"Cloth for orcs?" Topic

The other threads on armored ogres and big orcs got me thinking on something totally different. This is just for Tolkiens Middle Earth. Where did orcs get cloth for clothing?

In the first age, the main enemy stronghold was under a mountain. I don't see orcs herding sheep. Planting cotton, hemp or any other plant that would give you fiber for cloth.
So where would they get cloth.

Besides elves, most humans were not very advance and actually had to be armed and clothed by the great powers. Just don't see Morgoth putting in an order for a 1000 bolts of green or red cloth with the local merchants.

Sauron had large slave farms, which I suppose could be planting plants for their fiber. Or he could put have tribute paid with cloth from the humans under his control. But what about those orcs who were independent in the Misty Mountains for example? Did they wait around for a wagon full of cloth to fall into their hands.

So any thoughts on this silly subject. Did Tolkien who went into so much depth on his world building just not worry much about stuff that didn't drive the story?

Yea, verily… These are the things that keep ALL of us up nights, pulling out our hair and gnashing our teeth…

Typical Fantasy economy…

Rather than cloth, orcs might clad in leather and skins which can be got from hunting (with the by-product of putting meat on the table). Given that big orcs boss little orcs, the snaga types probably end up cleaning the cess pits and doing the tanning of the leather and hides.

Obvious answer? They stole it.

Warg fur and fell beast skin?

Probably from many sources such as raiding, pillaging, plundering, theft, extortion, trading (much less likely but still possible)for starters.

Did Tolkien who went into so much depth on his world building…

Strange. I think just the opposite.
I have often wondered how the hobbits could travel hundreds of miles from the Shire and only encounter one village, Bree.
And then going south from Rivendell… nothing.

Tolkien ignores any industrial base because he hated it, No one grows any food, except Farmer Maggot. And so on.

How does one tan elf skin?

I have often wondered how the hobbits could travel hundreds of miles from the Shire and only encounter one village, Bree.
And then going south from Rivendell… nothing.

But to be fair, in both of your examples the travellers are specifically attempting to journey in secret, and thus would avoid villages and towns where word of their party might reach the enemy. Therefore, the story wouldn't mention places they didn't enter, nor people they did not encounter.

The rest of your statements are clearly facetious, but I also think that one can take the term "world builder" to ridiculous extremes, which would include expecting any author of a work of entertainment to bother over much with developing or describing the entire economic, agricultural and manufacturing system of a fictional world. The wise writer mentions only that which is essential to his tale, and lets the reader's imagination fill in the rest.

"How does one tan elf skin?"

A sunny day and SPF 4, mai tais optional…. ;-)

I've always pictured orc & goblins dressed in rags, but I imagine rat hide would also be pretty common….

On the other hand, when I read Game of Thrones, I have to constantly flip back to the maps to see where the characters are. And as many place names as are provided, sometimes the name in question still is not on the map!

I fairly certain Orc underwear is made from burlap-explains their less-than-sunny dispositions.

I am being facetious? Where is the industrial base, except in Mordor?
That is the only place remotely suggesting factories, and therefore the only place capable of large scale manufacturing of cloth!
It is the clothing for humans, dwarves and elves you should be wondering about, not the orcs!

For 1000s of years humans clothed themselves without the need for factories to make cloth.

Similarly armies were equipped for similar periods without factories churning out weapons.

I've always thought as Orcs as scavengers and raiders – they will get stuff from whoever is weaker, and adapt it to what they need. Wether that is fur or cloth or wool.

Tolkien does describe the northern realm (formerly Arnor) as having been wiped out by a plague some hundreds of years before LOTR. So he did give the lack of population some thought.

Personally, I'd rather have eagles and ents on my side than an industrial base!

You don't need a factory for textiles, weavers cottages are still common in the UK, especially in the north. As for growing food, lots of references to slave worked fields in the east and south and one where Thorin refers to Hobbits as 'food growers' as an insult. Dwarves traded for food we are told. Mordor got a lot of tributes from the human races of Harad etc. I would imagine cloth would be one such item. Goblins were described as ingenious with machinery, so fashioning clothing, leather and furs would not seem hard. Probably done by the weaker ones as suggested.

There's a reference to "vast, slave tilled fields" or some such, that were said to be around the inland sea of Nurn, south of the mountain spurs that divide the plateau of Nurn from Gorgoroth. Cotton, sisal, jute or any number of other coarse, itchy fibres could have been grown there to make uncomfortable Orcish grundypants…

As with the humans and elves and hobbits I think it's safe to assume the females weave it. It's a world of cottage industry and Mordor is forging arms for its massive armies in its factories without much thought to high fashions.

One might point out that the various dwarven mines are essentially vast underground "factory" cities producing numerous consumer goods (even toys). So it's not true that Tolkien's world did not have an industrial base, to the extent that any pre-industrial civilization has one. He just had his placed out of sight and below ground, with an emphasis on personal craftsmanship over assembly line approaches.

Really, John, following your argument one would conclude that the Roman Empire must be a fantasy as well, as it clearly had no "industrial base" either.

And again, it comes back to what one expects of a story, anyway. One doesn't read The Lord of the Rings expecting it to be a treatise on the industrial and agricultural resources of Middle-Earth. Frodo wasn't on the Grand Tour of Major Economic and Production Facilities of Greater Gondor and Bordering Regions.

Don't know why this bothers me, when these idiots have not come up with a better way of killing each other then with swords after 1000s and 1000s of years.

You might consider that in actual history, swords, spears, arrows, etc., were our ancestor's primary means of killing each other for "1000s and 1000s of years" before anybody invented anything significantly different. Heck, it took our ancestors way more time than that to even figure out how to make weapons out of metal. As it is, we've only had even basic guns for less than six centuries, and guns of sufficient effectiveness to alter standard military practices (close order rank and file in block formations) for about a century. Indeed, Tolkien was a veteran of the first war where anybody finally recognized that sending men out in big side-by-side lines to be mowed down by machine gun fire was in fact a really stupid idea. So his Middle-Earth military equipment and methods are entirely reasonable, even for his millennial-long cultures. We certainly didn't do any better than they (if finding ways to massacre more of ourselves is truly "better").

oh i thought this was a charity drive or something :-)

they seem to wear mostly animal skins in the movies which makes sense…….

All of the races in LotR have some sort of civilized industrial base, just as any Dark Age or medieval society had. Gondor and Arnor should be likened more towards late Imperial Rome, capable of mass-producing arms and equipment and able to build great works with the secrets handed down to them from Numenor, but on the downward spiral of their empire. Its not that Gondor doesn't have the arms, its that it no longer has the men to resist Morder.

The Middle men, Rohan, Dale, and even the men of Darkness, Harad, etc, all make things as well, and have craftsmen to do so, though not in the massive quantities that we would expect today. In LotR, your are usually talking about tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, and items would be built to last if you take care of them (swords, spears, equipment, housewares, buildings).

Mordor is the opposite, sacrificing quality for brutal efficiency. Sauron would also press entire nations into service, along with his orcs to make weapons, armor, etc. He had no secrets, its was just pure numbers. 1,000 smiths will make more swords in a year and 10 smiths, even if those 10 smiths are excellent and their blades peerless. Sauron also is essentially immortal, so time and policy (Yay complete dictatorships) wouldn't factor into his plans until the ring was found (and then all of sudden he is pressured into an assault on the west before his plans were complete). Mordor focuses on the deitrus of war unlike most of the other races in Middle earth, and so weapons/equipment manufacturing is at the forefront.

Orcs do have personalities, and do wear clothes and such, though their clothes are warm rags and unadorned tunics, etc. Orcs even have orcish liquer, strong as hell, but effective in its alchohol content. Tastes like crap, but it gets the job done. Everything about orcs is twisted, brutal and efficient, but still relatable to the common man on some level since they are the corrupted forms of elves.

I was going to suggest either underground spider farms (say over the cess pits to catch flies) for spider-silk cloth or some kind of fungus that is stringy…