🧌Orcs: Asexual Reproduction?

Þráinn Þórhallsson said:

... I always like to think of them as a creature with an immense need to kill and cause pain to other living beings in order to find any real fulfilment. ..

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A strange kind of fulfillment. Even in battles they won, they often got slaughtered wholesale, due to their tendency for suicidal attacks. This is not a statistic gleaned from any specific battle, as JRRT tended to be vague on actual numbers, but they might get slaughtered at a rate of 9 to 1, but still won as they showed up on the battlefield with a 10 to 1 numerical superiority.

Olorgando said:

A strange kind of fulfillment. Even in battles they won, they often got slaughtered wholesale, due to their tendency for suicidal attacks. This is not a statistic gleaned from any specific battle, as JRRT tended to be vague on actual numbers, but they might get slaughtered at a rate of 9 to 1, but still won as they showed up on the battlefield with a 10 to 1 numerical superiority.

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Makes the most sense thou. Especially when you take into account what we learn about them in the Hobbit. Most torture devices in Middle-Earth are of their making and the only other creature they seem to get along with are wargs and please remember that in real life wolfs are one of the few predators who do not just kill for food but for fun.

In fact an old Icelandic word for murderer with something aching to the tendencies of serial killers is ''Morðvargur''(Murder warg).

Þráinn Þórhallsson said:

In fact an old Icelandic word for murderer with something aching to the tendencies of serial killers is ''Morðvargur''(Murder warg).

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Yes, and T.A. Shippey shows how Tolkien used both Old Norse vargr, "which means both 'wolf' and 'outlaw' " with Old English wearh, "which means 'outcast' or 'outlaw' (but not 'wolf')" to come up with warg: "wolves, but not just wolves, intelligent and malevolent wolves".

Þráinn Þórhallsson said:

Makes the most sense thou. Especially when you take into account what we learn about them in the Hobbit. Most torture devices in Middle-Earth are of their making and the only other creature they seem to get along with are wargs and please remember that in real life wolfs are one of the few predators who do not just kill for food but for fun.

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This is probably an assumption based on anthropomorphic notions. Wolves do engage in surplus killing but it's doubtful it's done for sport.

Þráinn Þórhallsson said:

wolfs

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Now, now, Thrain, the plural of wolf - and old word - has always been wolves.
And from my reading (and TV documentaries), I recall that wolves are actually more social than dogs, or the humans that bred dogs that way (dogs generally get along better with humans than wolves do, that's true). Normal wolves show their intelligence by giving humans a wide berth where possible, and in becoming expert at hiding where not.
I'm guessing the excess killings you are referring to is of enclosed livestock - which obviously comes to human attention. But that is likely to the situation of a fox in a chicken coop. The wild prey of both, if herding animals, scatter upon being attacked, an option that livestock enclosed in whatever way do not have. The predator is thus surrounded by panicked prey that cannot flee, provoking the killing instinct.
As to wolves not giving humans a wide berth, that seems mostly to have occurred in severe winters, like during the "small ice age" of the second millennium, when the wolves' prey had succumbed to the cold - or a greater amount of hunting the same "game" prey by humans that was also common in such winters.
The final reason for wolf attacks on humans is rabies. Which may be a disease of domesticated dogs rather than of the wild-types. From a book I recently read, rabies among foxes was pretty much unknown until after WW II in Germany, and after its first occurrence was spread precisely by the drastic measures taken to contain it. A thundering case of a "cure" being far worse than what was to be cured, something we're so good at.

Returning to Orc breeding ... projecting the current genetic engineering back into Morgoth's time, maybe he (or perhaps more likely Sauron, Morgoth had too much of Fëanor's rabid impatience for such things) managed to insert a snippet of the rabies virus genome into that of the Orcs? That could explain why the Orcs seem so "naturally rabid".

Well I'm not feeling the love for the Orcs in any great measure here, so I'll put my tuppence worth in.

Something that has always struck me as odd is the unrelenting hatred for Orcs by basically every other race in LoTR, but does this actually make sense?

Melkor captures Elves and enslaves and corrupts them in Utumno, with the result being the Orcs. So I would be happy to say that the Orcs are 'immortal' in the same way as the Elves. So some Orcs from this age (or at least their descendants) are around at the time of the LoTR (I'm thinking that Tracker Orc didn't get so deadly with a bow without an awful lot of practice).

In the same way we have the ordinary, boring Elves still around after all that time.

Now surely some of the first encounters between Elf and Orc would have been between people who basically knew each other (or at least knew of each other); and wouldn't this knowledge be passed down?

Yet at no stage does an Elf ever try to help an Orc? Even though they (or at least some of them) would have known the Orcs' origin?

Where does this leave us in terms of 'Elf=good Orc=bad'?

TrackerOrc said:

Well I'm not feeling the love for the Orcs in any great measure here, so I'll put my tuppence worth in.

Something that has always struck me as odd is the unrelenting hatred for Orcs by basically every other race in LoTR, but does this actually make sense?

Melkor captures Elves and enslaves and corrupts them in Utumno, with the result being the Orcs. So I would be happy to say that the Orcs are 'immortal' in the same way as the Elves. So some Orcs from this age (or at least their descendants) are around at the time of the LoTR (I'm thinking that Tracker Orc didn't get so deadly with a bow without an awful lot of practice).

In the same way we have the ordinary, boring Elves still around after all that time.

Now surely some of the first encounters between Elf and Orc would have been between people who basically knew each other (or at least knew of each other); and wouldn't this knowledge be passed down?

Yet at no stage does an Elf ever try to help an Orc? Even though they (or at least some of them) would have known the Orcs' origin?

Where does this leave us in terms of 'Elf=good Orc=bad'?

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in his later years, JRRT decided that Orcs could not be corrupted Men or Elves, as Morgoth could not have robbed a Man or an Elf of his God-given soul.

This is not simply my opinion, but is based on his notes (published in Morgoth’s Ring). I once wrote an essay about this.

Zahin Hasan said:

in his later years, JRRT decided that Orcs could not be corrupted Men or Elves, as Morgoth could not have robbed a Man or an Elf of his God-given soul.

This is not simply my opinion, but is based on his notes (published in Morgoth’s Ring). I once wrote an essay about this.

Namarie! Here’s an essay on the origin of 🧌Orcs.

Hi, I’m Zahin. I live in Bangladesh. I have been a huge fan of Tolkien for almost 40 years. Here is an essay I wrote on the origin of Orcs. Based on Morgoth’s Ring. In the published Silmarillion it says that orcs are corrupted Elves. This was an editorial choice made by Christopher Tolkien...

thetolkien.forum

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Ah, but I think there's enough ambiguity running right throughout Tolkien's work for me to be happy to stand by my opinion.

Melkor corrupting and enslaving Elves could be primarily physical, more than spiritual in any case?

Zahin Hasan said:

in his later years, JRRT decided that Orcs could not be corrupted Men or Elves, as Morgoth could not have robbed a Man or an Elf of his God-given soul.

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I can't agree. Well, I could, but I don't

And based on Text X published in Morgoth's Ring, and a note to the later text The Drúedain ["Towards the end of his life my father revealed a good deal more about the Wild Men of the Drúadan Forest. . ." CJRT Unfinished Tales], I argue that Tolkien landed on (or seemed to be leaning this way, let's say) the notion that "regular" Orks were bred from corrupted Men, with a mix of Ork-formed Maiar.

Your quote (in the link above) about the "rational soul" (and so on) hails from but one of Tolkien's ideas about the origin of orks (see B below), in a text wherein Tolkien mused about the possibility of the "regular" orks being misshapen beasts.

The following is my brief, possibly eye-irritating, external look at the origin of the Orks.


Ork Origins with a k

1916-17 (Fall of Gondolin, later read at Exeter College in 1920): Melko made the Orks "bred of subterranean heats and slime" and they were the "foul broodlings of Melko"

1920s Tolkien was largely concerned with poetry in these years. His poetry includes references to Orks, but not necessarily any that indicate origin. Or that is, I'm too lazy at the moment to try any find any such references.

1930 (Qenta Noldorinwa): the Dark Lord now makes Orks "of stone" with "hearts of hatred"

Mid to late 1930s: (Quenta Silmarillion) Melkor still makes Orcs: "yet the Orcs were not made until he had looked upon the Elves." (...) "The Orcs Morgoth made in envy and mockery of the Elves, and they were made of stone, but their hearts of hatred."

1940s and finishing up The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien, perhaps while writing The Lord of the Rings, possibly shifts from Morgoth creating Orks to Morgoth needing to pervert something already living -- as Frodo thinks might be the case -- although right now I'm unable to exactly date this passage from Frodo (The Tower of Cirith Ungol); "No, they eat and drink Sam. 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;..." Appendix F merely states that the orks were first bred by the Dark Power in the Elder Days. Also, Treebeard notes a few things that might speak to chronology, but I'll ignore these here.

early 1950s: in The Annals of Aman as first written Melkor still "made" orks from something -- but the idea now enters Silmarillion related texts that Melkor cannot create a true living being, as the Elf Pengolod will argue -- and a darker tale is noted among the Wise of Eressea, one that says Morgoth captured and perverted Elves, twisting them into orks. Christopher Tolkien chose this idea for the 1977 Silmarillion -- along with other texts from this phase of writing incidentally.

1954: in both letter 144 and (draft) letter 153 Tolkien essentially explains that Morgoth cannot create a spirit, and the orks are corruptions -- leaving open the possibility of other kinds of makings, which would be puppet-like by comparison.

later 1950s (or around this time anyway): Tolkien will question whether it could be true that Orks were actually Elves in origin, and if they could be "immortal" if so, for example, and he writes various origins in order to figure out things. I'll call these (collectively) the Myths Transformed Orc-related Essays, and use Christopher Tolkien's numbering of the texts. The various ideas include:

A) Orks possibly created out of the discords of the music (text VII). Tolkien writes: "Hence Orcs? Part of the Elf-Man idea gone wrong. Though as for Orcs the Eldar believed that Morgoth had actually 'bred' them by capturing Men (and Elves) early and increasing to the utmost any corrupt tendencies they possessed."

B) Orks created from beasts; also some Maiar early on (Text VIII) -- possibly an Elvish element too, but seemingly JRRT then reverts to orks simply being perverted beasts.

C) Orks from Elves (probably later from Men), some Maiar early on (Text IX)

D) Orcs created from Men, some Maiar early on (Text X) in this essay, soon after Morgoth's return he [Morgoth] will have a great number of Orks to command -- as it was left to Sauron to produce great numbers from Men, while Morgoth was in captivity. Tolkien is aware of existing chronology concerns here.

1969 or later: two notes on Orks now accompany one copy of Text X -- that is, the Orks from Men essay (or D above)

1) one of these notes carries a statement that denies an essential conception found in D -- and I have tried to explain this conception under D above -- the denial hails from the detail that this later note suggests Morgoth had great numbers of Orks at the height of his power and still after his return from captivity. And to muddy things further here, this may be a draft version for a variant passage that does not include this detail!

2) this short note concerns the spelling of the word orc: here Tolkien notes that he will spell it ork -- just as he had noted in text IX (or C above), where Orcs were from Elves (and "probably later also of Men").

I think Christopher Tolkien's point with these notes is that they might throw some measure of doubt upon the seemingly "final" idea that "regular" Orks were bred from Men (Text X). That said, there is another late text which appears to have Elves stating that Men are the source for Orks:

Late text (lacks date other than final period of Tolkien's writings): author's note (note 5) to The Drúedain: "To the unfriendly who, not knowing them well, declared that Morgoth must have bred the Orcs from such a stock the Eldar answered: "Doubtless Morgoth, since he can make no living thing, bred Orcs from various kinds of Men, but the Drúedain must have escaped his shadow;..." I can't really tell if this description is later or earlier than the two notes dated 1969 or later.

One can certainly claim that this is what the Eldar say, but compare this to what the Wise of Eressea said in earlier texts (about corrupted Elves). I have no idea if Tolkien would have ever, in any text published by himself, made the origin of Orks a fact certainly known by some, but this late answer from the Eldar appears to be in accord with Text X, in any case.
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Elthir said:

I can't agree. Well, I could, but I don't


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What he said, but My Aged Eyes...

Eldacar said:

This is becoming very philosophical. 😅

My take on where these proposed orc-children are: Elves take much longer to grow up than men, who in turn take much longer to mature than most if not all beasts. Maybe the twisting of the elves that became the orcs also shortened these time frames to maybe as little as a few weeks or days. So compared to the overall life span of orcs, there simply aren't any children to speak of.

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It various places the considerable size range of orcs are mentioned. Maybe the smaller ones are in part the orcish equivalent of child soldiers? If so, this adds to the horror of the orcs.

The Memes already said it best ^^