Uruks vs. Uruk-hai

[Elthir]

By the way, there is actually another instance, so just to note it as well:

B Urukhai
Uruk-hai 'Orc-folk'​

This instance is with respect to the word appearing in the appendices, and so appears much later in PE17.

 

[tom hyle]

Wow; the detail of discussion....many years and many concussions ago I read the Lord of the Rings repeatedly. My impressions from that time could be mistaken, but it always seemed clear to me that while there were many tribes/races/breeds (terms often used interchangeably in older writings in the English language) of orcs mentioned and implied, a few by name (black orc, red orc, Misty Mountain goblins), uruk-hai were something different though related, and specific to Saruman. As such I do find it unremarkable that the author felt no need to make it more clear, since it was already seemingly clear.

More in the way of questions than answers on perepheral matters brought up in the few pages of this thread I've read so far:

I recall a single reference to "half orcs" as such in LOTR; it was early in the novel, and if I recall correctly one or more of them were nosing around the Shire looking for Bagginses and trying to pass as human. It was not my impression that Uruk-hai were specifically related to these, though at that point in the novel we had not yet heard of Uruk-hai.

"the land of Mordor where the shadow lies" hmmm......shadow=darkness=protection from light.....Sauron is the Necromancer (Saruman is the White wizard, and in color theory all colors come together to form white, so Saruman of many colors remains in some sense a reinterpretted white); dead and undead things are not held to like bright light, in tradional folk-lore, are blinded, weakened, or otherwise offput by it, but it rarely does any specific harm to them, though there are occasional stories of trolls who turn to stone in sunlight; sometimes they turn back if not shattered. Orcs are made from elves; it has been said in another thread that they are undead elves of some kind, which I find an interesting concept. Are female orcs ever mentioned?

re the author's comment about a movie being infeasible, I suspect it had far more to do with the length and complexity of the novel than with special effects. The recent movie is very very long for a movie, so much so as to (like the novel) be broken into three segments for ready consumption, each of which is still exceptionally long for an entertainment film. Even so, a great deal has been left out; not just events and characters but whole themes such as the pagan Earth-gods (including Tom Bambadil; Beorn (yes, from The Hobbit); a more in-tune people, the woses/wildmen, known to our time as bigfoot; and the attitudes and powers of the forest/vegetable-related [gi]ents/tree-shepherds; my Catholic brother and sister in law uncomfortably changed the subject after raving joyously about the movie's suposed Christian themes at mention of this); the symbolism of the Necromancer's world of Death, fire, greed, and shadow representing modern industrial society; and the secret value of the marginalized, addressed only in reference to the smallness of hobbits in the movie, quite memorable and striking in the book in attitudes toward the disreputable poor dirty homeless rangers that culminated in Strider's all that glitters is not gold speach. (the strider we don't yet know isn't anywhere near scary enough in the movie, and he doesn't even scare Sam with his broken sword though he did in the cartoon version; in the newer movie he doesn't even carry it around, but it is apparently at Rivendel)

Kept was the latent racism about the dark evil men from the South, probably for the appeal of their likely oversized oliphants, and added was a renaissancy brothers Hildebrandt look that obscures the early-medieval trappings of the novel.

Pretty mixed bag ramblings, I know; My taste for serious scholarship these days is toward blade making, design, and use; and human psychology and sociology (group behavior is neccessarily important for a perpetual outsider like me to understand) but some of these thoughts may give a jumping-point or something for those who make a study of LOTR. I stumbled on this forum while reading about orcne/orcneas creatures of medieval myth.