandalf originally dealt mostly with Elves); perhaps he was able to influence the Orc coccoons to have more Manish traits. Or, maybe, Treebeard didn't know what he was talking about, or maybe he said something different than that but Merry and Pippen reported it wrong.

What about Men with Orc traits, like seen at the end of the Lord of the Rings in the Shire? Remember, in Tolkien's world ugliness and evil go together. If you absolutely have to have them blood-related to Orcs in some way, then perhaps Saruman (or maybe even Sauron too) tried some variant of the Morgoth torture coccoon process using Men as a basis. But I don't think it's inconceivable that in Tolkien's world, Men who act selfishly, cruelly, and hatefully enough -- act evilly enough that is -- might acquire physically Orcish traits.

What about Half-Orcs? Those are from D&D, aren't they? Not Tolkien directly? (If I misremember that, then see the paragraph above.)

Hi all,

very interesting discussion here, especially Parzival and CC (no not that one!)

Go not to the elves for they will say both yes and no.

Indeed Tolkien vacillated between orcs breeding 'naturally' and by 'spawning'. In some ways it's irrelevant, as the real question is: Do orcs have free will?

Is every single orc 'hardwired' evil, or can they be redeemed?

Certainly they were not mere automata, as Gorbag and Shagrat merrily remenisce about the good old days when they could plunder to their hearts' content without interference from the Big Bosses.

However, I think their function is simply to be the bad guys in the legendarium, and the Prof started taking it all a bit too seriously later on and attempted to justify 'orcicide' on moral groumds, which the story doesn't necessarily require.

His templates included the Viking sagas, and I can't really see the Vikings agonizing overmuch about such a question.

Meanwhile on orcish orgins – they were made 'in mockery' of elves or from tortured elves, men and possibly Boldogs – which is as clear as you're going to get!

By the way donrice – Sauron 'developed' the Uruk Hai, but Saruman committed the unforgivable sin of breeding (or mixing?) orcs with men to produce the half-orcs or goblin-men that are mentionaed at the Battles of the Isen and Helm's Deep.

Just a plug, but I find the Barrow Downs forum.barrowdowns.com to be an excellent Tolkien discussion forum, though bear in mind that it's family-friendly and flaming etc is likely to get you banned very swiftly.

Wow, some really deep thoughts on fantasy creatures.
Where ever they come from, they do reflect JRRT's hatred of
evil and ugliness. Hatreds he developed due to the brutality
of WWI. It needs to be remembered that LoTR is an anti war anti technology treatise first and foremost. So the creation of the orcs would be described as a Hellish process best not
described.

I like to think of orcs as being created by an alchemy process, akin to that of creating a homunculus (the Paracelsus method). Morgoth could use elven genetic material in the beginning, fed with a variety of species' blood, gestated in pits or whatever crucible is available. Once the experiment gets going, orcs can keep the process going on their own, maybe mixing in some human blood or whatnot later on to stir things up a bit. No need for females, no need for child orcs.

Interesting link doc mcb – as who doesn't like pi? Would think knowing the value in any age would be pretty useful.

And orcs are 'manufactured' – like the alchemy explanation. I think they did a good job with the Uruk Hai in the movie. I kinda picture all orcs as being made this way – maybe a little less dramatic.

Timbo W: Sauron 'developed' the Uruk Hai …

Good catch. I had remembered from the books that Uruks were from Mordor and Uruk-Hai from Isengard, but apparently the sources out there say the terms are interchangeable. Sorry about that.

Dr Mathias and brucka, Orcs couldn't have been 'manufactured'. They have souls. Tolkien said so, as Cog Comp already alluded to up thread, in the same statement where he said they were redeemable although not by Man or Elf, meaning only by the Creator. Only the Creator could create beings, e.g., souls; not any of the other gods were capable of it, not even Morgoth. We know this from the origin of Dwarfs where one god tried and was only successful with the intervention of the Creator.

Furthermore, to be truly evil implies free will. As Timbo W also points out, it is clear Orcs choose to be evil.

brucka: I think they did a good job with the Uruk Hai in the movie. I kinda picture all orcs as being made this way …

Me too. That's why my suggested explanation above worked with it.

Doc, I am well aware of the Bible pi… as well as many other seriously silly things the Bible says (Grasshoppers have only 4 legs, Bats are birds, Jephithah's daughter, etc.)

Back to the Orc mess…

Donrice, of course all of the creatures in ME were "created", that is one of the cornerstones of the mythology.

Otherwise, your ponderings are along a similar line to those I have taken.

At the present, I am of the opinion that JRRT would have eventually gone both routes:

Orcs don't as a rule breed with other Orcs, they kidnap and rape human women in order to keep their numbers up when there isn't a Dark Lord around to breed proper Orcs. This is why we seem the Orc degraded and diminished when there is no dark Lord around.

Yet, it is possible for a knowledgeable enough Dark Lord to use Breeding Pits to clone Orcs via the methods I have described before. This accounts for the rapid explosion of Orcs whenever a Dark Lord of any type happens on the scene.

From his Letters Tolkien referred many times to "Orc like men" who existed in his day and age. This is probably how the Orcs selected the women with which they bred. They found the most Orc Like women they could find, as these would probably be most likely to survive the pregnancy (and Orcs mature very rapidly).

Also, from the methods that JRRT described for breeding Orcs in pits, all one would need to do to add some mannish traits to the mix was to know how to add the human qualities at the right stage into the seed Orc used to create the rest of the batch (this is the Orc that is slowly chopped into bits while he is still alive that is used to grow the rest of the Orcs in a given pit).

I do not think that there were any Orcs left from the time of Morgoth… Not even Orc cocoons, as the way JRRT described the process, it took constant minding of the pits in order to introduce the proper elements at the right time (there were various types of fertilizer that were suggested as being necessary for breeding Orcs via pits).

Timbo, JRRT also agnoized, not over the Free Will issue (I know what he meant by Free Will, but I don't want to go into that land mine laden philosophical terrain)… The real issue was with Orc redemption.

He emphatically states that Orcs are irredeemable by Man or Elf.

I have read everything that is Published, and much that is unpublished about Orcs, and it is a subject that is very close to my own life experience… I have witnessed, personally, some very great evil during the Cold War that the thought of very nearly killed me… So, I know all too well about Men acting like Orcs… Back to the point though…

It is never explicitly stated that Saruman bred man and Orc. This is just speculation led by Treebeard, and it is further re-inforced by a comment made by Samwise while in Bree about the "Slant-eyed Southron" with Bill Ferny, whom Samwise observes "looks as he is more than half and orc"

donrice, as for manufacturing Orcs, Tolkien has made some, as yet to be published, comments that Orcs were indeed manufactured.

Just because an object has a soul, doesn't mean that one cannot manufacture it… It just means that the soul(s) in question will be broken, fragmented and diminished in the process, eventually becoming such a small piece of the original Fëa that it is hardly recognizable as such. Now, this does not mean that Morgoth manufactured the Orcs from scratch, as Aulë had done with the Dwarves. Morgoth perverted and corrupted already living things to his purposes… So, the first Orcs were not manufactured, but as Morgoth represented the evils of technology, JRRT ran with that and described a process by which Orcs could be manufactured (or reproduced mechanically/cloned) on a grand scale

When you chop a living Orc up to make other Orc in Orc-Pits, you also divide the Fëa into as many parts as you divide the Orc. Considering that the seed-Orc remains living during this process, it is a really awful process for the soul to endure, thus adding insult to injury as it were…

But, Morgoth was not interested in ing off Eru. Morgoth's thoughts were that everything taking place in ME was happening with the express consent of Eru/Illúvatar (at least his implicit consent), as everything that happens in ME happens due to the music composed by Eru and the Vala, so, in a sense, all of the Vala had a hand in the creation of the Orcs, either in their resistance to the music that led to their creation, or through not forcefully resisting that music, and allowing Melkor to amass such influence among the choir of the Valar

Security Critter,

I understand explicitly how JRRT felt, having witnessed monstrous evil firsthand myself (If I had access to PM, I could describe it, but I feel that the content filters on TMP would be upset by a description of what I witnessed, or it would get me suspended). He was appalled at the level of destruction and death that was possible with the technologies that had been developed by the Industrial Revolution, and in a way he was very much a luddite in that sense…

bruka, that's the whole point, they DIDN'T know the value of pi.

3 is not nearly close enough to pi for building arches or domes… Notice the lack of these in Biblical Societies, until the Romans came along and gave them a few more digits of pi (3.141), which THEN became useful for building things.

As for Orcs "choosing" to be evil… That is the whole Free Will debate and it is as stupid as when Theodiots argue the same thing… It is irrelevant to the issue.

As for Orcs "choosing" to be evil… That is the whole Free Will debate and it is as stupid as when Theodiots argue the same thing… It is irrelevant to the issue.

I don't see how it is irrelevant to the issue. It's actually the point of the issue— are orcs innately Evil, or are they neutral, able to choose either evil or good in life, just as a man/elf/or dwarf? It's a relevant question in Tolkien's creation, as Tolkien was hardly a Calvinist. Indeed, Tolkien expresses the power of choice as being central to the whole concept of good:

From The Hobbit, "Riddles in the Dark": "He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering."

From The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, "The Shadow of the Past": (Gandalf is speaking of Gollum):" 'There was a little corner of his mind that was still his own, and light came through it, as through a chink in the dark: light out of the past.' "

Later, Frodo: " 'What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!'
'Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy, not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.' "

Tolkien believed that our choices make all the difference in who we are and what our fates are to be. Free will is an essential element of that belief, and Tolkien wrote it into his works. Though he was well aware of the ancient pagan concept of fate— we can see his use of it in The Silmarillion, particularly the tale of Turin— the heart of his creation, the part that gave it soul, were the hobbits, for whom Fate seemed to be completely set aside. Everything that happened relied upon their choices, choices made by simple and loving hearts. Frodo chose to accept the Ring. Sam, Merry and Pippin chose to join him. Frodo chooses the route through Moria. Frodo chooses to leave the Fellowship; Sam chooses to follow. Frodo chooses to befriend and trust Gollum, despite Sam's misgivings. Merry and Pippin choose to enter Fangorn. Merry chooses to slip into battle with Eowyn. Pippin chooses to serve Denethor, despite Gandalf's wishes. Pippin, alone of the guards, chooses to ignore Denethor's orders and acts to rescue Faramir. Sam chooses to accept the Ring and the mission, rather than remain and die with Frodo as he desires.
"You carry the Fate of us all, little one," says Boromir to Frodo in the film. Indeed he does— for it is the choices of the hobbits which decide the fate of the world.

You may sneer at the concept all you wish, but Tolkien fundamentally incorporated Free Will into his work, and when discussing what he wrote, one must deal with what he wrote into it, whether one likes it or not.

Personally, I don't like the "fated" stories of the children of Hurin. I suspect Tolkien may not have liked them all that much either. He clearly enjoyed the process of creating a "Doom" story like the ancient literature that was his scholarly interest, but in the end what he himself chose to publish, the tales he loved and wish to share with the world, were about souls who rose above fate— souls who chose Good.

I suspect that's why he may have later struggled with justifying orcs as evil beings deserving slaughter— because in the end the concept went against his heart. "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

(One needs to keep in mind that one of Tolkien's closest friends and fellow writing partners at the time he wrote The Lord of the Rings was C.S. Lewis, philosopher, theologist and Christian, as Tolkien also was. Their beliefs were inseparable from their works; indeed both would have said their beliefs were the whole point.)

So, it is ok to slaughter Orc warriors by the bushel. Clearly that is what the armies did and they did it to break the enemy. Once the army was dispersed and out of the lands, it was no longer a threat so the good guys let the Orcs slink off into the darkness. I suspect it is not cool for the good guys to slaughter "innocent" Orc women and children…assuming they exist…as they probably lived in the "darkness" somewhere.

I was trying to simplify so I omitted this earlier, but Parzival is right to point out the friendship between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Anybody remember in one of the Narnia books, one of the young men goes to sleep thinking selfish hoarding thoughts and wakes up turned into a Dragon? And only regains his human form when he has a change of heart.

Now Tolkien and Lewis wrote about different fantasy worlds, and their internal mythologies aren't the same. But I believe they had absolute congruence on this point, as Parzival and others have pointed out: It is the choices we make that define us. If you want, turn it the other way … the type of person we are dictates the choices we make. But free will is required for this. Choices that are dictated by Fate are not true choices. Without free will we are merely machines, and machines are just tools.

Tolkien meant for his Orcs to have free will -- I am certain of it. Free will makes them much more evil.

Cog Comp: donrice, as for manufacturing Orcs, Tolkien has made some, as yet to be published, comments that Orcs were indeed manufactured.

OK, fair enough.

Just because an object has a soul, doesn't mean that one cannot manufacture it… It just means that the soul(s) in question will be broken, fragmented and diminished in the process, eventually becoming such a small piece of the original Fëa that it is hardly recognizable as such.

I think you are missing the forest for the trees here.

Other races procreate … biologically … and their children have new souls. Why can't the Orc pit process do this as well? That would be the ultimate perversion of the Creator's work (or as Morgoth would argue, exactly how it is supposed to be since it can be done). So create the Orc bodies by growing them in pits or vats or what have you, from whatever unclean sources you deem appropriate (chopped up Orcs, vivisected human women, the hair of Elves tortured into suicide, whichever).

But let each Orc have his own soul, his own free will, and do his own evil.

The ancient Hebrews DID manage to make round objects, I believe, including the object described in Chronicles and Kings. "Not having an accurate method of mathematical notation" is not quite the same as not knowing the relation between the diameter and circumference of circles.

Tolkien also seems to have thought of Middle Earth as flat. Bfd.

Indeed, if the Hebrews could make a bowl, couldn't they have, uh, turned it upside down and had a dome?

Theodiots?

Parzival, the manner in which the stories are interpreted can be changed easily.

I could easily re-tell the tales so that it would appear that Turin's life was solely the product of his choices, and I could tell the tale of Frodo as if he were fated to be the one to carry the ring to mount doom, and that it was Gollum's fate to bite off Frodo's finger and fall into the crack of doom.

It is this reason that I think it is ultimately futile to frame the stories in this fashion.

I choose to think it is the experience that we have in life, despite the choices we have made that define us. It doesn't matter if those choices come about as a matter of some imagined choice we think we have made (don't make me get all neurological here, and point out that things we think have been made as conscious decisions have really been decided for us by our subconscious up to 10 seconds before we are even aware that we have decided anything)…

Thus, whether our actions are fated (Le Place's Demon), or they are made due to a choice by Free Will (an indefensible philosophical concept given an omniscient God) it is still how we experience these choices that create the ultimate person who expresses their decisions (regardless of how they are arrived at).

It is possible to make constructs that have these concepts embodied, but I have done that topic to death.

Doc, and no, turning a bowl upside down is not how you make a dome.

It is possible to make domes of up to a few feet in diameter by making a bowl and turning it over, but there comes a point, around 20 to 30 feet across, where this is not possible and an engineer must have pi to around 2 digits to be able to make a dome that will not eventually collapse.

Theodiots, Those who try to solve the problems of Theodicy, or the problem of a loving God while there is terrible evil in the world. JRRT was a Theodiot, and Lewis was an even bigger one… JRRT did as I do, ignored the problem while acknowledging that it is a problem to propose a God who is both Omnipotent and Omniscient and Loving, and have evil in the world. In fact, it is impossible to really reconcile the problem, thus JRRT avoided it completely by refusing to discuss whether Eru/Illúvatar was really Omniscient, Omnipotent, or wholly loving… That is the route I take.

After all, if nothing can really be said about a mysterious and distant God, then why try to say anything at all about such an entity. It is like trying to define the properties of a ghost that lives in an alternate reality that we cannot experience… Without an ability to observe that realm, there is no way to say anything at all about it, even that it exists is not possible to say.

Oh, and as far as ME Being flat, we took Mathematica and found a geometry that would allow for conventional Newtonian Gravity (the scales are not large enough to need Einsteinian Tensor-space yet) to work, and for ME to be flat as a board.

It is the under side of it that has a funny shape so that gravity remains relatively constant throughout the expanse of Arda's lands in Middle Earth. Gravity would fluctuate slightly toward the edges of the world, but would remain very near 1g within the Bounds of Valinor and Endor.

Outside of that, when one gets to Vilya, well, then things start to get strange…

After the re-shaping of ME in the 2nd Age, then is when Einsteinian tensor-space gets busy (and I have to wait till I take another few classes to be able to build the appropriate model for it.

An upside down bowl does make a small dome, but you're not building it in place as a dome.

I don't think you can even make an arch more than about 10 feet across without knowing pi to 3-4 digits. I'd have to ask the civil engineer in the family, though.

As to theodicy, I think it begins and also ends with the Book of Job; not much new has been said since.

To defend God, you have to show that Job is BETTER OFF at the end than at the beginning, and that his gains could ONLY have been achieved through God's terrible inflictions upon him.

Fortunately for ethical monotheists, that can be done.

Chesterton argued that the two great alternatives are Job or the Illiad; "If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the ILIAD and die."

Lion in the Stars…

You are pretty much correct. You need 3 to four digits of pi when building anything in place larger than 10 feet (I think the largest to be built without pi to 3 places was around 21 feet, but they at least knew 3.14.

We had a program, when I was still an engineering student that would simulate building various things, and one of the things we had to do, was to "build" a dome on a church as an assignment, but we were only allowed to use pi to 2 places… The dome was supposed to be 50 feet across…

People got the dome to stay up on the church (this was simulated) for only a few days, for the most part, before it began to fall over… Usually pretty quickly, as a consequence of the foundations shifting under the added weight of the dome. The walls would spread JUST a bit, and the dome would collapse because it wasn't a complete half-hemisphere…

This thread has kinda roamed a little ways from the Orcs…

When I saw Lord of the Rings on the BBC top 100 books list ( first place no less) I was a little surprised. If the books can spawn a conversation about theoretical things as interesting as this has been, maybe they do deserve to be there…

The Lord of the rings should replace the Bible in my Opinion.

Both are works of fiction, but at least the ethical and moral lessons in the LotR are clearer, …

and when taken with the Talmud/Hadith of the works such as The Letters of JRRT and The History of the Lord of the Rings the philosophical underpinnings of the works are far clearer and less likely to be used to support something that is outright evil (as our current holy books are far too often used to support)…

This doesn't mean that people often don't disagree over the content of the LotR though…

Regarding the half orc question, does anyone remember the Fringe episode from season 1 with the rapid human gestation, which was both awesome and VERY disturbing; the show nearly lost my wife with that episode.

YouTube link

Working on that theory all Saroman would need would be a steady supply of human women who he did not need to hang around after the birth.

"Acquiring" the use of a woman's reproductive ability has never been that tough or unusual in most of the earths history, why should it be any different in Middle Earth?

Sorry for the bluntness of my comments, had to get it out of my head though as the chain of thought was making me feel a bit queasy!!!.

Stewbags, the question of Orcs raping women in ME was raised by JRRT as well, although, as with most things of that nature, he did not like to dwell upon it, and gave evasive answers.

JRRT tended to act as if his creation was a very real place, and that he was responsible for everything that happened in it as a consequence of his writing (which, in a loose sense is true).

The problem with this is that it would have placed quite a drain upon the populations of the cultures around Isengard if Saruman had co-opted the services of several hundred young Rohirrim or Dunlending women. And, with a fast gestation, not many of those women would survive, so you would get maybe one or two generations before needing another hundred women.

Each "Generation" would only produce a few hundred children, meaning that 100 generations (at most given a minimum of 100 "mothers") of Orc children would be needed to produce his army of 10,000 Uruk-Hai.

That just doesn't seem feasible given the depressed populations at the time of the War of the Ring (although, my opinion is that the populations were not nearly as depressed as were depicted).

Hah! CC, loved your mathematical model story of the flat-Arda question – cool! Also expalins Vingilot's flight/Vilya-faring capabilities ;-).

I always reckoned Arda was one section of an incomplete ringworld, tethered to a hub, with an equal weight on the other side (perhaps Narnia?) and set up to spin at 1g. In a Larry Niven/Iain M. Banks kinda stylee.

(for an encore you can go on to explain the equations
flower + maiar -> sun and fruit + maiar -> moon )

Nope, it is a circular flat semi-plane (it does rise slightly in the center) that has a complex geometric shape of mass below it that allows it to maintain 1G across the circle of Endor and Valinor. The sun and moon are smaller than our sun and moon and behave exactly as they are described in the Silmarillion. The stars are just tiny lights that are hung on a hemisphere that covers the world. The whole thing is called "Arda" or "The World".

It is the complex geometry of the mass beneath Arda that allows it to function as a world as described. The mass is distributed such that gravity is always pulling DOWN perpendicular to the plane of the world.

Cog Comp, Maybe half orc's retained their hermaphrodite status (assuming this chain of thought is valid). Maybe half orcs gestate as broods, so you would loose the female host but gain 6 or 7 half orcs at a time.

i would think "acquiring" women could be from many sources, slave trade, abduction, spoils of war. Acquiring thousands of women through these means would seem feasible. Think of how many slaves were "acquired" during the classical period.

I have to say the pits of Isengard seem a far more horrifying place after reading some of the posts here!!!