Backyard Professor
Member
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2025
- Messages
- 210
A good friend of mine got talking about Tolkien with me and told me something interesting I responded to, and I will share it here because you folks are the finest Tolkien fans I know of, and I am so appreciating reading all your ideas and discussions with helping all appreciate Tolkien's depth and wizardry when it comes to fantasy, myth, legend and reality.
Excellent points... So... here is how I would approach it, based on Tolkien's evolving thinking through time. He never did stop developing, changing, learning, and improving the world he created, which, betimes caused extra interesting contradictions to pop up which he would then address. His was never a completed project, but an adventure into the further unknown. He constantly revised the languages (which really ARE fun by the way!), the history, the chronology, and attempts to keep it real as a legendary world.
You put your finger on the issue that Tolkien's world shows the rise and fall of powers, how patterns repeat across ages, knowledge lost, and the general impermanence of things. Some destruction was followed with a partial renewal. Yet some things were entirely lost never to be brought back, like the two trees of light, the great Numenor, the fading the elves, etc. So, yeah, cycles exist, but so does forward moving. His repetition of patterns is not entirely like the Eastern or classic myth systems. Some things really are lost forever in Tolkien's world. The Silmarils are never recovered for instance. Many of the rings are destroyed, some of the Palantiri are destroyed and never rebuilt or used. So there is no eternal cycle that resets, but rather there is irreversible history where we can hear echoes, but there is no loop, as like Nietzsche's eternal return loop. So how does this effect Tolkien's ethics?
You are entirely correct to bring up the orcs, a subject Tolkien also thought through for decades since it bothered him greatly. Tolkien could have created a religion-like system with internal consistency. But the reason he didn’t is not lack of ambition, but it speaks more to ethical restraint. He refused prophetic authority, doctrinal finality, and moral closure. For him, he didn’t want people to obey Middle-earth. He wanted them to think inside it.
What I see in the various discussions of his Legendarium therefore is his ideas survive skeptical scrutiny since he remained open ended ethically. And yes, this disturbs some organized religions pretty badly! A fake prophet would have closed questions. Tolkien appears to me to have kept them open on purpose. And I don't see that as a failure on his part or laziness either. It's more in line, interestingly enough, with moral discipline. This brings us to the orcs. They aren't a hole in the system so much as an unresolved wound. And I don't see your point as naïve at all either. Tolkien himself struggled with this. I suggest, based on what we have of Tolkien's expositions that the Orcs were not morally unredeemable in principle. And, his struggling apparently prevented him from finding closure with this issue. Their existence is not a sweet spot in his ethics. His struggle can really be seen in his draft letter to Peter Hastings, a Catholic who was the manager of the Newman Bookshop in Oxford who had asked him if he had over-stepped his ethical and moral bounds in his sub-creation. (In "The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien," 2nd revised and enlarged edition, (2023): pp. 281-291)
Later in life he resisted that Orcs were soulless and purely evil by nature which deserved death simply by existing. He worried deeply that this would violate his belief that evil cannot create life, and imply God created beings beyond redemption, which in turn, in men's minds would justify extermination as being acceptable and morally clean. His troubled soul never did fully solve all that. But that is part of his point as well. They are ethically troubling by design. As we look over the Orcs in the story they appear to be the visible cost of domination. They are the end-state of total corruption (interesting to compare with Gollum, no?!). Orcs were robbed of culture, of mercy and even choice actually. They are not evil choices made freely, they are victims of Morgoth's violence, twisted beyond repair. But Tolkien doesn't then let us off the hook easily here. All this doesn't make their deaths morally easy by any means. It makes it tragic. I don't see Tolkien's own struggle to come to grips with this as lazy so much as morally honest about the cost of evil. Some harms, once done, cannot be undone, and that disturbs us, exactly as it should! And this doesn't collapse Tolkien's ethics I don't think, because nowhere in the Legendarium does Tolkien celebrate the killing of Orcs as a moral good. It is regrettable and tragic within the story’s constraints. He doesn't ever frame it anywhere as righteous joy. And here we get an incredible instructive contrast to mull over.
Some theology systems declare entire groups morally worthless, which in their turns justifies in their minds violence as obedience, in order to erase the moral discomfort. Yet Tolkien does not shy away from keeping that discomfort alive and seen, and felt. Tolkien's world is scarred, not with holes in the plot, but with a reality of consequences of choices made, ethics twisted, and lives changed. Orcs actually, come to think of it (!), support Tolkien's moral seriousness. If it was shallow, Orcs would be easy to destroy and be seen as a cleansing. No questions would linger. We wouldn't have to deal with this nasty business. Yet, readers keep asking about them, and very properly so. Tolkien himself kept revising their origin since he never fully resolved their problem. I would propose this is a sign of ethical depth, not failure. He increasingly rejected the idea of irredeemable beings, but never found a clean narrative solution. That lingering discomfort feels intentional to me appearing, on deep thought, as a refusal to make domination’s victims morally easy. This, to me, shows too much ethics for easy answers. Tolkien didn’t close every moral loop because closing them would have meant lying about the cost of evil. And that’s exactly why his work keeps generating serious thought rather than collapsing into doctrine.
Here is my response to his idea of how Tolkien failed.
Excellent points... So... here is how I would approach it, based on Tolkien's evolving thinking through time. He never did stop developing, changing, learning, and improving the world he created, which, betimes caused extra interesting contradictions to pop up which he would then address. His was never a completed project, but an adventure into the further unknown. He constantly revised the languages (which really ARE fun by the way!), the history, the chronology, and attempts to keep it real as a legendary world.
You put your finger on the issue that Tolkien's world shows the rise and fall of powers, how patterns repeat across ages, knowledge lost, and the general impermanence of things. Some destruction was followed with a partial renewal. Yet some things were entirely lost never to be brought back, like the two trees of light, the great Numenor, the fading the elves, etc. So, yeah, cycles exist, but so does forward moving. His repetition of patterns is not entirely like the Eastern or classic myth systems. Some things really are lost forever in Tolkien's world. The Silmarils are never recovered for instance. Many of the rings are destroyed, some of the Palantiri are destroyed and never rebuilt or used. So there is no eternal cycle that resets, but rather there is irreversible history where we can hear echoes, but there is no loop, as like Nietzsche's eternal return loop. So how does this effect Tolkien's ethics?
You are entirely correct to bring up the orcs, a subject Tolkien also thought through for decades since it bothered him greatly. Tolkien could have created a religion-like system with internal consistency. But the reason he didn’t is not lack of ambition, but it speaks more to ethical restraint. He refused prophetic authority, doctrinal finality, and moral closure. For him, he didn’t want people to obey Middle-earth. He wanted them to think inside it.
What I see in the various discussions of his Legendarium therefore is his ideas survive skeptical scrutiny since he remained open ended ethically. And yes, this disturbs some organized religions pretty badly! A fake prophet would have closed questions. Tolkien appears to me to have kept them open on purpose. And I don't see that as a failure on his part or laziness either. It's more in line, interestingly enough, with moral discipline. This brings us to the orcs. They aren't a hole in the system so much as an unresolved wound. And I don't see your point as naïve at all either. Tolkien himself struggled with this. I suggest, based on what we have of Tolkien's expositions that the Orcs were not morally unredeemable in principle. And, his struggling apparently prevented him from finding closure with this issue. Their existence is not a sweet spot in his ethics. His struggle can really be seen in his draft letter to Peter Hastings, a Catholic who was the manager of the Newman Bookshop in Oxford who had asked him if he had over-stepped his ethical and moral bounds in his sub-creation. (In "The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien," 2nd revised and enlarged edition, (2023): pp. 281-291)
Later in life he resisted that Orcs were soulless and purely evil by nature which deserved death simply by existing. He worried deeply that this would violate his belief that evil cannot create life, and imply God created beings beyond redemption, which in turn, in men's minds would justify extermination as being acceptable and morally clean. His troubled soul never did fully solve all that. But that is part of his point as well. They are ethically troubling by design. As we look over the Orcs in the story they appear to be the visible cost of domination. They are the end-state of total corruption (interesting to compare with Gollum, no?!). Orcs were robbed of culture, of mercy and even choice actually. They are not evil choices made freely, they are victims of Morgoth's violence, twisted beyond repair. But Tolkien doesn't then let us off the hook easily here. All this doesn't make their deaths morally easy by any means. It makes it tragic. I don't see Tolkien's own struggle to come to grips with this as lazy so much as morally honest about the cost of evil. Some harms, once done, cannot be undone, and that disturbs us, exactly as it should! And this doesn't collapse Tolkien's ethics I don't think, because nowhere in the Legendarium does Tolkien celebrate the killing of Orcs as a moral good. It is regrettable and tragic within the story’s constraints. He doesn't ever frame it anywhere as righteous joy. And here we get an incredible instructive contrast to mull over.
Some theology systems declare entire groups morally worthless, which in their turns justifies in their minds violence as obedience, in order to erase the moral discomfort. Yet Tolkien does not shy away from keeping that discomfort alive and seen, and felt. Tolkien's world is scarred, not with holes in the plot, but with a reality of consequences of choices made, ethics twisted, and lives changed. Orcs actually, come to think of it (!), support Tolkien's moral seriousness. If it was shallow, Orcs would be easy to destroy and be seen as a cleansing. No questions would linger. We wouldn't have to deal with this nasty business. Yet, readers keep asking about them, and very properly so. Tolkien himself kept revising their origin since he never fully resolved their problem. I would propose this is a sign of ethical depth, not failure. He increasingly rejected the idea of irredeemable beings, but never found a clean narrative solution. That lingering discomfort feels intentional to me appearing, on deep thought, as a refusal to make domination’s victims morally easy. This, to me, shows too much ethics for easy answers. Tolkien didn’t close every moral loop because closing them would have meant lying about the cost of evil. And that’s exactly why his work keeps generating serious thought rather than collapsing into doctrine.
