As I indicated, we don't know exactly what
Grishnákh or his followers are.
Tolkien doesn't say.
I don't think we would expect all
Orcs must be either
Uruks or snagas.
It is stressed Grishnákh is short. Shagrat is seen as large
Orc. Possibly these are relative terms. Grishnákh is short relative to
Saruman's even larger
Uruk-hai. Shagrat is simply a normal large Orc compared to the smaller types who are closer to
Hobbit size. Girshnákh and Gorbag
might be about the same size.
Or Gishnákh might indeed be short, not a
Uruk, or not a pure Uruk.
As often with Tolkien, the closer you look the more you see that you cannot find absolute evidence.
But calling Grishnákh
short rather than
shorter suggests to me he was short, was not an Uruk.
Aragil posted
:CT's use of his father's original index. Tar-Elenion has brought this up before. My response is that there is no index I have ever seen to LotR which equates Uruks and Uruk-hai, or that even cross-references Uruks and Uruk-hai. Why would Tolkien have dropped such a useful definition in the published index?
As Christopher Tolkien notes the original indiex was not complete. Also, it contained some very large entries, notably the entire article on the
Istari.
The Nancy Smith index included in the second edition to
The Lord of the Rings was an independent work, not done by Tolkien, though he later corrected it and added some annotations to it. Christopher Tolkien describes the original draft index as one on which he based in style, and also in content for some entries, the index in the
The Silmarillion and
Unfinished Tales. In both these indexes every entry is annoted, sometimes substantially.
Accordingly we would not expect to find the Uruk-hai information or most information from the Tolkien's original draft index in the Nancy Smith index, even if Tolkien was able to locate it at the time and use it. The Nancy Smith index remains mostly an unannotated index.
As to
Unfinished Tales, this is far from being all of a piece, it has late
items, early items, drafts, and finished work. One should consider each part separately.
For "The
Battles of the Fords of Isen" Christopher Tolkien only remarks that
... it presented relatively little difficulty of a textual kind, and is only unfinished in the most obvious sense. This is then not a hasty and hard-to-read pencil draft which Christopher Tolkien has had to painfully decipher, guess at words, and fix up grammatically.
In the HoME series Christopher Tolkien appears to print abbreviations and odd spellings as he finds them in the texts, for such sometimes apear. It seems his father generally used few abbreviations, except in some very rough drafts.
A study of this point might be helpful. Can you find any cases of abbreviations of a kind that might be misleading in finished texts.
The Uruk-hai of
Isengard claim they are resistant to the sun. They do not necessarily make this claim for all Orcs.
This is indeed the point which most makes readers suspect that the term
Uruk-hai refers only to Saruman's newly bred Uruks.
What they say is:
'We are the Uruk-hai: we do not stop the fight for night or day, for fair weather or for storm. We come to kill, by sun or moon. What of the dawn?
They claim they are Uruks, for the third time, and then they boast about their prowess.
The reader, including myself originally, perceives a connection between the fact that these are Uruk-hai and that they will fight by day, a characteristic of Saruman's new breed. Therefore
Uruk-hai must mean, it seems, mean that new breed.
Or it may mean, we are Uruks, professional soldiers, we don't stop for anything. Mordor-Uruks might make the same boast, though less able to fulfill it on a bright day, when the sun made their heads wobbly.
Note that almost all examples of the use of
Uruk-hai in the book are in words spoken by Orcs. In the full text the only exception is the chapter heading and a back-reference to
Pippin's captivity by the "Uruk-hai".
It is a term found mainly in Orc-speech.
I would take it that the title of the chapter comes about because it tells of
Merry and Pippin's captivity by the Uruks who contiually call themselves Uruk-hai, a term which, to my ears, flows better than "The Uruks".
If Shagrat had actually reported, I don't see where there would be any confusion- Shagrat knew that Gorbag's lot had been taken care of.
Snaga tells Gorbag:
Gorbag’s swine got to the gate first, and none of ours got out. Lagduf and Muzgash ran through, but they were shot. I saw it from a window, I tell you. And they were the last.
All Shagrat's folk have been skilled, save for himself and Snaga. Seemingly not all of Gorbag's, since they shot Lagduf and Muzgash. So where are they? They ran off, I would suppose, wanting to get as far as they could before word of the incident got to the authorities. Snaga's fear of going out to bring word to the authorities is, I think, mainly fear that Gorbag's Orcs are out there somewhere still.
As to the confusion, of course there is confusion. An entire garrison has been wiped out, there may be one or more
Elf warriors about, there are rebel-Orcs about, and who knows what kind of orders came back once
Lugburz heard about the Dwarf-men, meaning
Frodo and
Sam, especially when it was found that Frodo was no longer there.
Pure SNAFU.
Actually, considering what we know and what Shagrat would have said, the instructions given the soldier Orc are reasonable enough.
But the tracker gleefully speculates that they've all lost their heads and some will be in big trouble.
Tar-Elenion posted:
Besides the Mordorean Uruk-hai dont seem to have much problem with the sun either.
I suspect they do, but that there aren't many bright, sunny days in
Mordor. At this time
Sauron's darkness has spread well ouside of Mordor. It is probably always rather dark and gloomy within Mordor, at least north-western Mordor, under a veil of volcanic cloud.
The Sea of Núrnen region was probably more pleasant in human terms and less pleasant for Orcs.
From a later post by Aragil:
The internal conceipt of the story is that Frodo wrote it in the Red book, not that some magical scribe was writing down what was heard by each character
inn the moment it was heard. At the time when Frodo wrote the book, he had full knowledge of the terms 'Uruk-hai' and 'Uruks'. If he had equated the two, then he would have been free to use 'Uruk-hai' here, since it is spoken in exactly the same sense as earlier when he had
Ugluk say 'Uruk-hai'. Frodo didn't, and I'm not going to argue with him.
Uruks is the form of the word mentioned in the fight in
Moria. The
s plural gives indication that it represents some
Common Speech word. Sam hears what they say, and either pre-translated into Common Speech, or he is, through
the Ring, translating it himself. Whatever form Gorbag here used for the plural of
Uruk we would expect to be rendered to Sam's understanding as the normal Common Speech form of the plural of
Uruk, which would then be represented in the published text as English
Uruks.
Sam may quite well have never previously heard the term
Uruk-hai, if that is the term Gorbag is using. If he had heard it, it would probably be as a foreign term. Accordingly he would not hear this in his translation.
In the other case the soldier Orc and the tracker Orc are speaking to each other in Comon Speech. Presumably Frodo put down what they said, though possibly part cleaned up, and that is what we have in English. This would include the Orc expression Uruk-hai, if that was what was spoken.
Frodo would naturally have know both
Uruks and
Uruk-hai, the latter from this conversation and from Merry and Pippin's account which he included in his book.
Of course, this is really bogus.
Tolkien actually composed it all down in English from the beginning. But there is really no problem in his using
Uruks in one passage and
Uruk-hai in another if they mean the same thing.
There is a possiblity certainly, Aragil, that Tolkien at certain times
might have thought
Uruk-hai meant something different from
Uruks.
Tolkien was always refining his
languages and changing them and enjoyed subtle distinctions.
But evidence to support it is so weak, that I don't believe you can reasonably go any further than to point it out as a possibility.