Is there more to 🧌Orcs' evil nature than meets the 👁️eye?

[Þráinn Þórhallsson]

I just think it is kinda silly how so many people have this huge problem with Orcs as an all evil group when we got Troll, Stone Giants, Dragons, Ungoliant Spawns and the list goes on.

Now yes if somebody were to ask me what the most vile type of creature in middle-earth is it would be the Orcs, however that is only because they get no enjoyment out of anything other thing causing other creatures misery and they are never shown to be capable of empathy. Now compare that to Dragons who have at least a fine taste in jewelry and treasure even if they don't make any of them themselves or Willy the troll who shows a bit of empathy towards Bilbo when he is in the Trolls grip and just want to let him go as he is barely a mouth full.

On the other hand the Dragons and Trolls are far more dangerous then Orcs I mean in the Hobbit we get dialogues about the trolls taking the lives of entire villages of people and given how they later plan to cook the Dwarfs despite not being starving for food as it is, it is save to say that they are quite glutenous at least if we go by what we learn about the Trolls in the Hobbit not to mention if you are a Dwarf then you are in pretty bad luck if you encounter Trolls as we are told in third person that they hate any Dwarf that has not been killed for the sake of food, on the other hand the Dwarfs and Goblins were able to work together in the work of mining as we learn later in the Hobbit.

But even if you are not a Dwarf the Trolls eat other's farm animals, humans and if the fact that Sting is found among the remains of their victims is any indication probably Elves as well and if you ask me if I was a human in Middle Earth I would worry much sooner about the Trolls then Orcs since while not as homogeneously unempathetic and sadistic as those they are far more dangerous as the Melkor's corrupted Elves are if anything rather infamous for being a weak force to be reckoned with. Speaking of which much like the Orc's the Trolls are not any less a creation of Morgoth then the Orcs. If anything they are more so of an Melkor original product as they are living sentient creatures made out of stones were as Orcs are just a remnant of other lifeforms transformed to please the Dark Lord.

Now Dragons and the rest of the creatures are a little more complicated as they might have been sung into existence by Melkor but we are somewhat in the dark in regards to those matters especially since Ungoliant seems to be an other dimensional creature that could be as old as Eru himself.

Any way the reason this is posted in the New Line Cinema section of this forum is that the films might hade inflamed this controversy of Orcs as inherently evil compared to other creatures as they are they only ones who we are informed about as having been created by the Dark arts not to mention unlike the books they are shown to be without family and just made in factories no different to say the main armies in George Lucas Star Wars prequels and therefor less relatable and human like, not to mention that to allot of people it is probably hard to empathize with them as they are shown being born adults and never really having had so much as a child like innocence.

Also Jackson's first Lord of the Rings films as well as the tie in video game for Return of the King show the Trolls as victims of Sauron and the Moria Orcs were as the discussions between two Mordor Orcs of how they wish to be free from Sauron's grip is cut out of the films entirely. Mean while in the Two-Towers film the Trolls who open the black gate look to be injured and pushed to their limits as they open the gates and the same could be said about the Trolls in the aformentioned video games as they are letting out screams of pain as they have to push Sauron's Attack Towers and when we get a look at one of the Trolls in close up it seems on the verge of dying from the hard labor. As for the Moria Troll we see that it is chained and dragged by the Goblins into battle and giving that similar to the Trolls at the gates of Mordor it seems to have been physically abused it easy to take away that it is probably entering the battle against it's own will not to mention that the music that plays as it is finally put out of it's misery is pretty sumber.

With this in mind it is not hard to see why the Orcs are seen as the equivalent of potentially racist views of certain groups were as the Trolls get a free pass from overly passionate cultural critics as they are portrayed as far more sympathetic in Peter Jackson's more beloved trilogy based on Tolkiens work. After all allot more people go and see movies and even play video games then read books and as stated above in Jackson's renown film trilogy as well as at least one video game spoon of of his material the Trolls are shown in a farm more sympathetic light then they Orcs. Also to my knowledge no film adaptation has ever shown the Wargs as truly sinister creatures like in the books but rather as animals used by the Orcs so people are certainly not coming away with the impression that they are all evil like the Orcs if they don´t read books. But yeah, there is not a single Warg that shows even a slightest redeeming quality in the books despite being portrayed much more like highly conscience beings then other animals in the Hobbit books.

Also, while we do not see a single Good natured Dragon in any of the film adaptation of Tolkien's Middle Earth stories it is kinda hard for people to be left with the same impression of them as the Orc/Goblins as do to the Tolkien States copyright holding only one has been allowed to be portrayed on screen and it is pretty hard to say that a series of fiction is generalizing about any of it's species when we only see one individual as a bad guy.

So, yeah I think it is a bit unfair both in universe and out of universe to single the Orcs out as the only creature painted with the broad brush of evil when they are certainly not alone, although if you are wondering why I left out the Balrogs as well as the Great Beasts and Fell Beasts then for the former they seem to all have been Good individual Maiar spirits who joined the dark side so to speak and as for ladder they seem like mare beasts of burden who just do what their tamers make them do without much agency. Made by Sauron or not I just have a hard time thinking of the Fell and Great Beasts as truly evil.

 

[Olorgando]

What makes Orcs problematic, i.e. a problem for their opponents (except perhaps for Noldor fresh from Valinor), is that there always seem to be so §$%&#@€ many of them. They seem to breed awfully quickly, so recovering from horrendous losses, like three quarters of the Orcs of the north being destroyed in the Battle of Five Armies in 2941 TA. And they must have had far more losses than that in the War of the Dwarves and Orcs 2793-99 TA, ending just over 140 years before BoFA.
There are the types of ants know collectively in the vernacular as "army ants", both in the Americas - Eciton burchellii being considered the army ant here - and apparently their closest Old World equivalent, Dorylus molestus of tropical Africa. These two are probably the best-studied, and best known to a lay audience through nature films and TV documentaries. JRRT's descriptions of the suicidal attacks by Orcs, especially against fortifications, are very reminiscent of the behavior of these ants (or the other way around). The ants are especially aggressive when "moving house", with the queen protected by a huge (in ant terms) ball of bodies of her "subjects". This aspect does not enter into JRRT's writings, as he said little about their breeding habits (but enough to dump PJ's insect-like breeding of the Uruk-hai into the Baloney Slices garbage can).

 

[Ent]

Indeed we read this in The Silmarillion
"But he (Sauron) ruled rather by force and fear, if they might avail; and those who perceived his shadow spreading over the world called him the Dark Lord and named him the Enemy; and he gathered again under his government all the evil things of the days of Morgoth that remained on earth or beneath it, and the Orcs were at his command and multiplied like flies. Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Silmarillion (p. 307). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

So these things are true in Tolkien's Middle-earth:
1) - The issue is about the great battle between 'good and evil', not about races, peoples, etc.
2) - The issue with the Orcs isn't about the Orcs themselves... it's about their masters.
3) - the dragons were never gathered under Sauron, just under Melkor, and they were in fact bred by him to evil.
4) - the trolls were also perversions of the Evil, Melkor and Sauron, bred to evil.
5) - Ent personally doesn't really see the Trolls and Dragons etc. getting a 'pass' any more than the Orcs do.
6) - The Orcs were also able to "think", "command", "coordinate" and "control" to a degree we don't see in trolls, dragons, etc. This makes them by far the greater adversary than those who need to be led or directed.
7) - We can think of Trolls and Dragons more like "Hulk... Smash" while we can think of Orcs more like... "well, maybe if there are just enough of us we can storm the world in spite of our losses." Evil always has its 'blind sides'... as Melkor and Sauron (and Saruman) did.
Finally:
8) - the 'good' in middle-earth isn't battling against 'races' - SURPRISE - it's battling against those things that are supporting the 'evil'. (Goodness.. this is the way it has been in every war in every age at every time in the real world as well.)

To understand Tolkien we need to understand what HE was really dealing with rather than what we want to inject into his work as being dealt with. And he has given us plenty of material about what he was dealing with for us to learn from.

 

[Ent]

As a Post Script here...
We also do know it's stated somewhere the Orcs etc. hated their masters. But they were 'controlled'. We remember both Melkor and Sauron invested so much of themselves in "control" of their creatures, they actually diminished themselves.

Especially seen at the end when Sauron pulls his attention away from his armies and focuses on the ring at the brink of destruction. The whole were totally bereft of direction and guidance and without a clue what to do.

All this 'control' is written into Tolkien's works for a very specific reason... and relates to very real issues in the very real world everyone has always lived in.
Once we 'get that' in our evaluation of things. we start to see Tolkien's genius to a far greater extent.

What film makers etc. do with it Ent personally doesn't much care... they're so far from Tolkien's mind they (mostly) only get the surface stuff anyway.
They're 'entertaining', not writing history or instructing.

 

[Þráinn Þórhallsson]

As a Post Script here...
We also do know it's stated somewhere the Orcs etc. hated their masters. But they were 'controlled'. We remember both Melkor and Sauron invested so much of themselves in "control" of their creatures, they actually diminished themselves.

Especially seen at the end when Sauron pulls his attention away from his armies and focuses on the ring at the brink of destruction. The whole were totally bereft of direction and guidance and without a clue what to do.

All this 'control' is written into Tolkien's works for a very specific reason... and relates to very real issues in the very real world everyone has always lived in.
Once we 'get that' in our evaluation of things. we start to see Tolkien's genius to a far greater extent.

What film makers etc. do with it Ent personally doesn't much care... they're so far from Tolkien's mind they (mostly) only get the surface stuff anyway.
They're 'entertaining', not writing history or instructing.

Honestly more people need to listen to Ents then Japanese animators

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Outside his films, Miyazaki can come off as a grumpy curmudgeon.

But then, so can Tolkien, as with Clyde S. Kilby's surprise, when he referred to Sam, a universally admired character, as "vulgar" and "despicable".

We have to take some of their comments cum grano salis.😉

 

[Radaghast]

Miyazaki seems to simplify Tolkien's work a bit (not unlike how Tolkien simplifies Disney's movies) but there is an interesting comment made in that video that brings to mind a comment Tolkien made regarding what orcs look like:

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 Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, #210

That comment is cringe-worthy and I surprised the video doesn't mention it. I don't believe Tolkien had anything against people from the Far East but I obviously couldn't say for sure.

As far as orcs, overall, they're problematic because not enough has been said of their society or why they are so evil, other than that they were bred to be evil. One would expect them to behave with a hive mind but we see in LoR that they have personalities, even individual ambitions. And they seem as creeped out by the Nazgûl as anyone else, so there seems some potential for non-evil there that we never see. Different tribes of orcs hate each other almost as much as they hate everyone else but this seems to exist for plot convenience. It's an interesting idea that's never explored. Of course, I can readily believe Tolkien never really had time to develop them.

 

[Muskrat]

I think that orcs are problematic because they are as completely evil fairy story creatures. Rotten clean through. To be killed on sight. Recognizable by Elvish swords, sort of like radioactivity. This is a problem for those who take some of Tolkien‘s quotes seriously That nothing is evil in the beginning or is wholly evil. We can deal with Saruman or Grima, but orcs are to be exterminated without mercy. I think that Tolkien needed them for his story, but never did resolve the conflict in his mind. What would you think after the destruction of the Ring if Aragorn had decided to work out a peace treaty with the orcs? Seems anticlimactic and unlikely.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

Well, the "philosophical" implications exercised him greatly in later years -- not to any particular use, IMO, as it's in the nature of romance to create oppositional characters drawn in black and white. It's more or less beside the point to expect any great degree of nuance (or, to cite an egregious example, try to say, turn Aragorn into a "conflicted" character).

That comment is cringe-worthy

We need to keep in mind that much of Tolkien's "source material" came from his immersion in the literature of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Read some contemporary descriptions of the Huns, for example. Talk about xenophobia! I remember one including the line " . . . and as for their -- I cannot call them faces, but the things on the front of their heads . . ."

 

[Muskrat]

As I mentioned somewhere else, Norman Spinrad hated the whole idea so much that he wrote The Iron Dream, a novel purportedly by Adolf Hitler in which millions of orclike men are slaughtered. Not fun to read, I found, and it did make me think about oucs.

 

[Squint-eyed Southerner]

a novel purportedly by Adolf Hitler

And called "The Lord of the Swastika"! 😄