Are Tolkien's Orcs Female (or Male)?

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One thing that the this thread has reminded me of is that Tolkien’s Orcs, though a thoroughly nasty bunch, are not simply sword-fodder who always want to fight the heroes. They have their own factions; you can cut deals with them (or try, as Merry and Pippin did). And some like Shagrat and Gorbag don’t seem all that keen on being Sauron’s servants.
Well strictly speaking as portrayed in the books the idea was more that orcs are pre-disposed to feud among themselves in the absence of any other target (Frodo once commented after watching two orcs get into an actual fight that, had he and Sam been apparent, they would have immediately dropped their grievance to go after the hobbits) or somebody on behalf of some stronger authority to crack the whip. In the case with Merry and Grishnakh, that was really more about trying to appeal to some greed and ambition to create an opportunity; even apart from the fact that Merry didn't even have the Ring to give him (and wouldn't bargain it away for any reason, not merely for the moral stance but because willingly giving up the One Ring is almost impossible), I'm pretty sure he never would have thought he could actually come to an agreement to give it away in exchange for freedom.

Otherwise, we don't really get instances of people coming to some kind of beneficial understanding with orcs, nor does the presentation really create an impression that orcs are open to such a thing. That being said, I think it would be viable for an original work set in Tolkien's setting could explore the idea of people trying and maybe even succeeding, and I don't think Tolkien himself would necessarily take issue with somebody pursuing the idea that orcs could become something other than minions of evil.

Incidentally, it was brought up earlier that Tolkien "didn't write about elves fucking", and there actually is an essay he wrote about elf customs found in Morgoth's Ring which includes references to their sexual mores.

Long story short, elves are portrayed as pretty much entirely regarding sex as a procreative act and don't have much of a drive anyway, so after they have between one and three children they pretty much lose interest entirely (although there also seems to be a certain spiritual quality that can mean having too many children is intensely changing).

A bit of a moot point, mind, because the reason elves are "fading" isn't because of population drop off, it's because immortality and a long history of war are portrayed as the kind of thing that eventually make existing anywhere outside of the Undying Lands unsatisfying to them.
 
Long story short, elves are portrayed as pretty much entirely regarding sex as a procreative act and don't have much of a drive anyway, so after they have between one and three children they pretty much lose interest entirely (although there also seems to be a certain spiritual quality that can mean having too many children is intensely changing).
Welp, if they won't screw to save their species elves deserve to die out.
 
That description sounds like the biggest giveaway of Tolkien's Catholicism yet...

Jk, as a former Catholic I know we fuck like bunnies. All that guilt leads to a lot of horniness in my experience. But I'm pretty sure that description of the sex life of elves does reflect at least the ideals of Tolkien as an aging, conservative Catholic. Not too far off from the Protestant prig in the classic Python sketch.

 
Welp, if they won't screw to save their species elves deserve to die out.
They can’t die out— they’re immortal. Even if you kill one to death it just re-spawns in the Halls of Mandos, whence it could if it wanted (though only one ever has) simply come back. Tolkien’s elves aren’t dying out, they’re emigrating to America.
 
That description sounds like the biggest giveaway of Tolkien's Catholicism yet...

Jk, as a former Catholic I know we fuck like bunnies. All that guilt leads to a lot of horniness in my experience. But I'm pretty sure that description of the sex life of elves does reflect at least the ideals of Tolkien as an aging, conservative Catholic.
That's exactly what I thought when I first read about it, yeah.

There are some other signs in that essay, but bringing them up would probably open a can of worms.
 
I've been tossing an idea around in my head where Goblins, Orcs, Bugbears, Ogres, etc. are all the same species at different life stages. Like the older they get the bigger they get. But their brains don't get bigger so they have to spend more brain power on dealing with the bigger nervous system, which explains why Ogres are dumb as rocks while Goblins can make cannons and such.

I also like 40k's Orks literally being fungus that got out of control.
I like this idea quite a bit, though I might even say that we don’t necessarily get smarter as we get older either. Maybe orcs just have a gene that gets them bigger and stronger as they get older.

I don’t use a lot of orcs for whatever reason, but I tend to prefer mine biologically sexless beings. They can’t reproduce inherently. They are created by or from something else.
 
Well strictly speaking as portrayed in the books the idea was more that orcs are pre-disposed to feud among themselves in the absence of any other target (Frodo once commented after watching two orcs get into an actual fight that, had he and Sam been apparent, they would have immediately dropped their grievance to go after the hobbits) or somebody on behalf of some stronger authority to crack the whip. In the case with Merry and Grishnakh, that was really more about trying to appeal to some greed and ambition to create an opportunity; even apart from the fact that Merry didn't even have the Ring to give him (and wouldn't bargain it away for any reason, not merely for the moral stance but because willingly giving up the One Ring is almost impossible), I'm pretty sure he never would have thought he could actually come to an agreement to give it away in exchange for freedom.

Otherwise, we don't really get instances of people coming to some kind of beneficial understanding with orcs, nor does the presentation really create an impression that orcs are open to such a thing....

I see what you mean, though a lot of it comes down to the definition of 'beneficial'; it is easy enough to imagine a deal with a particular party of Orcs along the lines of 'only a fool fights in a burning house,' i.e. 'let's stop fighting each other so we can all escape a larger threat,' though this might not involve actual cooperation, as such. But the overall thrust of my remarks was based on a contrast with, say, skeletons or other mindless undead, which had been mentioned upthread as an alternative for Orcs. There is no reasoning or deal-cutting with such beings, in most portrayals of them.
 
One thing I'll say is that while I think it can be okay to have antagonists in the form of a kind of minion creature, I think it's a worthwhile challenge to oneself to make them at least half as interesting as the Jem'hadar from Deep Space Nine are.

Also that I honestly think the whole "we want totally irredeemable monsters to be able to fight and kill opponents in large numbers without remorse" to be kind of dumb, because it seems to me that most works of fiction and people observing them don't really have any problems with that thing being done to human people. I think most subscribe to some form of morality that makes it okay enough for people to employ lethal force against opponents who pose a deliberate danger to themselves or others. Hell, I think even when somebody does come at something like, say, A Song of Ice and Fire with a perspective of "oh the poor Lannister levies", that seems to exist in a space of distant critical analysis rather than the immediate emotional experience of the work.

And really, I think either a comprehensive critical faculty or sophisticated emotional take on something like orcs would also still end up feeling that there's something tragic about their deaths in warfare, compounded rather than detracted by their inability to be anything else.

Which wraps around to the point about the Jem'hadar, in which our Starfleet characters are very effectively conveyed as being able to recognise some of the dimensions to their opposing mass-produced monsters and make attempts where possible to try and get through to them (even when largely knowing it's futile), but do not hesitate in actually fighting them.

Agree, nobody seems to have issues mowing down hordes of Nazis even when recognizing that some are not truly evil, just followers taking the path of least resistance.

If it makes you feel any better, early D&D was as likely to have Berserkers in the dungeon as orcs.

I suspect the morality of violence in roleplaying games is probably too hot and political a topic for this forum.

Meh, just so long as people stay away from judging others or trying to tie fantasies to real life behaviour, it seems at least an eminently viable topic regarding the hobby. The problem might just be in that term "morality" - if we talk about the morality of player characters, or the morality of a fantasy world, that's vastly diferent than discusing the morality of the players themselves.
The reason why we're using orcs isn't to feel better about our fictional PCs because they aren't murdering "real" people. The reason is tradition. All the moral justifications are irrational garbage that people come up with because they can't accept or don't want to accept the real reason: tradition.

PCs kill orcs instead of humans because it's tradition. Gygax copied Tolkien because he thought it was cool. That's it.
 
Um, sure, Orcs are a traditional D&D monster, just like dragons and slimes and bugbears and rust monsters and beholders and displacer beats, etc. And they are a staple of post-Tolkien fantasy fiction.

I'm not surre that I've ever seen anyone denying or not accepting that, but I also don;t think that's actually a relevant point to any moral questions within any given fictional setting - it's metacommentary at best.
 
I think in this day and age there's a lot to be said for something being "traditional" not being self-justifying in any case, but I find something particularly curious about the assertion of people being irrational in the unwillingness to believe that they're doing something because it's traditional. As if it's inconceivable for there to be people who don't care in the least for something being a tradition, and could even still do it for entirely different reasons.

Heh, "irrational"; it's such a funny word. It really ought to apply to a fully dysfunctional world view or lifestyle, but people so often like to apply it to "modes of logic that I'm invested in regarding with contempt". Here's a hypothesis: emotional engagement with works of fiction is not irrational in and of itself, because it can be a low investment and low risk way to keep things circulating in parts of the brain that are beneficial to mental health, or provide a framework for intellectual reflection on a subject matter.
 
So, a woman found a creature washed up on a beach at Gabr al-Bint in the Sinai in June and described the event as follows:

"I didn't touch it. Just looking at it made me feel uneasy...It looked like a Lord of the Rings orc."

This is the picture of the creature, which is actually a Moray eel, apparently:

Orc.jpg
 
Suddenly I'm thinking about that excerpt given earlier of something Dungeons and Dragons related where I think it kind of jokes about the idea of somebody attempting to engage with an orc diplomatically as a ploy to killing them, and it makes me think that The Lord of the Rings does really punctuate the matter in how it not only provides both Saruman and Sauron with human soldiers as well, but makes a whole point out of how the magnanimous leaders of the good guys are sure to release their captives (the fact that they even have captives at all), and how that gets regarded by those released.

I think Tolkien was the kind of thoughtful person and bit of a perfectionist in drafting his stories to a point that makes me wonder if he ever had a thought of including references to orcs being taken captive and what might be done with them afterwards. I suppose if the intention was them to be a thoroughly evil race, it was easy enough to give himself the out that orcs don't ever surrender, although as far as a bit of critical consistency goes such a thing would be a bit amusing when we seem to get enough examples of orcs who aren't exactly brave; who you'd really expect to beg for their lives if backed into a corner, even if they are supposed to be indoctrinated to the idea that no enemy would take them alive. Still, I do wonder if he ever had an instance of processing the idea of "having my protagonists kill surrendering or captive orcs is a bit too dark no matter how I portray them".

It just kind of occurred to me because the aforementioned article seems to use some of those rhetorical devices that often get used to present the idea of diplomacy with Evil creatures as kind of absurd and how it brings me to a John Wick adjacent thought of "attempting diplomacy in a combat situation is hardly ever a thing anyway, the most you get as an alternative to fighting is demands or offers of surrender into captivity, and maybe being released to deliver a message to commanders to open negotiations".

Heh, it kind of makes me think about an alternative story that has something like the orcs, where they don't really exist as anything other than ravenous hordes, but there are some people within the narrative able to reflect on how artificial that must be in what are otherwise real living beings and the likelihood of it being an imposition of a dark magic, and that while engaging in war with them is necessary somebody might want to explore the possibility of rehabilitating them. It's in my head from the way that orcs are kind of a literary exaggeration of how, say, Germanic tribes in the latter decades of the Western Roman Empire get abstracted, when of course the reality was a much more complex relationship.

See, now I'm picturing a setting where in the distant past there were orcs ala Tolkien, and after the obligatory Dark Lord was finally defeated the attitude of "we should really rehabilitate them rather than wipe them out" prevailed, but it turns out the only thing your pseudo-Medieval society can effectively rehabilitate orcs into is serfs. And after a few generations of them coming to regard that as an indignity, orcs manage to depart en masse to live in something like a nearby steppe, where their relations with neighbours go back to often being violent and raiding, but aren't just that and where on top of being able to have cordial trade relations and mutual military alliances in certain times and places, internally they do have an actual society with values and fulfilment. So the overall assessment of an observer with the scope to see all of it is "well, they kind of rolled back around to mostly relating to us a lot like they did when they were servants of the Dark Lord, but at least they're real people now".
 
I think Tolkien was the kind of thoughtful person and bit of a perfectionist in drafting his stories to a point that makes me wonder if he ever had a thought of including references to orcs being taken captive and what might be done with them afterwards. I suppose if the intention was them to be a thoroughly evil race, it was easy enough to give himself the out that orcs don't ever surrender, although as far as a bit of critical consistency goes such a thing would be a bit amusing when we seem to get enough examples of orcs who aren't exactly brave; who you'd really expect to beg for their lives if backed into a corner, even if they are supposed to be indoctrinated to the idea that no enemy would take them alive. Still, I do wonder if he ever had an instance of processing the idea of "having my protagonists kill surrendering or captive orcs is a bit too dark no matter how I portray them".

"The Wise in the Elder Days taught always the Orcs were not 'made' by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost.* This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded.

... * [footnote to the text] Few Orcs ever did so in the Elder Days, and at no time would any Orc treat with any Elf. For one thing Morgoth had achieved was to convince the Orcs beyond refutation that the Elves were crueller than themselves, taking captives only for 'amusement', or to eat them (as the Orcs would do at need)."

--J.R.R. Tolkien, Morgoth's Ring, p. 419, hardcover Houghton Mifflin edition. This is an excerpt from what appears to be the last essay Tolkien wrote considering the origin and nature of Orcs; the entire text is worth reading for anyone interested in the question.
 
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There is an interesting bit in the new Thor movie that makes me think we have a very narrow view of this. Like why do there have to be males and females of any race? Procreation, right? It’s sort of limited to think we have two genders just because that’s the way many organisms do it in earth.
 
"The Wise in the Elder Days taught always the Orcs were not 'made' by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost.* This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded.

... * [footnote to the text] Few Orcs ever did so in the Elder Days, and at no time would any Orc treat with any Elf. For one thing Morgoth had achieved was to convince the Orcs beyond refutation that the Elves were crueller than themselves, taking captives only for 'amusement', or to eat them (as the Orcs would do at need)."

--J.R.R. Tolkien, Morgoth's Ring, p. 419, hardcover Houghton Mifflin edition. This is an excerpt from what appears to be the last essay Tolkien wrote considering the origin and nature of Orcs; the entire text is worth reading for anyone interested in the question.
Ahh yes, I remember having actually read that passage quoted in the past.

It would be an interesting thing to have seen in the story at one point; they have an orc captive, don't really have the means to hold him indefinitely, and ultimately reckon with the decision to send him on his own way even if they expect he'll get back to a unit rather than actually arrive at other people to surrender again to. Kind of a Saving Private Ryan thing.

Mind, the footnote does kind of bring back around to a query of "how evil can we really consider the orcs if they're not only explicitly brutalised by their own master (whom I'm pretty sure is referred to as somebody they merely fear more than they hate), but have been instilled with the idea that their enemy is even worse and would eat them if given the chance"?
 
There is an interesting bit in the new Thor movie that makes me think we have a very narrow view of this. Like why do there have to be males and females of any race? Procreation, right? It’s sort of limited to think we have two genders just because that’s the way many organisms do it in earth.

And of course there are other organisms in Earth where the distinction doesn't matter like single cell organisms. As been mentioned in this thread the 40k Ork's peculiar biology is part of its pizzazz in the setting.

Nothing wrong with getting weird with your setting, opens new opportunities in game.
 
That is really cool and really creepy. I should read this "Hater" series. It sounds like David Moody is basing these creatures off the behavior of online mobs.
Interestingly, my first thought as well.

I dunno, I think I prefer Orcs to be intensely clanish and looking for conflict. Family, extended family, clan, tribe, other orcs, non-orcish world...from nearest to furthest, always ally with the closest available against anyone further down the chain, in any conflict.
Then make them somewhat angry, rather territorial, and prone to boredom, and watch out what happens:devil:.


Welp, if they won't screw to save their species elves deserve to die out.
Like the (non)fucking pandas:grin:?
 
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