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

Maybe evil is an instinct in ME, like with animals. You can train it out of them if you start early enough and work at it. 'course you can't train metal…

Stewbags, looking purely at JRRT, I doubt that hermaphroditism would have occurred to him, and it doesn't seem like something that he could even think about, considering the great difficulty he had with considering even minor "evils".

Plus, he makes specific reference to two forms of procreation:

Embodied

And mechanistic (cloning, although he does not use that word exactly, it is the process he described).

And, he specifically uses the word "He" when referring to most of the orcs he even mentions with a personal pronoun.

JRRT had a sensibility that the female of the species was to be protected. One could even say he was Misogynistic in this regard. I am not going to consider something quite as outlandish as hermaphroditism without some context of literary support from ME materials… It is just reaching for straws…

I can't believe I'm only just now discovering this thread. :)

(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.)

Very, very good point. I think we have to keep this in mind when analyzing any ME work. CS Lewis at one point (in the Screwtape Letters) has Screwtape advise Wormwood that the best action for a devil is to look at what God intends as an activity in its natural and good state, and then twist it into as unnatural and evil a form as can be devised. But you can see why Tolkien didn't go too deeply into this. The RIGHT answer could never be acceptable to Tolkien because it conjures all the right questions about evil; namely, "How could this be allowed to happen?".

On the OFM's point, I disagree. Tolkien was first and foremost a world builder. There's no lack of people on the web who come up with their own unique ideas and then try to push them as if it were canon. The reason we use distinctions like Parzival's is to separate what's known about ME from what's derived by assumption or from his unpublished notes, and from what's entirely speculation.

BWS, I had exactly the same idea (super-science hermaphrodite bio-soldiers) in the mid-90's for an RPG I ran. The key issue here is violence. You can have a sapient hermaphrodite species as a loving, nurturing culture. But if their psychology is entirely unsentimental, violent and exploitive, you have a pretty dystopian society. Which for orcs is obviously the idea.

OK and just for posterity, here is the compilation of possible Orc origins we've seen so far. When creating a fantasy setting with Orcs or orc-like baddies, this thread is a nice place to start.

Orcs as the lineal descendants of Elves (corrupted, broken, mutated). This is supported in the published source material. Arguing against it is some of the unpublished material Cog cites (though Morgoth was perfectly capable of twisting elves to his will with his eyes, so the problem Cog cites isn't necessarily fatal for Morgoth). Orcs would therefore have women and children (mentioned in the Hobbit) and reproduce somewhat naturally, though no doubt their culture and lifecycle would somehow be corrupt and evil. Are they still immortal like Elves? Quite possibly, though again not necessarily.

Orcs as constructs, created in spawning pits. Tolkien's unpublished works supports this view. Orcs are asexual and are reproduced by being spawned magically from the corpses of other Orcs. They're born as adults. The obvious problem with this is, "How do they reproduce when Morgoth/Sauron/Saruman/etc isn't around?" Maybe they don't. They might be unaging like elves (who supplied the corpses for the first pits).

Orcs as fungus, reproducing by spores. Totally unsupported in Middle Earth; it's how GW does it. Orcs are at the top of a greenskin hierarchy with smaller and smaller creatures, but all are the same species that live off anything they can find, and each other if there's nothing else. Asexual and no babies per se; the younger ones are smaller but fully mature.

Orcs as bacteria, reproducing explosively by budding. Similar to the spores above, with the variation that the adult dies to create several kids. Green Ronin's approach. Again, asexual, though here there are babies; though they are feral.

Orcs as hermaphrodites, reproducing by rape. Other than this disturbing twist, it's the same as the "lineal descendants of elves" idea. Babies might be mistreated, but they are still basically babies.

Orcs as parasites, reproducing by raping humans and other humanoid females. I'll leave the implications to your imagination but there aren't any orc femals this way, this does open the door to babies (feral?). Obviously, orcs need a steady supply of victims. When you consider the hordes that Orcs are supposed to mass in, I don't know how viable this idea really is, but this does spike the Horror Meter.

You see the issues emerging? We're creating a species that's entirely evil because we want to give heroes a license to slaughter with a clear conscience. We don't want Orc women and Orc children because obviously it's especially morally questionable to kill them, and also because the moment you imagine an orc family life, you open all those moral cans of worms that you're trying to get rid of. Obviously, another quality is that they should be prolific so you can have the massive rampaging force of numbers.

So all these ideas are to make Orcs sexless because we want to avoid killing women. Many involve Orcs somehow bypassing childhood so we can avoid having to kill children (or making it ok by making the babies into some kind of animals or vermin). The ideas are pretty dark and evil, because we want our Orcs to be as unsympathetic and freely killable as possible. These options attempt to answer the question: "How different does a being have to be from human (and in what ways) before genocide stops being evil?" I'm not convinced that there's ever such a point.

At the other end of the spectrum, we just live with the fact that Orcs are free-willed sentient beings that you simply can't freely exterminate, no matter how much you dehumanize them:

Orcs as savage but conventional humanoids. The World of Warcraft approach. There are Orc females, orc children, and Orcs are savage but not innately evil. They're no more evil than humans are; in early expansions they were ruled by an evil magical dictatorship. You don't get to kill them with impunity; instead, you treat them like you would any rampaging Mongols or Huns or Vandals or Goths or Vikings.

I think this whole debate is an interesting window into our own moralities. RPG and wargame designers attempting to create their own orcs (or orc-like baddies) need to be aware of these issues and really think through their implications not just for Orc society, but for the morality of the races that war with them.

I should point out that JRRT saw Orcs as Male, not sexless, as he quailed several times when asked about Orcs raping women.

This is also a problem for female Orcs as descendants of Elves, as Elven Women die when raped (JRRT says so explicitly in Letters) or forced into a sexual relationship against their will… Plus, he has also mentioned that they have a great deal of control over whether they will conceive and will not conceive in a situation where children would be a danger either to the mother or the child would be in danger.

Later in his life, JRRT considered that Orcs might have been the descendants of Men, but he would have had to re-write the entire mythology of the Silmarillion and all of his original work.

My thoughts about why he did this are that as he Aged, JRRT began to see his creation as more and more real to himself. If you read The Letters of JRRT there is an episode revealed where he was given a goblet as a gift. It was a fairly expensive gift, but it had an engraving of the inscription, in Black Speech, from the One Ring. Tolkien describes his revulsion at the thing and never used it for anything but an ashtray, and felt that he could not destroy it because of the expense of the gift and the fact that it was a gift given with good intent.

Clearly though, he was looking for a way justify destroying this gift.

This shows that JRRT had a huge problem in considering the evil in the world that he had created, which, in effect, meant to him that HE had created that evil himself (You can probably see where this is leading if you think about how disgusted he felt about the Black Speech on the Goblet, when he himself was the origin of something that was evil).

Having been to Marquette and spending a small fortune on bribes, I got to see some of his work on the origins of Orcs. This is where I read about how they were spawned by Morgoth (it does not discuss original creation of the Orcs, but only how Morgoth Managed to keep himself supplied with hoards of Orcs).

As I said before, this does not conflict with the possibility that the Orcs had some method of reproduction that was "embodied" (i.e. sexual reproduction), but only that they would have to use human women as the original mates, and that this would have resulted in the degradation of the Orcs as a species between the time of Morgoth and the time of Sauron.

None of this has even addressed the existence of the Boldoeg (Boldog), which were/are mentioned in The History of Middle Earth as a smaller type of demon than a Balrog that were used as Warriors by Morgoth during the War in which Utumno is overthrown. One origin he explored for Orcs was that they were the mixing of these Maia Boldoeg with the Elves or Men.

Even that explanation could still be considered to be true, as it would not rule out perverting the Elves, nor either type of Orc Breeding (embodied or disembodied/cloning).

It is interesting that you mention that people creating RPGs need to consider these issues, when most people I know DON'T consider these issues in an RPG.

The reason I have been so deeply considering them is that several people I am in school with and working with (all AI/Computer Scientists and Computer Engineers) are trying to work out consistent laws of nature for a Virtual world modeled and created as described by JRRT for Middle Earth.

We have managed to come up with spacial geometries that will allow for the world to be a relatively flat plane sitting within a sphere of elements, within which the stars, sun and moon circle the plane of Endor (Middle Earth), and we have come up with genetics that explain both Elven immortality and the longevity of the Edain (turns out that when bred for longevity, animals will express traits exactly how JRRT described them. The animals retain their vigor for up to five times a normal life span, and then begin to age/decay at a vastly accelerated rate. Often dying within a short time after infirmity sets in).

We have even begun mapping Middle Earth using a program that the USGS uses to map the Earth, which keeps track of geological features, plate tectonics, weather, plant life, wildlife, etc…

We just need to wait until we have the computational power to actually run such a detailed simulation (without people first).

Eventually, our hope is to build a Virtual World where people may experience the events in the History of Middle Earth in a full immersion VR.

And, thus, we need to work out things like Orcs, Balrogs, Trolls, Giants (of which the Ents were just one type) and Dragons to name but a few critters.

Fascinating project CC,

but if one of your mates starts singing out of tune, watch out!!!

Orcs as savage but conventional humanoids. The World of Warcraft approach.

Descended from D&D, obviously. One does not get half-orcs otherwise. The sheer fecundity of the D&D Orcish and Goblinoid races is the conventional way to get to Tolkien's fast-appearing armies, and is what D&D went with in the absence of more… disturbing alternatives.

Even LotR and TaBA (aka, "The Hobbit") suggests some confusion, though. Who was maintaining the numbers of the Orcs under the Misty Mountains, or the Goblins in Moria? Were these both basically garrisons instead of communities?

JRRT-orcs: Morgoth was a Divine Being, and he made a lot, lot of orcs, by torturing and warping the elves that never crossed to the Blessed realms and alter on humans. We have no diea about numbers, because Tolkein never gave them to us fo Morgoths hosts. Everything I have read of Tolkien points to orcs being a tool, not a race. A pervesion of other races, a mockery into the face of Eu, and defniently not a diffrent species with procreation. It is very clear in the Simmilarion of how orcs were brought about. Same thing with Dragons and Balrgos. Morgoth created nothing, by default he couldn't. He perverted what already was there. There are no orc children because orcs cannot procreate, part of the perversion I think mentioned in Sim. is that the warped creatutres had lost the aability to procreate. I can't chaeck it because the book is in the other side of the Atalntic but I remember it very well because it was so antitehtical to D&D orcs. New Orcs are created the same way as old orcs, by warping and torturing other beings. Sauron had a huge slave population and could get more from Harad. Not all of them ended up tilling the fields around Nurn.

GW-Orcs-> have a "childhood" in the growing phase. But the childhood is more like a rut of stray dogs then a family.

Warcraft Orcs-> they can procreate and have females

D&D orcs-> I guess depends on the iteration.

Timbo, see, that is part of the project too. It will probably be up to me to see to it that Melkor is REALLY included, as most of the rest of them don't really have a nasty bone in their body, nor have they had the experience of say, going to Afghanistan during the Cold War to 'assist' the nascent Mujaheddin in that country only to find out that they are helping monsters, but help anyway, because that is what you were told to do (sort of stuff) only to discover that you "allies" are cutting the faces off of anyone they disagree with, including their own family… That sort of stuff…

So, eventually, we are all going to have to designate a "Melkor" team. Manwë is already a team comprised of a few of us, and we are really looking for more women to get involved. It isn't that we don't think we can manifest traits of the female Valar via an appropriate AI (eventually), but that we think that all of the Valar and ME itself, needs to have a better representation of the female aspect from real women, instead of a bunch of male scientists, artists and engineers.

Farstar, the questions that you have asked are exactly what we are looking at finding answers for, and means of explaining via a naturalistic method (although, since our world is literally a creation, we as "God" really can intervene in the functioning of the world), so that intervention by the Godlike 'Powers' (Valar) is not necessary for the world to run on its own.

Our current solution was to adopt both the embodied procreation, and the 'breeding pits' (cloning via a disgusting method) as a means to sustain Orc numbers.

KTravlos,

What you have mentioned about Morgoth and Orcs is definitely true of the First Age, but Orcs did have a sexual gender, so they were, in theory, capable of breeding. Although in the First Age, it is doubtful that any Orc, Human, or Elve would have suffered a hybrid Man-Orc, to live (No Elve-Orcs, because that would mean that the Orcs had found an Elf-Maid with which to breed and JRRT specifically denied this possibility in Letters.

If you go back and re-read this thread, the real issues are about the times when there was no Dark Lord with the knowledge of how to clone Orcs in pits of and other disgusting filth. As I keep mentioning, in The Letters of JRRT Tolkien specificaly allows for 'embodied procreation' via sexual means for the Orcs, but he refused to comment on Orc women or children.

Obviously, during times when there was no Dark Lord to oversee the collection of the Orcs into a more monolithic group, the Orcs would need some form of society in which to maintain their numbers. The canon sources mention the declining number of Orcs during the periods with no Dark Lord, yet whenever a Dark Lord returns to the scene, it is only a matter of a few years before that Dark Lord has at his disposal hoards of Orcs in the tens of thousands.

Speaking of Numbers, Morgoth probably breed tens to hundreds of millions of Orcs. This does not mean that he would have needed tens to hundreds of millions of elves to pervert and warp to his purposes as the 'fathers of the Orcs', but rather just a handful of decent stock from which to use as a 'seed stock' for the cloning process involved in the pits, as one 'seed Orc' would be used to create hundreds of offspring Orcs, thus splitting the Fëa of the original elf used to create the original Seed Orc into many many pieces, which themselves would eventually be further fragmented in later breeding operations.

As for other types of 'game' Orcs… I really haven't read much about them as they fall outside the scope of our project.

Cog's done a good summary, though as he points out Tolkien contradicts himself over the years and clearly gave this a lot of thought but came to few enduring conclusions.

One quibble: my point about Morgoth's daunting eyes is that elves were subject to the force of his will. In that context, and given that the elves were captured and held as thralls, it is reasonable to suppose that the normal rules that apply when elves are tortured, defiled and forcibly bred do not apply (the way they might if, say, an evil Man was the villain).

The canon sources mention the declining number of Orcs during the periods with no Dark Lord, yet whenever a Dark Lord returns to the scene, it is only a matter of a few years before that Dark Lord has at his disposal hoards of Orcs in the tens of thousands.-> Well we really don't know how fast the process is. Take a human being and torture and dehumanise, how long before it is aslavering beast?

My impression from the books is that when Dark Lords were not around orcs tended to become near extinct. Hiding deep in the earth or in foreboding woods, and avoiding humans as much as possible. When a dark lord resurfaced they would congregate to him, also the dark lord would use them and huamn dupes to get slaves for the warping process. Anotehr possibility is that orcs themselves knew how to do it, but when a dark lord was not around did not have the will. Ergo when he came around they got back to the buisness. Morgoth was better at this then Sauron, ergo why Sauron relied so heavily on human armies (the actual orc armies in the THrid age are small if you htink about it. All orc armies were essentially assisted by larger huamn forces.)

Orcs would need some form of society in which to maintain their numbers-> my impression is that their "society" is aprasitic barring a dark lord, essentially based on raw force, and instict, less a society and more an animal pack.

I think orcs could commit rape, and there are allusions to it. But I do not think they could procreate. I will stick to the warpig hypotheses as it makes the most sense with the material for me.

One more thing to keep in mind. Large numbers of Orcs, and new variants are always associated with the presence and activity either of a Valar(Melkor) or Maiar(Suaron and Saruman).

BTW… I have yet to really get round to any immediate gaming issues with this thread, but wish to do so now.

I have been a long time admirer and supporter of Tom Meier's work, and wish that Thunderbolt Mountain would expand its Fantasy lines to provide for a bit more variety in the Line of Orcs (and Elves, and hopefully eventually some more humans)…

However, Tom doesn't seem to get around to working on this line very often, as it is more of a vanity project from what I understand.

Maybe if we managed to collect a large enough order for the line he might consider working on it a bit more??? I am planning to spend a hefty chunk of change with him this fall (although I need to get moved so that I can do more – and better – work to support said purchase). I had thought abut doing a co-op buy, where I get together with a larger number of people to buy even more of the minis at better prices and let Mr. Meier know that his line is appreciated and that we would like to see more from it.

Specifically the Orcs at the moment, but I would also really like to see at least two more variants of each of the Elves as well, so that they might have both front and rear rank variants for each Elven Spearmen (both High and Wood elves)… The Orcs, I would like to see three more variants of each Armored type and an equal number of Orcs that are not as well armored, or unarmored (he has stated an intention to do so, at least the unarmored ones)…

Considering that an Orc army is really just large units or mobs of Orcs, having many variants avoids too much duplication when lookig at Orc Armies (and, in FoG, the Orc armies tend to get pretty big considering the cheap cost of their troop types – based upon the FoG fantasy group's work on ME lists)…

Anyway, I would like to see more realization of my vision of ME in real life, namely, in miniature for the time being (at least until I can afford to get my own 3D software running, so that I might begin to do some work on miniatures. I find that it is easier for me to work digitally now than it is to work in resin)

I just got an email from my previous contact at Marquette (he is now retired) who looked into the dates that the "not to be published" Orc materials were possibly written.

It seems that they are contemporary works with JRRT's last essays on Orcs that are published in The History of Middle Earth, Vol X: Morgoth's Ring.

The essays in Morgoth's Ring posit that the Orcs were a degenerate race of Men (with only a possibility that they had Elven Blood/Race as a "possible strain"

This would have presented problems in the chronology of events…

EXCEPT… It seems that JRRT envisioned two different types of Orc… The Lesser (derived from Man/Elves) and the Greater (derived from Maia, or Lesser Spirits who took on bodily forms). The Greater Orcs were once referred to as Boldeog/Baldeog/Boldog/Baldog, in combination with the Balrogs. These too would have had mixing with men and elves.

He also speaks of the possibility that the Orcs were Mindless Beasts corrupted by Morgoth (or Sauron, see below). If they were corruptions of the Great Apes, or similar beasts (as some of the Trolls were said to be), then it could certainly explain how they behaved in such a base fashion.

It also seems that JRRT felt that Morgoth would have had little to do with the actual creation of Orcs, as Morgoth's efforts were usually marred by his wrath and hatred and lack of patience to finish things.

This would have left Sauron as the one (Originally a Servant of Aulë, The Maker) who was charged with the creation (mind you, this is not Creation in the sense that Éru/illuvatar created the world or his children, but a baser creation which was just a corruption and perversion of life that already existed) of the Orcs.

A Combination of all three possibilities of origins seems to also be a highly likely outcome… That Orcs were a combination of Corrupted/Perverted Man/Elf, that Orcs were debased Maia/Lesser Spirits, and that Orcs were a Corrupted/Perverted Beast… In fact, roll all three into one: Sauron bred the spirits with Men and Elves (explaining how he would not need female elves who die when raped – he used the female 'spirits' and female humans), AND he bred these debased crossings of men/elf with debased spirit with beasts made even more wicked and terrible by exposure to who knows what craft that either Morgoth or Sauron could have come up with.

This doesn't change my supposition that Sauron use both methods of spawning Orcs (both embodied procreation, and spawning pits/cloning), but only deals with the materials which were present.

It also explains much about the longevity of Orcs, and how some would seem to have very short, brutal existences, and how others (The Greater Orcs, or Uruks) would have been around since the First Age (Such as How Shagrat and Gorbag could recall the Siege of Barad Dur as if they were there)…

Simply put, in the beginning of the First Age, Orcs were big brutal monsters, capable of going toe-toe with the elves in small numbers (i.e. 10 Orcs could hope to possibly survive taking on an Elven Lord or Warrior in his prime), but also explains how most of them became diminished and corrupted during the periods without a Dark Lord.

I can kind of understand how JRRT seemed to hold so many different versions of the same event (and, if one is to look at this from the purely mythological aspect. Having more than one origin myth is pretty common)… I have just recently noticed that in the many versions of a story I have been working on since I was 14 that I have the same events or origins explained in a dozen or so different ways.

Orcs are created in a magical laboratory setting. Brewed up if you will.

"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…"

Similar to Norman's Curii then.

I seem to recall half-orcs being a product of dark magic, rather than orcs breeding conventionally with humans

The origins of "Half-Orcs" or even their provenance is very much up in the air for Middle Earth.