A Problem of Evil

So I watched the first three episodes of The Rings of Power, Season 2 and enjoyed it, although like many other people I was surprised by the glimpse of an orc mother holding an orc baby, being shown affection by an orc father. And thus the debate on the origin of orcs is now in full swing on the internet. From Joshua Trevino on Armas:

The orcs are J.R.R. Tolkien’s invention, originating mostly as “goblins” in The Hobbit and then emerging fully into themselves in The Lord of the Rings. They are the horde-infantry of evil, numerous and objects to be killed, the base tools of the Enemy. Like all the Enemy’s soldiers, they are perversions of things originally created good. The Wargs are fallen wolves. The balrogs are fallen Maiar, which is to say lesser angels in the Arda cosmology. The Nazgûl and the Easterlings are varieties of fallen Men. The orcs, then, are fallen or corrupted Elves — at least in Tolkien’s original telling. The point is that they, like all the servants of the Enemy — again in the Tolkien legendarium, originally Morgoth and then Sauron — illuminate a specifically Catholic perspective on creation, befitting the author’s own faith. Creation is good, and is corrupted, with death entering into it, only by the choice of the created themselves. Even Morgoth, originally Melkor, and Sauron the Maiar were once fair and beloved.

We have to understand the purpose of the characterization in this explicitly religious light. If this literature is tutelage, and it is, then the lesson here is one familiar to the well-catechized of most Christian denominations. The orcs — nearly undifferentiated, base, enslaved, antlike, and shackled to their appetites — are the consequence and endstate of corruption, of the choice for evil. This is true of all their companions in the Enemy’s armies. It is not that they are denied the opportunity for repentance, but the metaphor for their state is clear: they are in hell and the time when their nature would have allowed them that choice is gone. Tolkien does provide episodes where repentance is offered: to Boromir, who repents (of lust for the Ring) before death; and to Gríma Wormtongue, who is offered forgiveness (for serving the lesser Enemy in Saruman) and freely rejects it. It is also offered to Sméagol, who accepts it and then rejects it, thereby gaining and then losing his salvation, no doubt to the perplexity of a certain class of Protestants. Hell is not a sentence, but a choice, and this too is a Catholic (and Orthodox) lesson imparted by the tale.

These characterizations are tremendously important for the integrity and purpose of the work. Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision,” and the nature of the orcs — and all the freely fallen of Middle Earth — is tightly bound to this framework and concept. Without it, it is purposeless fantasy, and for all the beauty of its prose, not worth the read. Without it, crucially, it is not Tolkien, and any adaptation with that absence merely wears the skin of his work, much as Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis had Puzzle the Donkey wear the lion’s skin and pretend to be Aslan. The mere form of the thing was never salvific, nor even instructive: what is required is its nature and substance.

Literature is a conversation, not a mere transmission, and so the living have the opportunity to respond to the dead. At its best this is education and the elevation of the former in the latter’s light and tradition. At considerably less than its best we have the movement now, on more than one front, to rehabilitate the orcs and even issue apologetics for them. It seems an incredible thing to write, but also an inevitable thing: in an age with an accelerating normalization of all manner of real evils, from Hamas to brujería to polyamory, it should be no surprise that a fictional evil gets its own due-time reappraisal. The two major fronts for this are the venerable Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, which has nothing to do with Tolkien except that it lifted the concept of the orcs wholesale from his work; and the Amazon Prime series Rings of Power, now in its second season. (Read more.)

 

From Screen Rant:

 The origin of Orcs in Lord of the Rings is hotly contested among fans, and was only briefly touched on in the Peter Jackson films. Jackson’s depiction of Uruk-hai birthed in mud and slime came from one of Tolkien’s earliest Orc origin stories - seen in The Book of Lost Tales - which claimed that Orcs were “bred from the heats and slimes of the earth.” Tolkien never published this in his lifetime; instead, it was published by his son posthumously for literary interest. 

 Uruk-hai are a separate breed to Orcs, and not one that Rings of Power has tackled yet. Uruk-hai were later given a different origin story in Tolkien’s work, as were Orcs. It is one of these later origin stories for Orcs that Rings of Power is leaning into - the notion of Orcs as corrupted Elves. Rings of Power offers a more up-to-date version of the Orc origin story than Jackson. Judging from Hazeldine’s comments, season 2 may also specify the process of corruption that makes an Elf into an Orc. 

Peter Jackson’s version of the Orc origin story made sense for his films, providing family-friendly horror potential and drama, but Tolkien made this story darker. Tolkien later claimed that Orcs were corrupted Elves, which is the version of the story that Rings of Power uses, and that Tolkien’s son chose for The Silmarillion. Work that Tolkien published in his lifetime offered no certain conclusions on the topic, but Frodo made an interesting assertion on the subject of Orc origins in The Return of the King:

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; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.

 (Read more.)

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