[mwcz]

I've not seen Rings of Power and I don't plan to, but I'd just point out that the Silmarillion describes the origin of orcs as being an exploited race of intelligent beings, elves who were captured and tortured until their forms became what we know as orcs.

"... all those of the Quendi [elves] who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes."

[the_af]

Like the sibling comment remarks, Tolkien never fully embarked on this path.

He had a problem: as a Catholic [1], he thought every creature deserved pity and second chances (you can see this when Gandalf rebukes Frodo when he says "it's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum"). If the Orcs are really "fallen Elves", they deserve pity and maybe mercy; they are worthy of redemption. Yet Orcs in LotR are to be killed on sight; there's only one passage in all of LotR where the Hobbits reflect on the corpse of an Orc with any kind of attempt at insight.

For Orcs to be a thing to be destroyed without mercy, unworthy of redemption, they must have not be corrupted souls. Yet here Tolkien found another stumbling block: according to his Catholic-influenced vision, Evil cannot create, only corrupt and destroy. So Morgoth couldn't have created Orcs, he must have used existing souls as raw material.

Tolkien never resolved this conundrum.

----

[1] someone in another comment argued quite convincingly that Catholics at times had no trouble murdering other Christians over doctrinal affairs, so let's add a qualification here: "Tolkien's Catholic-influenced morality, which was his own nonetheless".

[GuinansEyebrows]

> I've not seen Rings of Power and I don't plan to

i say this as a die hard Tolkien fan, having read (most of) HOME: i enjoyed Rings of Power quite a lot and i'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys the extended world of middle earth. the casting is great, i actually did enjoy the picking at the question of orcish morality, and because amazon was willing to throw millions at it, it looks fantastic for a tv show.

it doesn't follow canon (some weird squashing of timelines re: ringmaking, the akallabeth etc) which seems to upset a lot of geeks. however, one thing to keep in mind when interacting with extended works based on Middle Earth is that Tolkien didn't necessarily set out to codify everything perfectly (and what was there was definitely the result of his obsession and great care for the world he built). one of his stated desires in writing LOTR was to establish a modern mythology that other people could write/create within, so the fiction could take a life of its own. maybe he wouldn't always like the ways people built on his work, but that's the risk he took when he explicitly set out to invent a mythology for others to interact with.

we're still going to ignore the hobbit movie trilogy, though.

[gambiting]

And as this wiki article posted in other comments very nicely explains, Tolkien never came to a good and final conclusion on how this all really worked, with different explanations in different works of his. The "they were just evil force that could be killed without remorse" theme is the dominant one, because it works in the context of the story and the worldbuilding that he did for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma

[mwcz]

Fully understood and appreciated. I'm just replying to a comment stating that orcs were forces of destruction and not exploited intelligent beings with evidence to the contrary from the Silmarillion. Tolkien's dilemma is even more concrete evidence.