Lord of the Rings

Being made in mockery of Elves doesn't necessarily mean being made from Elves. There's also the theory that Orcs were made by twisting animals into a vaguely Elf-like shape.

granted sometimes Sauron's forces are weirdly treated as automatons guided by his will but it could just be metaphor.

In that case I think that it's more that Sauron has a particular talent for mind-control—for exerting his will upon and dominating others.

(I recall, for example, that part of what he is said to have poured into the One Ring was his will to dominate.)

The exception, of course, is the Ringwraiths, who, through the effects of their Nine, literally have no will but Sauron's.

The orcs do seem to be released from some sort of control once Sauron is destroyed.

Having read a bit more on The Rings of Power, while it is okay if you enjoy it anyway, I feel I should warn you that this show can and does lie to you about what is going on for the sake of clever tricks and surprise twists. Orc armies respawn several times, and one orc army suddenly turns into a human army after they have been defeated, for example.

The idea that only Illúvatar can create life is also something not stated outright in The Lord of the Rings.

When Sam asks Frodo if orcs need to eat, Frodo replies: "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures." It's probably near the truth, but it's still given as Frodo's opinion.

Granted this part

Sounds like something he read somewhere, or heard Gandalf or the Elves say.

Besides, being a Catholic, Tolkien may not be comfortable with the idea that a devil-like or fallen angel figure can create life, this is a power reserved for God only.

Edited by jawal on Dec 5th 2023 at 10:48:42 AM

Oh he states that no one but Illúvatar could create independent life outright in several letters and The Silmarillion, it's just not made that clear in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit.

it seen orc for tolkien were pretty much the ultimate idea of soldier-as-automatons. While I get the whole LOTOR-is-not-allegory you can see the idea orcs and mordor for extention is kinda everything Tolkien hated of modern europe trying to make hundred of doll solder(so to speak).

So I get the idea was thar orcs werent exactly quiet....people, a in between on dwarft automatons before having souls and you know, actually people. Something that can breed, being brutal, dosent need that much invesment and were loyal the momen the show up.

Two Tolkien quotes about orcs stick in my mind:

"We were all Orcs in the Great War."

and

"The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."

The latter sticks because WTF.

Comparing them to Mongols sweeping and destroying Europe is fine.

But...no, that's not what he's saying.

To avoid making excuses for the second quote, another bit about orcs-as-common-infantry that stuck with me is the banter between orcs we hear close to Shelob's lair with the "I thought the war was going well? It's what they're saying from up top I mean." "OF COURSE THEY would say that, duuuuh..." and the rivalry between different units and different jobs within orc ranks like the tracker and the Uruk fighting in Mordor.

If you use sci fi speech on the orcs, you can see them as clone or mutants in a way, create without families, conection, only their devotion to the state or rather, their ingrain leader, Sauron.

Some of them do resemble Super Mutants, yeah.

A few points:

• The context of the quote is that Tolkien was objecting to a proposed film script describing orcs as having beaks and being otherwise very bird-like. Tolkien had to object that the orcs couldn't appear too inhuman or monstrous-looking, because his plot required that Sam and Frodo could reasonably be mistaken for orcs for a long period while wearing orc gear. "Bird orcs" would have made this difficult, so he emphasized in his letter that orcs should appear like ugly and degraded humans, not birds.

• "Mongoloid" used to be a formal medical term used for those with Down Syndrome. In the mid 1960s the world medical community decided the term was derogatory to Mongolians and promoted using the term "Down Syndrome" instead. By "Mongol-type" Tolkien may have meant "Mongoloid" in his letter, so he may have been saying with that phrase that orcs look as if they suffer from genetic disorders rather than saying that they look like Asians. Still rather insensitive by modern standards, but less overtly racist.

• Tolkien is not making a claim that "Mongol-types" are universally ugly. He acknowledges that it is "to Europeans" that some "Mongol-type" facial features may appear ugly or repulsive.
• Basically he is saying, "imagine what your culture considers the ugliest human features, make them even more degraded and ugly than a human could be, and you have a description of orcs."

Edited by Bense on Dec 7th 2023 at 9:06:28 AM

That's really funny then, considering one of the Hobbits wears a bird beak mask during their scene in the orc army...

It was still pretty racist even if not too out of the norm by his day’s standards. He did not have to reference Mongolian people in the first place, after all. It is a sign of how normalized that kind of talk was back then.

As I said, there is a possibility he might not have been referencing the Mongolian people at all, but using a then-current medical term. It's a bit of a stretch, and still rather insensitive by modern standards, but in that case not intended as a racial reference.

Edited by Bense on Dec 7th 2023 at 9:07:21 AM

It's possible, there is, for instance, the Mongolian birth mark, which people used to believe was a mark of Mongolian descent (but this has been disproven). I had one of those, and as far as I can tell, I don't look anything like a steppe nomad, real or stereotypical.

Looking at the quote, I think that he likely was referencing the relevant racial group—but I get the feeling that it's more in a "cultural standards of beauty vary; I'm working from 'Western European' standards, from which this group looks less lovely than most" sort of way.

This is, of course, not particularly sensitive.

But it's also not really disparaging the group in question in a universal way. Note that he specifies that they're less lovely to Western Europeans—which implies that he acknowledges that they might be lovely to other groups. And further, that he calls them "least lovely"—which doesn't necessarily mean "not lovely at all", just "at a degree of loveliness lower than all others".

The bit about being "degraded", note further, is not applied to such people, but to orcs, specifically.

I do feel that he's perhaps over-universalising a standard of beauty that might be more varied than he realises even within Western Europe.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Dec 7th 2023 at 10:29:37 PM

It's also worth remembering that the forces of good are multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, and much of the narrative consists of getting them to work together towards victory over evil, burying a few old grudges along the way.

Hobbits, wizards, men of Arnor, Gondor, Rohan, and the Wildmen of the Woods, the dead men of Dunharrow, dwarves of the Lonely Mountain, elves and half-elves of Rivendell and Lórien, ents, the eagles of the Misty Mountains, Tom Bombadil, and one five-hundred-year-old corrupted river hobbit (he's sort of on the good side).

All play important rolls in the narrative.

Edited by Bense on Dec 7th 2023 at 1:56:38 PM

I think it's more a sign of how normalized that kind of speech was, and that not even Tolkien was immune to it. Yellow Peril bullshit was (and to some extent still is) pretty common.

That bit about "slant eyes" in particular. Fucking hell.

Edited by M84 on Dec 7th 2023 at 9:49:04 PM

Also what kid of feeling he is wanting to evoke, the orcs are quintesencial idea in fantasy of the horde, big, numberless and like a ocean were how much they are matter more than how good they are and most of the time we used the mongol comparation to that

It's the 20th anniversary of the release of the theatrical The Return of the King. The movie won 11 Oscars, in every category for which it was nominated, tying for most Oscar wins with Ben Hur and Titanic.

It grossed more than $1.1 billion worldwide (second-highest grossing film of all time at the time of its release).

It is a landmark in the fantasy genre of film.

It holds a 94% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

It's not a perfect film by any means, but very impressive.

It's a controversial opinion, but I prefer the theatrical cut of ROTK to the extended cut. The movie is taxing in it's length and most of the extra scenes add nothing of value (with the exception of Saruman's death and maybe 1 or 2 other scenes). The movie is the roughest of the trilogy, there's some weird editing/cutting choices. And the less said about Arwen's fate being tied to the ring, the better.

That said, it's still light years ahead of all the bloated comic book bullocks we've had shoved down our throats these last 15 years.

Edited by Wabbawabbajack on Dec 19th 2023 at 4:19:09 AM