Banter/Off-topic Thread & Community Stoning Platform

First of all we need to explain three concepts to understand orcs, Hröa & Fëa, Morgoth's Ring and Tolkien's themes of creation.

I. The Burden of Creation
In Tolkien's legendarium contains many thematic threads, a lot of which come from things that were personally important to him, like the decay of the natural world or even the most powerless of us having the ability to contribute to greater causes. But a very important theme that spans the breadth of the legendarium is that of a creator's relationship, and burden, with their creation, one which Tolkien himself was very aware of.

In the legendarium, creating something is never just making it. Anything made, specially very powerful things, takes on a sort of "aspect" of their creator, of their personality, goals while making the item, and emotions or mindset.

A good example is the glowing elven swords. In most fantasy settings this would just be some stat, some arbitrary property just innate to elven weapons, but Glamdring, Sting and Orcrist were made in Gondolin by elven smiths, elves who HATE orcs with a passion and want nothing but to exterminate them. This seething hatred was "passed onto" the swords in their hour of creation, giving them the power to detect the presence of orcs.

If you are paying attention and have even a bit of brain plasticity then you probably already figured out which other seemingly random powerful magical item is also a product of this theme. Yes, the one ring itself, is also an example of the burden of creation, all of the rings are for that matter. But notice that I call it a "burden", and there's a very important reason for that.

II. Morgoth's Ring
A lot of people find it silly that Sauron would ever imbue so much of his spirit into the ring, there's plenty of clickbait "PLOTHOLES IN LOTR" articles written by shmucks about how this makes no sense. Well considering the burden of creation, he might not have had much of a choice.

There's a series of volumes collated and edited by Christopher Tolkien after his father's passing called "The History of Middle Earth", volume ten is called "Morgoth's Ring". But what is "Morgoth's Ring"? If you are not aware, Morgoth is basically Sauron 1.0, he's the original big bad guy except he was big-ger and bad-dier than Sauron until the GODS THEMSELVES had to come down and seal him away.

But the thing is, the other gods and Morgoth fought a bunch of times in the past, and somehow, every time they fight the guy he only gets weaker and easier to beat. By the time he was finally sent to the void, Morgoth was incredibly weak, a literal shell of his former self, what happened? Well a part of it is that he got into a bunch of scrapes over hundreds of years and that did wound him, but a god who literally went against 13 other gods at the start of the canon, breaking apart continents and destroying everything as he pleased now reduced to some guy who has to seriously fight a single elf? Or who gets put to sleep by some song?

Well here comes "The Burden of creation" and the true meaning of "Morgoth's Ring". Morgoth's Ring as a phrase recalls Sauron's Ring, the one ring, so one questions, what was Morgoth's Ring then? Well to make it simple, Morgoth's Ring is THE WORLD ITSELF. Morgoth essentially came down into this new world and he began to influence it like one would an item one is working on, he introduced disease, made the plants wither, destroyed mountains, drained seas and created volcanoes.

As I said, creating things in Tolkien's world influences the item, but it also influences the person. Leaving that little mark of one's own conscious and will into the item drains you as the creator of some of your own power. When Morgoth started treating the world like it was his to shape, he poured his own vile self and malice into the DNA of the world itself as it were, and that act in turn drained him of some of his own godly strength, so much so that by the end of his chapter in the legendarium he's left incredibly weak.

When Sauron creates the one ring he pours his own strength into it, to make it as powerful as he needs it to be he has to pour more, therefore it becomes a liability, but a needed one. That's why the ring is always talked about as "being part of Sauron" or "having a will of its own", it's not just because he made it, it's because it literally does contain part of Sauron's own persona, his goals, and his mindset.

III. Hröa & Fëa
So cool, but what the FUCK, does any of this have to do with orcs? You may be asking. Well as it happens it is the ground work needed to truly explain how orcs are less of a race, and more of a concept.

The origin of orcs is a bit of an unanswered question in the canon. Tolkien himself struggled with the conception of orcs, which had originally just been an insertion of classic European goblins (synonymous with orc in Tolkien's world) like dwarves or elves were. Some many drafts later and the idea came around to ol' Reuel that orcs could be a corruption of elves by, guess who, Morgoth, which is the most common explanation thrown around.

But orcs in the canon are in this weird position were they have way less depth as a group than any of the others for seemingly no reason, many people have attributed this to Tolkien just wanting to write one-dimensional villains, which come on, I don't think that man was capable of writing anything "one-dimensional". Others have attributed it to Tolkien struggling to write a truly "evil" race as a Catholic, nobody truly knows.

And this mystery stuck around for years until the release of "Nature of middle earth" some years ago, probably the last book of collated and unpublished Tolkien writings we will ever see. This book contains very interesting notes about the biology and metaphysics of the legendarium, one in particular, is about Hröa & Fëa.

Hröa & Fëa are in simple terms, the body and the spirit/soul. Beings with both of these are sometimes called "Incarnates", though in Tolkien's conception of the idea, the soul is a lot more important than the body, mostly because people's souls represent their actual self, they never truly die and they just go to heaven or in the case of men "someplace else".

But an interesting detail is that orcs do not possess the Fëa, just like animals. That's why I call them "Undead" because if the torture of elves somehow left them without souls, then that literally means orcs are elf zombies in the weirdest way.

IV. My conclusion
Combining all of these ideas and concepts, I have come to believe orcs are, in practice, (and I say that because again, Tolkien never got to fleshing them out in concept) just another product of the themes of creation.

Orcs are just another byproduct of Morgoth's ring, a sign of the corruption of the world. A lot of post-Tolkien media like 40k or D&D has made orcs into their own proper race with culture and alike elves or dwarves, but in Tolkien's canon, orcs are nothing more than a means to the ends of the dark lords. They are an extension of the influence of the dark lords and serve no further purpose than what the dark lords' motives are.

That's why the orcs basically vanish from the canon after Sauron is defeated, a lot of people question what happened and if the free peoples had to go on an orc hunting genocide, but the truth of the matter is that conceptually orcs did not have any purpose after the downfall of the dark lord. They're like a glove that nobody is putting on anymore, or a tool that nobody is using, once their purpose for existence goes away, they do too.

They're not "black people" because thinking of them as some sort of race in the first place is wrong, view them as an extension of evil, as something unnatural that was not meant to be, as incomplete beings that literally do not possess a soul. They are by all means not a people or a race but just the manifestation of evil.