Tolkien would appreciate the orc baby and so should you

"Rings of Power" have 99 problems, but the orc baby ain't one

Hello,

A small and topical point today. Diletante discussions about ars/e aeterna will resume next week.

1.

“Rings of Power” are basically okay. They are better than several ongoing competing epic fantasy series and much worse than the first four seasons of “Game of Thrones”. They are well there with chocolate ice cream and four cheese pizza. Which is why the constant outrages around them seem a little strange to me.

Especially the recent one, concerning the orc baby. Eru, how much scorn did this tiny creature cause! The orc baby itself is in frame for merely few seconds (I struggled to take a screenshot), and in fact is not interesting in the slightest. But the distress about it kinda is.

Youtube’s “righteous outrage” by meiosis

First, what is all the ruckus about? From what I could read, the main point of contention is that Tolkien's orcs are supposed to be fully evil, artificial murder machines. They are not supposed to have families. They are not supposed to care for each other. They are supposed to be a moderate threat to our protagonists and then die in large numbers. That’s what zombies, stormtroopers, and, apparently, orcs are for.

This is some elf propaganda, this.

2.

Tolkien himself might have taken issue with this approach. In “The Silmarillion”, he wrote:

For the Orcs had life, and multiplied in the fashion of the Children of Ilúvatar.

“The Hobbit” also has a few mentions of orc progeny. For one, Gollum reminisces about eating an orc child:

No one would see him, no one would notice him, till he had his fingers on their throat. Only a few hours ago he had worn it, and caught a small goblin-imp. How it squeaked! He still had a bone or two left to gnaw, but he wanted something softer.

Moreover, the orc leader in the end of the book is characterized as “Bolg, son of Azog”. Even more straightforwardly, Tolkien wrote this in a 1963 letter to Mrs Munby:

There must have been orc-women. But in stories that seldom if ever see the Orcs except as soldiers of armies in the service of the evil lords we naturally would not learn much about their lives. Not much was known.

So, he definitely considered that the orcs can have babies and families, to say the least. And if a 130-year-old conservative Christian British war veteran is more hippie-leftie than you, you should take a good look in the mirror.

The reason everyone’s showing this specific frame is because it’s the only goddamn frame! Snapped from Amazon Prime

But Tolkien did get himself into trouble with this issue, and this is the interesting part of the story. I will be cannibalizing a small part of my review of “Man’s Search for Meaning” for the next bit, so if you like the reasoning, check the whole thing.

3.

You see, Tolkien has created a stringent morality system in his world. Elves are good, Orcs, Trolls, and Wargs are bad, Humans, Dwarves, and Hobbits move on this one-dimensional scale from one end to the other. But Orcs have always been problematic. Unlike other bad creatures, Orcs have sentience and even some rudimentary sense of morality. We see it in “Hobbit”, and in “Lord of the Rings” (e.g., encounter with Gorbag). So how can it be? And, more practically, can good characters slaughter them without reluctance or remorse?

When in LoTR, Sam watches as Faramir kills a man who serves Sauron, we get a poignant and very important thought that can easily be attributed to the author himself, being a war veteran and all:

It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace.

So, why shouldn’t the same sentiment be attributed to the Orcs?

Tolkien knew about this problem and tried to write his way out of it. He couldn’t directly “George-Lucas” it, but he famously changed the origin of Orcs several times. They were Elves enslaved and corrupted by Morgoth, then they were fully “brooded” by Morgoth, then they were “beasts of humanized shape”, or possibly, results of forced mating between Elves and beasts. Each one of those retcons brought more problems. The more canonical version, I believe, is still the “corrupted Elves” theory; at least it appears in more early texts and is corroborated by the Lord of the Rings. It absolutely allows for having orc children, orc families, and orc feelings, corrupted as they might be. It also has dark implications for the good characters, both by modern standards and those contemporary to Tolkien.

Tolkien had such problems with this sentience dilemma because it exists in real life as well. How we treat our enemies during wartime and after is morally mirky. If orcs are “beasts of humanized shape”, how can they have sentience? And if orcs are sentient, how can we kill them without remorse? Not every killing is strictly in personal self-defense. War has an answer: necessity surpasses morals. It is a true but immoral statement. And it also does not mean that morality is meaningless, even in wartime.

4.

One of the reasons this topic interested me so much is that, you know, I’m something of an orc myself. What I mean is “orcs” is a frequently used pejorative for Russian troops in the Ukraine that is quite naturally generalized to Russians in general. So, our cultural treatment of fictional orcs may have some effect on our actual treatment of the ones we call orcs.

Which is why the more I think about it, the more I like the orc baby. Our world’s morality system is not as stringent as Tolkien’s; we all need reminders of our enemies’ intrinsic humanity once in a while, even if they act like total orcs sometimes. If it is an intentional message on the part of “Rings of Power” scriptwriters, it’s a bold impulse that should be respected. If it’s an accidental statement, it’s a good one; they should embrace it.

An aspect that I disliked in this whole story is the outrage that was stirred when the episode in question aired. What? Orc babies? Orc families?! How can orcs have feelings? They are evil murder machines! It destroys Tolkien’s legacy! Elf propaganda! All of this shows that the poor little orc baby actually touched a nerve.

This is juvenile escapism. Wars happen. In any real war, both sides heavily feature humans. Sometimes, to stay alive themselves, humans on the one side have to kill humans on the other side. Humans are definitely sentient: they have intelligence, emotions, feelings, children, families. Some believe they even have souls. Even the shitty ones. Having all that does not change their shittiness one bit; after all, look at us. And when humans kill humans, they inevitably destroy all that comes with. War is intrinsically immoral but sometimes necessary to ensure survival. It’s ok to be conflicted about it. This is the true Tolkien’s dilemma.

Only fantasy heroes and psychopaths are blessed with the ability to kill hundreds without triggering PTSD.

We wish we were so lucky. But we are not.

Hence, the orc baby.

Best,

Ꙝ