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🌋Mordor 🧌Orcs at Parth Galen


Aragil,

You are of course right. I confused which of the two orcs who first speak to Pippin later gets it from Ugluk and crowd. Guess I was still suffering from the results of Pippin's concussion.
 
Aragil, there is no point in putting forth a particular hypothesis as more or less likely when so many facts are missing.

It the guardian Orcs were Mordor-orcs in Tolkien’s mind when he wrote those passages, then none of your supposedly less likely passages would cause any difficulty.

Accordingly, how do you determine less or more in regards to liklihood? Every one of your supposed problems can be explained ... though of course which explanation is correct in each case will not be provable.

And there are still puzzles. You still have to explain, under your interpretation, why Pippin is guarded by northern Orcs rather than Sauron’s Uruk-hai. Why the debate about which way to occurred to late is an equal problem under any interpretation.

In Appendix F the Tolkien claims the guardian Orc was a Mordor-orc. Despite all likelihood discussed here the only statement elsewhere that is the slightest tension with this is Aragorn’s pointing out Notherners in reference to the five dead Orcs in a way that does naturally suggest he means all five. But this utterance may not mean all five when looked at closely and with knowledge that at least one of those Orcs was a Mordor-Orc.

Grishnákh’s referring to himself in the singular indicates nothing either way, especially since as an officer he might tend not to include his entourage when referring to himself.



How ther northern Orcs, Saruman’s Uruk-hai and Grishnákh (along with other Mordor-orcs?) got together in the first place is never explained.

Without answers to such questions discussions of liklikhood begin so much in ignorance that I don’s see they can pursued with any great conviction. Tolken’s drafts indicate quarrel between Mordor-orcs and Saurman’s orcs followed by a return of Grishnákh with a full troop of Orcs. I see no difficulty in seeing that in the final text as written. (Of course, Tolkien is not so plain in the final text as written so one cannot be sure that Tolkien still saw that. But the Appendix F mention of the guard being a Mordor-orc would suggest that was still what he saw.)

If Merry and Pippin had actually been taken captive by a group mostly of northern-Orcs, aided by a few of Saruman’s Orcs and Grishnákh and his small company but with the Saruman Orcs being slain, and if it was Grishnákh and his Mordor-orcs who actually got hold of Merry and Pippin then the situation might become clearer ... if that was what Tolkien imagined.

Unfortunately Tolkien tells the story only as a very short backflash and continually keeps to Pippin’s point of view. As a result much that Tolkien knew was never recorded.
Not that these are impossible explanations, but assuming Grishnakh had backup is creating more problems than it solves, hence it is becoming less likely.
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Perhaps at the time Grishnákh’s living Mordor-orc backup was only that cursing Orc whom Tolkien called a Mordor-orc.

The Nazgûl ferring isn’t a problem. We don’t know where exactly Grishnákh gathered his other followers from and so nothing is either more or less likely. A party of spies who were to meet at a designated point, to which Grishnákh also headed after leaving Uglúk makes sense. That this designated point was close by might explain why Grishnákh waited to make his argument: he’s trying to sway the northern Orcs (and even Uglúk if he can) without letting them know of the other group of Mordor-orcs nearby which would be his true destination, and then to the Nazgûl drop point.)

That of course works regardless of whether Grishnákh had other Mordor-orcs with him when he quarreled with Uglúk or didn’t. Is that what Tolkien thought? Who knows.

In this portion of the text there is just too much that Tolkien had probably thought out but failed to record (and perhaps some things that he hadn’t though out properly in which case liklihood may no be a guided as to what Tolkien intended). Arghh!
 
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Hmm. Perhaps I am putting less emphasis on author intent than you are.

"Were there Mordor Orcs other than Grishnakh at Parth Galen?"

In my mind Tolkien's intent is not so much the issue here, it is what we can deduce from reading the passage. Usually the two will meet up- if Tolkien wrote the passage in a clear way, then his intent will obviously coincide with the impression we get as readers. But my question is most closely framed by "what do we think is most likely once we read the text? In this case it doesn't matter what information is missing, but rather what is present.

As a reader I feel that Pippin's guards are twice described as Northerners. The first description comes from Aragorn. Of course, at the time we don't know the Yellow-fanged guard is among the slain because we don't know of his existance until the proceding chapter. The second identification comes from Pippin- he says that he sees Northerners gathered around Grishnakh and Ugluk right after it is mentioned that his guards have gone to join the fray. I can not comprehend how the guards could leave his position, go towards the position of Ugluk, and yet not be in Pippin's field of view when he observes only U, G, and Northerners. When it actually comes to fighting, two Orcs are immediately killed by Ugluk. A third Orc falls over Merry as Ugluk's followers jump ahead. Another Orc is killed, and this is the yellow-fanged guard, who is slain by Ugluk's companions. It would seem odd that the Isengarders would kill anyone other than the closest Orc, so in all likelihood they killed the Orc who was the fourth closest to Ugluk to begin with. I believe this Orc would have been in Pippin's field of view when he saw "many smaller goblins" (assuming many is at least four).

Regarding the other points- Grishnakh's description of himself ("I" etc.) is of course different than Ugluk's. Not that the two can't speak in different manners, but it is a definite difference, and one could certainly infer that Grishnakh speaks in the singular because he is alone, while Ugluk (who is equally an officer) speaks in the plural because he is accompanied by others.

There are hints as to how the Orcs met up- Ugluk heavily implies that the Northerners have been with the Isengarders for some time ("We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we choose"). How Grishnakh and possible compatriots fit in is still a mystery, but I'd think that it is (in some ways) the point of this whole thread.

The 'Orc-raid' chapter in HoME leaves a lot to be desired (as I learned in the Uruks vs. Uruk-hai thread). The original sketch which speaks of Mordor Orcs and Isengarders is nothing more than an outline. In my opinion, 'Mordor' Orcs here could easily be a short-hand reference for 'those Orcs who wanted to go to Mordor'- fitting in with the opening line "Some want to go North. Some say ought to go straight to Mordor". The origin of these orcs is never specified. And remember, the even earlier drafting in the Departure of Boromir is quite explicit about there being no Mordor Orcs present.

Appendix F was written at least a decade after this point, so (IMO at least) Tolkien could have forgotten what he originally intended.

As for where Grishnakh meets his cohorts, nothing is explicitly stated, but much is suggested by their trajectory having come 'out of the East' across the River or over the Wold. Unless Grishnakh was in the habit of running first North and then West instead of diagonally, then he met his companions much to the North.
 
Aragil, I still see you trying to read too much into an account which does not necessarily bear the interpretations you read into. That something seems more likely, to you, doesn’t mean that it is in the text.

I might say that I think, though of course it is hard to recall now, that I had always understood Pippin’s guards not to be northerners, to be distinct from the northern Orcs that Pippin sees, that there were three parties to the quarrel and that Grishnákh was not alone, that at least Pippin’s guards were Mordor-orcs.

I have done much studying of various fine points of interpretation of many medieval and ancient texts and become very critical of attempts to read anything from a text beyond the minimal meaning that cannot be avoided.

Commentators differ so widely on what a text means and I try to carefully ascertain the differences between what a text actually says and what it seems to mean and what it might be made to mean given other information. I’ve so often seen texts worked over in the fashion that you have worked this text over and seen the results then disproved by some other information, like the Appendix F Mordor-orc or simply another parallel account.

Accordingly I am far less ready then you are to simply say Tolkien was wrong about the Mordor-orc when I know that elsewhere in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien makes errors within the text or that parts of the text are in tension with one another (sometimes because they were written from slightly different concepts as the HoME series shows).

Relying on hints is dangerous when more weight is put on a text then it should bear, especially since one tends to ignore exactly the same kind of tension and hints in cases where other information makes the text clear and the hints would be misleading. E.g. the question of whether Uruk-hai sometimes means Mordor-orc or not partly comes up because Tolkien is not writing clearly on the matter, and there is a certain tension in his use of Uruk-hai that makes it seem to many readers to apply only to Saruman’s Orcs.

An author can be misleading and often is, not realizing that his words do not capture important parts of the vision. To take one minor point, did Boromir have his shield with him when he fell? Tolkien doesn’t mention it at all in any of the places where one would feel he ought to have mentioned it ... until suddenly Boromir’s cloven shield appears in the elegy poem.

Another example, when speaking to Faramir Frodo mostly speaks in the singular and even says: Did we not have more knowledge of the tale this might suggest Frodo came into Ithilien alone, just as you would have Grishnákh’s mean he is alone. I don’t think Grishnakh’s words even suggest anything of the kind, any more than Frodo’s do.

In both cases they partly indicate a special status of the speaker.
 
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But what the author is trying to convey in a fictional work is very different from what is trying to be conveyed in a piece of historical text. In the latter case there is some actual danger in misinterpreting, in the former case the only danger is that your reading might be at variance with the author's intention while writing. Of course, IMO the author's own opinion at a later point in time could very well be at variance with what they thought when they wrote something, so I'm quite free in excusing myself from interpreting matters differently than they author.

You brought up the U vs. U-h bit- if some alternate piece of information came up which unequivocally proved that Tolkien equated the terms Uruks and Uruk-hai (such as Wayne Hammond's promised publication of Tolkien's original Appendix to LotR), I would still allow my own reading to differentiate the terms, because that is how I perceive them to be used in the text. Author intent in this case means little to me, because I perceive too much 'tension' to reconcile the proposed intent with what the text actually states.

I encourage all scholarly rigorousness in combing over historical documents, but I don't think that the same standard should be applied to literature, where there is no 'objective' truth to be found. IMO the value of literature comes through personal interpretation.

And as for the matter of this thread, I still think that Pippin's identification is quite definite, as is Aragorn's. I see no evidence supporting the Appendix F entry, and indeed I believe that many parts of the episode become inexplicable (or at least very difficult to explain) if the Appendix entry is taken literally.

Knowing the amount of time which passed between the writing of the passage and the writing of the Appendix, I find it quite easy to say that Tolkien might have made an error. Indeed, the very curse of the Orc himself is rather famously translated (by Tolkien) into two different English versions on two different occasions. Obviously one of the translations is at variance with whatever Tolkien was thinking at the time he wrote the original passage- either he later changed his mind about meaning or else he simply forgot his original intention. I believe that either way supports my case.
 
Aragil said:
Of course, IMO the author's own opinion at a later point in time could very well be at variance with what they thought when they wrote something, so I'm quite free in excusing myself from interpreting matters differently than the author.
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But when different interpretations are possible then one should be careful to distinguish one’s own preferred interpretation as an interpretation which expands on what the text actually says. There are errors and tensions within the main text itself, for example Gimli’s claim that he has not fought Orcs since Moria or Gandalf’s words to Shadowfax which make no sense in the published version:
Gandalf caressed him. ‘It is a long way from Rivendell, my friend,’ he said; ‘but you are wise and swift and come at need.’
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A later interpretation by an author may be quite accurate and text written in stream may be incorrect:
]I wondered often how Gollum came by a Great Ring, as plainly it was ― that at least was clear from the first.
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Everything surrounding this and everything else Tolkien wrote in drafts shows this statement cannot be correct, that Great Ring must be a slip for Ring of Power. There are other errors in the text and other occurrences of tension between accounts.

Tolkien might have erred in his Mordor-orc mention in Appendix F. But that this late statement is in tension with one sentence doesn’t prove anything except that, as usual, not everything in a book is as clear as one might wish when exacming fine details.
Aragil said:
Author intent in this case means little to me, because I perceive too much 'tension' to reconcile the proposed intent with what the text actually states.
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I don’t perceive too much tension to prove to me that Tolkien was later mistaken, In any case, author intent, when it can be determined, should always be strongly considered. So does the value of history when it has a value other than simple statements of supposed fact.

Authors, whether purportedly writing history or fiction or something in between are often not totally clear, may even err, may expect certain knowledge or understanding that a reader does not have and so forth. When the same text is interpreted in contrary ways then either some of the interpretations should prove, after study, to be invalid or the text in certain places simply is ambigious.

Sometimes newly discovered texts can solve ambiguities. Sometimes they create them in that suddenly it is seen that a known text need not be interpreted as had almost universally been done.

Interpretations of an historical text are no less personal than interpretations of a literary texts. When doing careful reading of literary text or purported historical text we should want to know as much as possible exactly what the author means, no more and no less. From purportedly historical texts we may also wish to discover what really happened. But knowing that depends first on not reading too much into the text. In fact we often despair of ever knowing exactly what happened but study contrary accounts of what happened to understand how events were seen by particular authors.

It is sometimes too easy to take from a text what in fact has been read into it instead of what is there. It doesn’t particularly. A later comment by an author may be incorrect in respect to what he meant when he wrote a passage. It may also be entirely correct. It may be of dubious validity.

That Tolkien sometimes changed his mind about features of his legendarium confuses things more, e.g. Gildor Inglorien is not quite the same person in the first version and the second versions of The Lord of the Rings because Tolkien had done some renaming of Elves of the First Age. Saruman did and did not know that Gandalf possessed a Ring of Power.

One should point out such ambiguities when they are obvious, as in two separate meanings given to the curse of the Mordor-orc. One should also recognize ambiguity when it is not especially obvious.
 
Flame of Udûn said:
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but if you mean that the term Great Ring refers only to Sauron's One Ring, you are wrong.
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I misspoke badly.

The problem is that Tolkien seems to have introduced the lesser Elven rings specifically to explain why Gandalf did not recognize immediately what Gollum’s ring must be. All explanations fail if Gandalf knew at once that Gollum’s ring must be one of the Great Rings. Indeed, because all the Great Rings save the One Ring had their proper stone, and if Gandalf knew at once that it was a Great Ring, then he would have known at once that it was the One Ring. Or at least with a little thought on the matter and taking into account the possiblity the his Ring lore might be wrong on some point he would have very soon realized the it was almost certainly the One Ring.

Tolkien therefore certainly meant Gandalf to say something like Gollum’s ring was plainly an Elven-ring from the first. But the One Ring is specifically not an Elven-ring, indeed the only Ring of Power that probably cannot be described as an Elven-ring. So that description doesn’t fit.

As you point out, Tolkien equates Ring of Power and Great Ring.

Perhaps Tolkien should have had Gandalf say was that it was clear from the first that this was a magical ring. But Tolkien likes to be very careful about his use of the word magical. Somehow, perhaps for that reason, Great Ring got written down at that point.

What one really needs is a term that covers all the rings made by the Elven-smiths of Eregion and by Sauron and does not cover any other possible magical ring of some other kind that might exist. But Tolkien does not provide us with such a term. Yet the plain idea in all this explanation is that Gandalf felt originally that Gollum had come by a lesser ring. Somehow Tolkien used the wrong description in having Gandalf identify it as a Great Ring at that point.

Perhaps a reasonable amendment might be:
I wondered often how Gollum came by one of those rings out of old tales, as plainly it was; that at least was clear from the first.
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What was clear to Gandalf is that a ring of invisiblity must have been one of the old rings forged by combined Elven power and Sauronic power. That is all that was clear from the first.
 

If you're speaking of what I think you are, what about the Uruk Hai in the scenes where Sam rescued Frodo from the Orcs of the Tower? If Uruks were the invention of Saruman, what were these guys doing working for Sauron? Or am I confused (wouldn't be the first time)?

Lotho
 
Lotho,

Taking the liberty of replying for Aragil, I believe he is asking whether there were any other orcs in the employ of Mordor at Parth Galen. Aragil is presenting the case that all the orcs on that little raiding party either worked for Saruman or had come down from the Misty Mountains, with the exception of Grishnakh who worked for Mordor. What breeds of orcs there were is a secondary question.
 
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Well, I'll have to overcome my monumental laziness and go back and re-read those passages: the ones where Sam goes up in the tower and rescues Frodo. There were Uruk-Hai there, and I'm wondering how they got there and who they were working for, since they were Saruman's creation. But thanks for the clarification!

Lotho
 
Oh dear lord, no!
Actually, in the movie the Orcs of the Tower (at least Shagrat's lot) are indistinguishable from Saruman's Uruk-hai. This is a bit interesting, as the movie makes it quite explicit that Saruman has bred his Uruk-hai from men and lesser Orcs, so they should not resemble creatures of Sauron, which (presumably) have been bred in a different manner.

The book story is a bit different. If you really want to read about it in depth, there is a thread in this forum called Uruks vs. Uruk-hai. The central question of that thread is whether the terms "Uruks" and "Uruk-hai" are equivalent. In the books Saruman's soldiers are described as Uruk-hai, whilst Sauron has creatures referred to as Uruks. Sauron's Uruks are certainly different from Saruman's troops, as they have probably not been cross-bred with Men and are never described as being particularly sun-tolerant, whilst Saruman's troops are. However, from a linguistic sense the words are quite similar, and it is possible that both groups of Orcs would generally fall into the single broad class of Uruks/Uruk-hai. Sauron's troops at the tower describe themselves as Uruks (this is as Sam is listening in, after Frodo has been captured). In the films the terms Uruks and Uruk-hai are used interchangeably, so when PJ et al read that the troops of the tower where Uruks, they probably just decided to re-use the costumes from all of the Isengard scenes. In the book Shagrat and his company are described as being more similar to Grishnakh, but without being able to look at one of Saruman's Uruk-hai next to one of Sauron's Uruks, it is questionable whether one could be able to discern the difference anyway.
 

Well first of all, let me thank you very much for putting up that link which I just finished reading. It "leaves me deep in your debt," as Gimli said to Pippin about pipeweed. And to bring up another quote, evidently I "put my finger on the sore that many feel," this apparent puzzle over use of the word "uruk:" did it refer to the creatures that Saruman hatched, or is it a generic term for an especially large, ugly and intelligent orc?

Ultimately I must go back again (as I have done so many times) to the passage in Tolkien's forward to LOTR, where he says that he is aware of errors both major and minor in LOTR, but being under no obligation to correct them, he passes them over in silence. This may be one of those inconsistencies.

Thanks again!

Lotho
 
There are several places where it seem to be made clear that there are three distinct orc types present.

The returned Gandalf tells Aragorn and Co that there were Mordor orcs--

"--And he does not know of the quarrel between his servants and the Orcs of Mordor--"

Since we know that the Uruk-hai were there, and we know that there were Misty Mountain orcs, this statement confirms the presence of multiple Mordor orcs. Grishnakh was not alone.
 
Hmm. I'm afraid I can't agree with that. Within the aspect of the story, Gandalf has NO way of knowing what happened between the various orcs in the party, so he is hardly a good source. What he did know would come from Aragorn's words to him- probably most importantly about the discovery of the dead orcs at the base of the Emyn Muil. Since the narrator/Aragorn did not communicate the presence of Mordor Orcs at this scene, it would be elliptical (to say the least) to derive it from Gandalf's comments regarding the scene, especially as Gandalf himself was not a witness to the event, while we (as readers) DID witness the event through the eyes of Pippin.
 
How does Aragorn know anything of the nature of the fight between the rival orc factions? He knows that it happened--but not why. Aragorn says nothing to Gandalf about the subject--one can infer he knows nothing about it.

In the scene in question Gandalf is explaining much. He speaks of many things that he cannot have seen first hand. He speaks of looking inside Saruman's mind.

He also speaks of being able to see "many things far off"

There is magic all through the story, to insist that the resurrected maia known as Gandalf has NO way of knowing what happened between the orcs is ignoring a major aspect of the tale.
 
Aragorn's guess as to what happens between the rival orc factions agrees exactly with what Pippin witnesses. He later claims to know more of Orc-kind than any living man. He mentions nothing of Mordor Orcs at the scene of the dead bodies, and I call that reliable testimony.

Gandalf can see (or at least, understand) many things even when he is not physically present. Yet he gives no indication that he was spying on the Orc party, and he is quite unaware (though perhaps he suspected) that Gollum was travelling with Frodo and Sam- and throughout the story he is much more concerned with their plight than anything happening in the West. I just don't see anything that would suggest that Gandalf could positively ID the members and ethnicity of the Orc forces at Parth Galen and later. However, as I've said before, his comments could easily be taken to refer to the Moria Orcs, who were generally considered "creatures of Sauron".
 
Aragil said:
He later claims to know more of Orc-kind than any living man. He mentions nothing of Mordor Orcs at the scene of the dead bodies, and I call that reliable testimony.
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But what Aragorn said of those four bodies is not so clear as you want to make it.

As you know well, Grishnákh and a “couple of score” of Mordor Orcs were among those slain by the Rohirrim.

This is why evidence from silence is worthless. Aragorn, when examining the Orcs burned by the Rohirrim, either did not happen to see the gear that suggested Mordor Orcs or (more likely) did not see any reason to mention it especially.
Aragorn said:
I just don't see anything that would suggest that Gandalf could positively ID the members and ethnicity of the Orc forces at Parth Galen and later.
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Gandalf attributes his knowledge of Merry and Pippin’s captivity to Gwaihir.

You don’t see because you don’t want to see, or rather you attempt to illuminate the darkness with your imagination. That’s fair enough, as long as you don’t think your imaginings necessarily represent what must be there in direct contradictions to what the author states.
 
The author directly contradicts himself, leaving fertile imaginations like mine to sort through the mess. Sound fair?
 
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