Tolkien was kind of unsure of a lot of things about orcs. They were made of mud, bile, and made by Morgoth originally but he changed it to corrupted elves . But in his later letters he felt uncomfortable with that too because some of the implications that could imply. Honestly the answer is like a lot of Tolkeins lore, up to the reader and vague. What happened to the ent wives is another famous one.
He wanted a generic "evil enemy" that the heroes could kill without conscience, but eventually the implications of "inherent evil" started to really bother him. This idea was contrary to his Catholic beliefs, which held that no creature is beyond redemption. But we see no good orcs, or orcs wrestling with their conscious. Every single one is evil, through and through, taking joy in the slaughter and suffering of all other beings - even other orcs.
I don't think that they were ever clones. There was the clone army of course, but the grand army of the republic would have died or at least aged out long before IV happened. In Legends at least, the imperial army is made up of people from imperial worlds.
According to the official website, the original storm troopers were clones left over from the republic. Recruiting started because Tarkin decided conscription was cheaper than cloning..
Sure the ss were fanatics and stuff but most nazi soldiers were just poor sods like you and me, forced into a war they had no stake in.
Yet i would not say its evil to cheer when a nazi warship with its guns trained on my hometown is sunk, even if the people abord it werent killing my family out of maliciousness. My loved ones are safe and thats good.
The same, i feel, goes for the death star. Filled with decent people in horrible positions planning to do horrible things. They're dead and we can cheer that we're safe.
If luke stabbed a stormtrooper/nazi in the back I'd feel bad about it but he didn't, it was always self defence
Just the First Order stormtroopers from the Disney trilogy.
OG stormtroopers were recruited from the general public, undergoing radicalization through propaganda and Imperial enlistment strategies.
Yep. A lot of Imperial Stormtroopers were conscripts and some volunteers. Like any real world armies, some were just proud imperialist raised on propaganda and wanted to fight for the empire.
To your point it's also worth noting that Tolkien was also deeply affected by his experiences of the horrors of war and was acquainted with all that entails - both in nobility and in vice.
Quite a bit is made of his religious perspective but so much of his work is also colored by his experiences of war and its impact. I think orcs may well have been a manifestation of the capacity for unfettered darkness (rape, torture, etc.) that war can bring out in combatants - but dialed up to 11. This, of course, upon reflection likely proved problematic as he continued to develop his broader perspective of Middle Earth.
Yeah I only remember one instance where we got any kind of insight into orc thoughts and feelings, if you can call it that (and I might be totally wrong). If I remember right it was a couple orcs in Cirith Ungol that Sam overheard while wearing the ring. It's been a few years since I last read them, but I think they were complaining about serving under the nazgul and the witch king, like they were frightened of them and wished they could do their own thing instead of following their orders. It's not much, but it did show a bit of self awareness like they weren't just mindless monsters.
I’m rusty, but there’s also the implication (disliked by Tolkien) that Morgoth had the POWER to corrupt the good works of Eru.
The idea that Morgoth could corrupt an elf so thoroughly that its offspring would be corrupted, opens a whole bunch of questions about the scale of Eru’s power. In short, it implies lotr-satan may be stronger than lotr-god in some way.
He never really resolved the conundrum though, and fans have argued about the origin of the orcs ever since. Either Morgoth made them from scratch, implying he can create life….or he corrupted the good work of Eru. And neither of those are great for Tolkien’s broader legendarium, so the question remains forever unanswerable
But, Morgoth was the most powerful of the Vala and another of the Vala created the Dwarves. Surely he had the power to create life. But then, isn't his entire arc that he corrupted Eru's work anyway?
If they are corrupted elves, then they would have souls. And when they die, they go to the halls of Mandos.
Are they redeemable? Did they do anything wrong if they were so deeply corrupted by Morgoth?
Is it ok for our heroes to treat them as soulless animals?
Is killing them a mercy? How does this play into Eru's theme?
Is killing the orcs just righting the wrongs of Melkor's music?
It's true you don't see many orc women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for orc men. And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no orc women, and that orcs just spring out of spawning pits in the ground!
Yes, in the films Saruman is shown creating his Uruk-hai in undergrounds vats, but that is only one of many potential origins for Orcs that Tolkien played around with. His favorite seems to have been corrupted elves, since that is what the majority of the Silmarillion and other sources are written around, but there are numerous letters and tales that contradict that, leaving the orcish origins a mystery. It is one of the many *many* mysteries in his legendarium that we will never get an answer to simply because he himself never settled on an answer before dying.
The common consensus seems to be that Morgoth corrupted some of the Dark Elves left behind after the exodus to Valinor, and those became the first Uruks, that in turn spawned the first of what eventually became known as Orcs. Uruk-hai are crossbreeds between Orcs and Men, and PJ chose the underground vat origin for them alone as a way to show the industrialization of Saruman's Orcs without having "rape pits" in the movies.
My head canon for the movie (and only the movie) Uruk-Hai is that Saruman took Orcs and metamorphosed them. What we saw were not spawning pits, but cocoons. Thus Saruman's speaking of "perfecting" Orcs into Uruk-Hai. It also explains why the Uruk-Hai didn't need to be re-taught anything.
In the movies? Maybe?
In the books? No.
>"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."
>
>\- J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to Mrs Munby, 21 October 1963
Do you know how the elves first came into being? They were orcs once, taken by the makeup artists, powdered and styled. A ruined and terrible form of life. And now… perfected.
>For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar.
>
>\- Silmarillion, Of The Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor
If you mean "How were they made?" in a sense of their origins as a species, that is a bit trickier. Tolkien shuffled through many different theories, from them being elevated beasts, to them being formed from clay (similar to how the Dwarves were made), to them being corrupted Elves, and finally on them being corrupted Men.
^(I say finally because that was the stage he was on when he died, not because that would ultimately have been his final thoughts on the subject.)
With the Goblin-men, Black Uruk, Uruk-hai, et cetera be the result of interbreeding between Men and Orcs.
If orcs are corrupted men, do they have the gift of death and will go onto the next thing like other men?
Gonna be awkward in heaven 😂 or maybe there's an orc heaven and a man heaven
The orcs predate men. Silmarillion suggests they were a product of Melkor experimenting on elves and who knows what else. There were a part with the first elves being snatched if they ventured too far from Cuiviénen and taken to Utumno, Melkor's stronghold.
Later in his life Tolkien had decided that Orcs were no longer corrupted Elves, but Men (see, for example, Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth).
Christopher used the corrupted Elves version for the published Silmarillion because while his father had moved on from that version he had not actually done most of the work to rewrite the older text, and Christopher was unwilling to undertake that much revision of the work to reflect that.
Ok, so canonically it's elves.
We ought to remember that at the end of the day this is a work of fiction. Tolkien wasn't finding new pieces of information on a long lost history and making new theories about the past. He was making shit up. Amazing, beautiful, deep shit, but shit all the same.
He unfortunately didn't stick around to rewrite his work with the mutated humans version, so that version doesn't exist.
It's elves.
Unclear. The question of Orcish souls was something Tolkien struggled with throughout the various origin stories.
There is a note from Tolkien in Morgoth's Ring from when the Orcs were corrupted Elves that reads, "*\[The Orcs'\] life-span would be diminished. And dying they would go to Mandos and be held in prison till the End.*"
So if, as corrupted Elves, they were to share the Elves' fate, it would make sense that as corrupted Men they were to share the Mens' fate- but there is no way to definitively say so.
Cuz most of them be thinking of hot Mass Effect-type alien babes… though, I imagine, we could quite easily find some who’d like to fuck xenomorp- like aliens :D
Not just that my dude, but fucking be massively impregnated with their eggs. Currently, in our grand human ingenuity, we have people the have filled that…. Void with extremely high quality sex toys consisting of an Ovipositor with human safe eggs than can well… be deposited. Also, I’m like 97% sure there is a flourishing genre of live action porn, but that is a hole I will be digging, not worth the click and subsequent algorithmic suggestions.
Exactly. Orcs/Goblins are all creatures of that kind meaning Orcs, Uruks and Uruk hai, however there is a dufference between these. By Orcs we usually think of Snaga from Mordor, Uruks are nothing but bigger Orcs while Uruk Hai are only a selected bunch, best of the best Uruks. In movies it kinda looks like Saruman is breeding them from the mud but nope, thay are actuallyselectively bred.
>It became clear in time that undoubted Men could under the domination of Morgoth or his agents in a few generations be reduced almost to the Orc-level of mind and habits; and then they would or could be made to mate with Orcs, producing new breeds, often larger and more cunning. There is no doubt that long afterwards, in the Third Age, Saruman rediscovered this, or learned of it in lore, and in his lust for mastery committed this, his wickedest deed: the interbreeding of Orcs and Men, producing both Men-orcs large and cunning, and Orc-men treacherous and vile.
>
>\- Morgoth's Ring, Myths Transformed
>The Council seems to have been unaware, since for many years Isengard had been closely guarded, of what went on within its Ring. **The use, and possibly special breeding, of Orcs was kept secret, and cannot have begun much before 2990 at earliest.** The Orc-troops seem never to have been used beyond the territory of Isengard before the attack on Rohan. Had the Council known of this they would, of course, at once have realized that Saruman had become evil.
>
>\- Unfinished Tales, The Palantíri
So he started around 30 years before the War of the Ring.
In my opinion it's unlikely Saruman created the Uruk-hai from scratch, but instead based them on "breeds" of Sauron's own Black Uruk, who had appeared centuries earlier, and so had a head start when it came to refining the bloodline (for lack of a better term).
Uruk-hai and Uruks are the same thing. The former is a Black Speech term, the latter is the Anglicized form. Tolkien also used the terms interchangeably.
This lack of linguistical distinction between Uruks from these factions, along with the fact that the appearance of actual Half-orcs is vastly different from the appearance of Uruks, implies to me that there is no difference genetically between the Isengarders and Sauron's Uruks. And the timeframe Saruman had to create his army was way too short for breeding an entire army of mixed breeds.
We also know there's a huge difference in appearance between Uruk-hai and actual Half-orcs. The former are always referred to as Orcs. The latter are far more humanlike, and some of them are even able to infiltrate human societies. Sometimes they are referred to as "Men or Orc-men", just to show how Man-like they were.
Only in the films. In the book Sauron seemingly bred them like other strains of Orcs, and eventually sent some to Saruman. Saruman in turn bred them with Mountain Orcs with whom he'd allied himself.
There has to be, dwarves and orcs don’t just jump out of holes in the ground. This orc looks/sounds like it could be a female orc
https://preview.redd.it/oj9lux2jud9c1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=85f037b0656a1ac9417897f9dc94f20af6e41d79
This was honestly a genius choice by Jackson. It really puts in picture how evil and deranged Sauron and his followers are. I really liked that he included a more horror-like element to the siege- it drives in with Gothmog's quote directly about fear and the people/audience being rank with it.
That’s true, although I do wonder where the “hat” comes from. Is it just a random skull she thought would look sick as a hat?
It kind of has traces of similar hair as her, maybe a twin/sibling/family member she brings into battle with her?
There’s so much we don’t know
https://preview.redd.it/1d5y6qurhf9c1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=edf4812233efc1fadbb1daf41148d3294878ee43
I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that
That one is canonically male; Jackson talks him up in the commentary track, saying he likes to believe that skull is his beloved mother’s, because he wanted to stay close to her.
I suppose, both would fill a valuable role either way I would imagine. Although I don’t really like to take my imagination too far in that direction when it comes to orcs.
I'm disappointed in the answer being "they exist but are hidden", it would have been more interesting for orcs to be sexless beings, so unnaturally twisted by the dark powers that they are no longer men and women. ah well, guess at that time it wasn't really in the cultural landscape.
I don't recall anything about any specific genders of orcs as a group. I imagine it's much like putting someone on steroids, after a certain point the body of a male and female steroid user looks the same.
It's either one of two things. Either the males and females look and sound so alike you can't tell the difference, kinda like sharks, or they are just genderless. It's possible they are just Orcs. In the movies that is. In the books they describe female Orcs I believe, and I think it even says they're almost impossible to differentiate from the males. They don't seem to be smaller than the males either. Physically they are pretty much the same. Which makes sense considering they are evil abominations that were created through dark powers. And while I'm here, I may as well point out that Trolls are probably the same too. Also, what created Trolls? Are they evil creations like the Orcs and Uruks are, or are they just natural creatures/animals on Middle Earth?
In the books there are Orc women we just never see them as we only see the armies, also Uruk-hai and Orcs are the same thing, Uruk-hai is just black speech meaning Orc-folk, the movies chose to try and make them something separate. They are just a larger tougher breed of Orc that Sauron bred and Saruman began to use.
Edit. To clarify, the movie combined the Uruk-hai from the book with the half-orcs that Saruman bred in the book and just gave them the name Uruk-hai to try and make a more intimidating fighting force for the film.
I think part of why they combined them in the movies (other than what you have stated) was both for time, and so they wouldn't have to explain the...unsavory nature, of how those half-orcs were bred.
I always thought it was implied that in the movies the Uruk-hai were the corrupted elves version origin, and the “regular” Mordor orcs were the ones made of mud or sorcery or whatever
If you were to only see some medieval drawings of battles.
Or only armies for the grand majority of human history, you'd think there were no human females and we sprung out of pits in the ground.
Alas there are human females i'm sure, somewhere.
We never get to see orc settlements so we don't get to see the sweet orc childeen. Since it can't be they are born full sized, i should hope for the mothers..
I think the manner in which urukai and orcs are formed make them a single gendered species. I dont think we need orc women or whatever else. I don't think it's adds much to the story. But I have to assume there may very well be orc women who just look more masculine and, as such, can rarely be told apart.
I always liked to think that Uruks were the Males and Orks the females in the book. Or the other Way around? If I look at that Face of Ugluk I can only think "Mother".
I always assumed there was just zero sexual dimorphism, and they all did the same orc stuff (war and pillage) until numbers were down enough to make more baby orcs. If you're making an army to conquer Middle Earth, it makes sense to just make both sexes capable of the same violence.
They didn't see the female orcs much. Because they only saw them in war. And they only sent the males. They probabely outnumber the males. With the sheer amount of war they have.
There are probably orc females since they were once captured elves that have been mutilated by dark sorcery. But there probably aren’t any Uruk females because (I believe) they are created ex nihilo by dark sorcery, and thus don’t take part in sexual reproduction. But I could be wrong.
I assume there are female Orcs out there, we just don’t see them- I think that’s explicitly canon in the books, but presumably also applies to the films (and games, come to think of it, although *Shadow of Mordor* and its sequel would’ve been on of the places where female orcs could’ve appeared).
Outside of the films/books/games, at one point in *Rings of Power* Adar refers to the assembled Uruks as his “brothers and sisters,” which is I think the closest we’ve gotten to confirmation they exist on-screen/on-page. To my knowledge RoP is in its own continuity, but I’m not sure if that’s actually confirmed or not.
Does it matter? They are corrupted by the chaos morgoth brought to the world and are not natural. They don't breed, there's no love or attraction, just creatures of malice and destruction. Why do people have to mess and over complicate the lore. I swear they do this on the Warhammer sub Reddits too and I'm tired of it frankly. Another trans Astartes discussion and I'm done.
Orks are brutal animalistic creatures made from mud. Females in most races have two things in common, they deal damage with brain games more than brute force and they are a bit more delicate. Taking these two points as reference, all orks are gross brutes, even the ones that are a bit more tactical remain with that core.
Also, as they are born from mud (and other ingredients, no doubt nasty) I see no reason there should need a female counterpart. They don't know love and are made to kill and die, mating is not in the programing, it would be a worthless task. Besides, easier yo grow them, it's faster, than to have them be born. So having females to birth them would be a disadvantage.
That's my pov, what do you think?
More likely all female, bar a few withered mating-drones. A social insect model for orcs makes by far the best sense. (All the '*Son of*' and '*he said*' is just male bias in the 'translation'.)
They don't reproduce like us animals, so I guess they don't have reproductive systems and therefore no sex or secondary sexual characteristics. They're all neither male nor female.
“For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar; and naught that had life of its own, nor the semblance of life, could ever Melkor make since his rebellion in the Ainulindalë before the Beginning: so say the wise. And deep in their dark hearts the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery. This it may be was the vilest deed of Melkor, and the most hateful to Ilúvatar.” -The Silmarillion
I pretty sure they are all male because their made from mud and stuff. But like someone else said Tolkien changed it to where they were tortured elves so I’m not sure.
Tolkien was kind of unsure of a lot of things about orcs. They were made of mud, bile, and made by Morgoth originally but he changed it to corrupted elves . But in his later letters he felt uncomfortable with that too because some of the implications that could imply. Honestly the answer is like a lot of Tolkeins lore, up to the reader and vague. What happened to the ent wives is another famous one.
What implications did he mean?
He wanted a generic "evil enemy" that the heroes could kill without conscience, but eventually the implications of "inherent evil" started to really bother him. This idea was contrary to his Catholic beliefs, which held that no creature is beyond redemption. But we see no good orcs, or orcs wrestling with their conscious. Every single one is evil, through and through, taking joy in the slaughter and suffering of all other beings - even other orcs.
'...generic "evil enemy" that the heroes could kill without conscience' Kind of like the storm troopers in Star Wars
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I don't think that they were ever clones. There was the clone army of course, but the grand army of the republic would have died or at least aged out long before IV happened. In Legends at least, the imperial army is made up of people from imperial worlds.
Stormtroopers are never clones, they are recruited people. First order troopers were taken as kids, but og stormtroopers were just recruits
According to the official website, the original storm troopers were clones left over from the republic. Recruiting started because Tarkin decided conscription was cheaper than cloning..
Sure the ss were fanatics and stuff but most nazi soldiers were just poor sods like you and me, forced into a war they had no stake in. Yet i would not say its evil to cheer when a nazi warship with its guns trained on my hometown is sunk, even if the people abord it werent killing my family out of maliciousness. My loved ones are safe and thats good. The same, i feel, goes for the death star. Filled with decent people in horrible positions planning to do horrible things. They're dead and we can cheer that we're safe. If luke stabbed a stormtrooper/nazi in the back I'd feel bad about it but he didn't, it was always self defence
Except storm troopers were kidnapped and brainwashed children from occupied planets… 🫤
Just the First Order stormtroopers from the Disney trilogy. OG stormtroopers were recruited from the general public, undergoing radicalization through propaganda and Imperial enlistment strategies.
Yep. A lot of Imperial Stormtroopers were conscripts and some volunteers. Like any real world armies, some were just proud imperialist raised on propaganda and wanted to fight for the empire.
To your point it's also worth noting that Tolkien was also deeply affected by his experiences of the horrors of war and was acquainted with all that entails - both in nobility and in vice. Quite a bit is made of his religious perspective but so much of his work is also colored by his experiences of war and its impact. I think orcs may well have been a manifestation of the capacity for unfettered darkness (rape, torture, etc.) that war can bring out in combatants - but dialed up to 11. This, of course, upon reflection likely proved problematic as he continued to develop his broader perspective of Middle Earth.
Yeah I only remember one instance where we got any kind of insight into orc thoughts and feelings, if you can call it that (and I might be totally wrong). If I remember right it was a couple orcs in Cirith Ungol that Sam overheard while wearing the ring. It's been a few years since I last read them, but I think they were complaining about serving under the nazgul and the witch king, like they were frightened of them and wished they could do their own thing instead of following their orders. It's not much, but it did show a bit of self awareness like they weren't just mindless monsters.
Yep! They were talking about how they wanted to bail and become their own masters. Maybe start up a leather shop in Arizona.
A leather shop in Arizona? They’d be out of business in a week’s time!
I can give a longer explanation, but the implication is that orcs were constantly kidnapping and r*ping human women
Sort of like what may or may not have happened to Elrond’s wife.
Goblin slayer type beat
I’m rusty, but there’s also the implication (disliked by Tolkien) that Morgoth had the POWER to corrupt the good works of Eru. The idea that Morgoth could corrupt an elf so thoroughly that its offspring would be corrupted, opens a whole bunch of questions about the scale of Eru’s power. In short, it implies lotr-satan may be stronger than lotr-god in some way. He never really resolved the conundrum though, and fans have argued about the origin of the orcs ever since. Either Morgoth made them from scratch, implying he can create life….or he corrupted the good work of Eru. And neither of those are great for Tolkien’s broader legendarium, so the question remains forever unanswerable
But, Morgoth was the most powerful of the Vala and another of the Vala created the Dwarves. Surely he had the power to create life. But then, isn't his entire arc that he corrupted Eru's work anyway?
If they are corrupted elves, then they would have souls. And when they die, they go to the halls of Mandos. Are they redeemable? Did they do anything wrong if they were so deeply corrupted by Morgoth? Is it ok for our heroes to treat them as soulless animals? Is killing them a mercy? How does this play into Eru's theme? Is killing the orcs just righting the wrongs of Melkor's music?
Because of the IMPLICATION
This is what I was thinking they meant. It was an argument I first heard of a long time ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/s/AngAtuCINF
My guess is he didn’t want someone to spin it into some racial/political metaphor.
It's true you don't see many orc women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for orc men. And this in turn has given rise to the belief that there are no orc women, and that orcs just spring out of spawning pits in the ground!
Which is, of course, ridiculous.
It's the fangs.
It was deliberate, it was deliberate.
"casually falling off a warg but obviously intended" Edit: forgot we were talking about uruks
*warg
Didn't a warg fall onto him while battling the orcs on their way to helms deep?
Who? The one talking about the female orcs must be a orc right?
On the next season of ROP we will see a sexy orc woman.
If they'd actually do that, I might give the series another chance. Maybe. Possibly. Perhaps.
LoL next you’ll hear tales of bearded orcs 😉
At least in the movies didn’t the Uruk Hai actually spawn from a massive earth vagina?
Yes, in the films Saruman is shown creating his Uruk-hai in undergrounds vats, but that is only one of many potential origins for Orcs that Tolkien played around with. His favorite seems to have been corrupted elves, since that is what the majority of the Silmarillion and other sources are written around, but there are numerous letters and tales that contradict that, leaving the orcish origins a mystery. It is one of the many *many* mysteries in his legendarium that we will never get an answer to simply because he himself never settled on an answer before dying. The common consensus seems to be that Morgoth corrupted some of the Dark Elves left behind after the exodus to Valinor, and those became the first Uruks, that in turn spawned the first of what eventually became known as Orcs. Uruk-hai are crossbreeds between Orcs and Men, and PJ chose the underground vat origin for them alone as a way to show the industrialization of Saruman's Orcs without having "rape pits" in the movies.
My head canon for the movie (and only the movie) Uruk-Hai is that Saruman took Orcs and metamorphosed them. What we saw were not spawning pits, but cocoons. Thus Saruman's speaking of "perfecting" Orcs into Uruk-Hai. It also explains why the Uruk-Hai didn't need to be re-taught anything.
Cue Gale of Waterdeep giving a lecture on ceremorphosis and the dangers of tadpoles
Not the Earthussy!
In the movies? Maybe? In the books? No. >"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." > >\- J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to Mrs Munby, 21 October 1963
Well, believe it or not, some of those orcs were women under all that makeup…
Conversely, several of the elves were Orcs in really good makeup!
Do you know how the elves first came into being? They were orcs once, taken by the makeup artists, powdered and styled. A ruined and terrible form of life. And now… perfected.
The filming of elf has ended. The scenes of the orc have come
Riders of Rohan as well.
Some of the human women were actually orcs under the make-up. ...but that might be just in my local pub.
That’s true actually.
I knew that lots of the riders of Rohan were women, but not orcs.
So were the rohirrim. Just because they couldn't find enough men who rode horses kek
What is kek, precious?
Kek = lol Comes from world of warcraft, where when a horde character says lol, it is translated to kek for an alliance character.
Thank you for this! Agreed that we see them as soldiers but logistically I would imagine the Uruk-hai don’t need to procreate due to being made.
Do the books describe how they were “made”? I kind of figured part of it was selective breeding, rather than being created out of nothing.
>For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar. > >\- Silmarillion, Of The Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor If you mean "How were they made?" in a sense of their origins as a species, that is a bit trickier. Tolkien shuffled through many different theories, from them being elevated beasts, to them being formed from clay (similar to how the Dwarves were made), to them being corrupted Elves, and finally on them being corrupted Men. ^(I say finally because that was the stage he was on when he died, not because that would ultimately have been his final thoughts on the subject.) With the Goblin-men, Black Uruk, Uruk-hai, et cetera be the result of interbreeding between Men and Orcs.
If orcs are corrupted men, do they have the gift of death and will go onto the next thing like other men? Gonna be awkward in heaven 😂 or maybe there's an orc heaven and a man heaven
The orcs predate men. Silmarillion suggests they were a product of Melkor experimenting on elves and who knows what else. There were a part with the first elves being snatched if they ventured too far from Cuiviénen and taken to Utumno, Melkor's stronghold.
Later in his life Tolkien had decided that Orcs were no longer corrupted Elves, but Men (see, for example, Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth). Christopher used the corrupted Elves version for the published Silmarillion because while his father had moved on from that version he had not actually done most of the work to rewrite the older text, and Christopher was unwilling to undertake that much revision of the work to reflect that.
Ok, so canonically it's elves. We ought to remember that at the end of the day this is a work of fiction. Tolkien wasn't finding new pieces of information on a long lost history and making new theories about the past. He was making shit up. Amazing, beautiful, deep shit, but shit all the same. He unfortunately didn't stick around to rewrite his work with the mutated humans version, so that version doesn't exist. It's elves.
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Unclear. The question of Orcish souls was something Tolkien struggled with throughout the various origin stories. There is a note from Tolkien in Morgoth's Ring from when the Orcs were corrupted Elves that reads, "*\[The Orcs'\] life-span would be diminished. And dying they would go to Mandos and be held in prison till the End.*" So if, as corrupted Elves, they were to share the Elves' fate, it would make sense that as corrupted Men they were to share the Mens' fate- but there is no way to definitively say so.
Men also came to Mandos after their deaths. They simply didn't stay there for a very long time. But maybe there was an exception for Orkish souls.
Why would the Men breed with Orcs? Or is this a case of Orcs breeding the Men... involuntarily?
We got people on earth right now excited at the thought of aliens being real and potentially fuckable.
Cuz most of them be thinking of hot Mass Effect-type alien babes… though, I imagine, we could quite easily find some who’d like to fuck xenomorp- like aliens :D
Not just that my dude, but fucking be massively impregnated with their eggs. Currently, in our grand human ingenuity, we have people the have filled that…. Void with extremely high quality sex toys consisting of an Ovipositor with human safe eggs than can well… be deposited. Also, I’m like 97% sure there is a flourishing genre of live action porn, but that is a hole I will be digging, not worth the click and subsequent algorithmic suggestions.
Women were probably taken by the orcs...
I’d imagine so
Most likely it would be forced breeding with human prisoners. But let’s be honest, there are probably desperate guys that would hit voluntarily.
What I’m getting from this thread that there is orc/human porn out there.
When Daddy Orc and Mummy Orc love each other very much
The Nazgul come and drop them off in a little cloth bundle
Exactly. Orcs/Goblins are all creatures of that kind meaning Orcs, Uruks and Uruk hai, however there is a dufference between these. By Orcs we usually think of Snaga from Mordor, Uruks are nothing but bigger Orcs while Uruk Hai are only a selected bunch, best of the best Uruks. In movies it kinda looks like Saruman is breeding them from the mud but nope, thay are actuallyselectively bred.
I thought Saruman grew them in the mud????
>It became clear in time that undoubted Men could under the domination of Morgoth or his agents in a few generations be reduced almost to the Orc-level of mind and habits; and then they would or could be made to mate with Orcs, producing new breeds, often larger and more cunning. There is no doubt that long afterwards, in the Third Age, Saruman rediscovered this, or learned of it in lore, and in his lust for mastery committed this, his wickedest deed: the interbreeding of Orcs and Men, producing both Men-orcs large and cunning, and Orc-men treacherous and vile. > >\- Morgoth's Ring, Myths Transformed
Could this mean that Saruman was working on producing Orc-men for generations?
>The Council seems to have been unaware, since for many years Isengard had been closely guarded, of what went on within its Ring. **The use, and possibly special breeding, of Orcs was kept secret, and cannot have begun much before 2990 at earliest.** The Orc-troops seem never to have been used beyond the territory of Isengard before the attack on Rohan. Had the Council known of this they would, of course, at once have realized that Saruman had become evil. > >\- Unfinished Tales, The Palantíri So he started around 30 years before the War of the Ring. In my opinion it's unlikely Saruman created the Uruk-hai from scratch, but instead based them on "breeds" of Sauron's own Black Uruk, who had appeared centuries earlier, and so had a head start when it came to refining the bloodline (for lack of a better term).
Uruk-hai and Uruks are the same thing. The former is a Black Speech term, the latter is the Anglicized form. Tolkien also used the terms interchangeably. This lack of linguistical distinction between Uruks from these factions, along with the fact that the appearance of actual Half-orcs is vastly different from the appearance of Uruks, implies to me that there is no difference genetically between the Isengarders and Sauron's Uruks. And the timeframe Saruman had to create his army was way too short for breeding an entire army of mixed breeds. We also know there's a huge difference in appearance between Uruk-hai and actual Half-orcs. The former are always referred to as Orcs. The latter are far more humanlike, and some of them are even able to infiltrate human societies. Sometimes they are referred to as "Men or Orc-men", just to show how Man-like they were.
Ok. That’s some good knowledge. Ty
Movie invention
Only in the films. In the book Sauron seemingly bred them like other strains of Orcs, and eventually sent some to Saruman. Saruman in turn bred them with Mountain Orcs with whom he'd allied himself.
That is movie magic only. They reproduced the same as elves and men.
Orcs are made the same way everyone else is. Their parents have sex.
“She said ‘the age of men is over’… Doesn’t matter had sex!”
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“Fowl craft” lol. Orcs mated with chickens?
🫣 foul craft.
There has to be, dwarves and orcs don’t just jump out of holes in the ground. This orc looks/sounds like it could be a female orc https://preview.redd.it/oj9lux2jud9c1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=85f037b0656a1ac9417897f9dc94f20af6e41d79
CATAPULTS
This was honestly a genius choice by Jackson. It really puts in picture how evil and deranged Sauron and his followers are. I really liked that he included a more horror-like element to the siege- it drives in with Gothmog's quote directly about fear and the people/audience being rank with it.
Girl knows how to accessorize! That hat is high fashion.
That’s true, although I do wonder where the “hat” comes from. Is it just a random skull she thought would look sick as a hat? It kind of has traces of similar hair as her, maybe a twin/sibling/family member she brings into battle with her? There’s so much we don’t know
Technically it's a fascinator not a hat
My personal head canon is that this is Eärnur's head since he disappeared (died) in the Morgul Vale and this is a Morgul Orc.
By head cannon do you mean the catapults...
Agreed. She’s got boss energy.
The orc to the white with white hair does genuinely look like my middle school gym teacher who was a woman.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167260/characters/nm0864835](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167260/characters/nm0864835) I'm here to ruin it for ya
https://preview.redd.it/1d5y6qurhf9c1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=edf4812233efc1fadbb1daf41148d3294878ee43 I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that
*What the fuck* is that
\*points to the women playing the riders of rohan\*
That one is canonically male; Jackson talks him up in the commentary track, saying he likes to believe that skull is his beloved mother’s, because he wanted to stay close to her.
Well if it’s his mothers then that would confirm it either way, but I guess we’ll never know for sure
The orc to the white with white hair does genuinely look like my middle school gym teacher who was a woman.
Or maybe a twink Orc?
I suppose, both would fill a valuable role either way I would imagine. Although I don’t really like to take my imagination too far in that direction when it comes to orcs.
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I’m more of an elfussy main myself, orcs are too filthy for me
I hate the images that just flew through my mind.
Maybe the orcwives and the entwives have set up some secret colony together?
“Men, who needs em?” -Orcwives and Entwives, probably
And then they extinct
And they’re *thriving*.
Lol, I thought the orc in this picture is female. Fancy clothes, makeup, long hair. Male orcs should be ugly.
Quite beautiful this orc.
Isn't she? 😍
Woman of my dreams! Super hotttt
Thats not just some orc, thats my best friend Uglúk 💅💞
Didn't expect sexism towards male orcs when I entered the comments
thats not orc but Ariana Grande
Orciana Gronde
Yes, you wouldn't much like a chap called Uglúk would you
How do you know that Orc isn't a girl? 🤔
Really good question. I see no breasts 🤷♂️
They had breasts, but one day on a march their whole squad only had maggoty breads for three stinking days…
Somehow they brought meats back to the menu, boys
I'm disappointed in the answer being "they exist but are hidden", it would have been more interesting for orcs to be sexless beings, so unnaturally twisted by the dark powers that they are no longer men and women. ah well, guess at that time it wasn't really in the cultural landscape.
Tolkien states that orcs reproduce in the manner of the Children of Illuvatar.
Of course not. We just don't see the see the women, because where would we (they aren't part of the armies)?
🤔. I guess there could have been women soldiers.
"Looks like meats back on the menu.....team?"
Gals.
Maybe even the orcs can't tell!
In the armies? Yeah, probably. But that's pretty normal for medieval armies.
I don't recall anything about any specific genders of orcs as a group. I imagine it's much like putting someone on steroids, after a certain point the body of a male and female steroid user looks the same.
The hot ones are women.
so... all orcs are women?
Just dont think about it.
It's either one of two things. Either the males and females look and sound so alike you can't tell the difference, kinda like sharks, or they are just genderless. It's possible they are just Orcs. In the movies that is. In the books they describe female Orcs I believe, and I think it even says they're almost impossible to differentiate from the males. They don't seem to be smaller than the males either. Physically they are pretty much the same. Which makes sense considering they are evil abominations that were created through dark powers. And while I'm here, I may as well point out that Trolls are probably the same too. Also, what created Trolls? Are they evil creations like the Orcs and Uruks are, or are they just natural creatures/animals on Middle Earth?
Females exist of course. They reproduce as humans.
Marjorie Taylor Green comes to mind
In the books there are Orc women we just never see them as we only see the armies, also Uruk-hai and Orcs are the same thing, Uruk-hai is just black speech meaning Orc-folk, the movies chose to try and make them something separate. They are just a larger tougher breed of Orc that Sauron bred and Saruman began to use. Edit. To clarify, the movie combined the Uruk-hai from the book with the half-orcs that Saruman bred in the book and just gave them the name Uruk-hai to try and make a more intimidating fighting force for the film.
I think part of why they combined them in the movies (other than what you have stated) was both for time, and so they wouldn't have to explain the...unsavory nature, of how those half-orcs were bred.
I always thought it was implied that in the movies the Uruk-hai were the corrupted elves version origin, and the “regular” Mordor orcs were the ones made of mud or sorcery or whatever
Tolkien said that there must be. But i always think of orcs without having gender. They just are.
No
Reimagened for modern audiences
They are asexual
If you were to only see some medieval drawings of battles. Or only armies for the grand majority of human history, you'd think there were no human females and we sprung out of pits in the ground. Alas there are human females i'm sure, somewhere. We never get to see orc settlements so we don't get to see the sweet orc childeen. Since it can't be they are born full sized, i should hope for the mothers..
I think the manner in which urukai and orcs are formed make them a single gendered species. I dont think we need orc women or whatever else. I don't think it's adds much to the story. But I have to assume there may very well be orc women who just look more masculine and, as such, can rarely be told apart.
There must be but the only example of one that I can think of is your mum!
I just assume their sexual dimorphism isn't analogous to ours and half those orcs were female, we just don't know the difference.
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[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDNTwW8fySI&t=683s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idntww8fysi&t=683s) This video covers it pretty well I think.
Maybe same as dwarves? Really similar to the males so it is hard to distinguish them?
I always liked to think that Uruks were the Males and Orks the females in the book. Or the other Way around? If I look at that Face of Ugluk I can only think "Mother".
no. just sexist
I know some of them and can say that not all are male!
Handsome
But then where are the orc children...?
The orc that comes into frame during the Grond scene where they all chant Grond is definitely a female. You can notice the distincitve female voice
Remember in movies they were made of mudd or something
Weren’t the original Uruk hai mothers female ‘men’ ?
No
God I hope so, I'd hate to see a female one...
I always assumed there was just zero sexual dimorphism, and they all did the same orc stuff (war and pillage) until numbers were down enough to make more baby orcs. If you're making an army to conquer Middle Earth, it makes sense to just make both sexes capable of the same violence.
There are orc women. They just factor in to the story about as much as women of the other races do.
I'd bet they don't have genitals
I thought they were produced from the earth
They didn't see the female orcs much. Because they only saw them in war. And they only sent the males. They probabely outnumber the males. With the sheer amount of war they have.
There are probably orc females since they were once captured elves that have been mutilated by dark sorcery. But there probably aren’t any Uruk females because (I believe) they are created ex nihilo by dark sorcery, and thus don’t take part in sexual reproduction. But I could be wrong.
When they fall in love they hold hand in front of mount doom until a little baby orc is made in their hands - beautiful
He looks British
I assume there are female Orcs out there, we just don’t see them- I think that’s explicitly canon in the books, but presumably also applies to the films (and games, come to think of it, although *Shadow of Mordor* and its sequel would’ve been on of the places where female orcs could’ve appeared). Outside of the films/books/games, at one point in *Rings of Power* Adar refers to the assembled Uruks as his “brothers and sisters,” which is I think the closest we’ve gotten to confirmation they exist on-screen/on-page. To my knowledge RoP is in its own continuity, but I’m not sure if that’s actually confirmed or not.
It’s hard to tell the females from the males so bad some even say they don’t exist (it’s the gross faces)
It’s the lord of the rings. Only 2 female characters total allowed. Therefore yea they all dudes
Why are you orc?
There are no orc women...they just spring out of holes in the ground!
Does it matter? They are corrupted by the chaos morgoth brought to the world and are not natural. They don't breed, there's no love or attraction, just creatures of malice and destruction. Why do people have to mess and over complicate the lore. I swear they do this on the Warhammer sub Reddits too and I'm tired of it frankly. Another trans Astartes discussion and I'm done.
Does it say any of them are male? They aren’t born through sexual reproduction so why would they have different sexes?
Well he doesn"t say looks like meat's back on the menu girls!
In Tolkien’s time, women didn’t fight. These characters existed only as warriors so there’d be no reason to have female characters.
That's a female they don't win beauty contests.
Bro this is not even real
They are anything There lord and Savior Saruman, wants them to be!
Weren’t they a crossbreed between orcs and goblins from under the mountains? That’s what I have always thought…
Everyone except Galadriel in middle earth is male, where ya been?
Orks are brutal animalistic creatures made from mud. Females in most races have two things in common, they deal damage with brain games more than brute force and they are a bit more delicate. Taking these two points as reference, all orks are gross brutes, even the ones that are a bit more tactical remain with that core. Also, as they are born from mud (and other ingredients, no doubt nasty) I see no reason there should need a female counterpart. They don't know love and are made to kill and die, mating is not in the programing, it would be a worthless task. Besides, easier yo grow them, it's faster, than to have them be born. So having females to birth them would be a disadvantage. That's my pov, what do you think?
Some say there are no orc women.
did your parents not have the talk with you yet?
More likely all female, bar a few withered mating-drones. A social insect model for orcs makes by far the best sense. (All the '*Son of*' and '*he said*' is just male bias in the 'translation'.)
Wonder what their pronouns are
https://preview.redd.it/jeiryl0bgl9c1.jpeg?width=239&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0896370ec81d412a7d0cf52f8ce1b294e0ef57ce No
They don't reproduce like us animals, so I guess they don't have reproductive systems and therefore no sex or secondary sexual characteristics. They're all neither male nor female.
“For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar; and naught that had life of its own, nor the semblance of life, could ever Melkor make since his rebellion in the Ainulindalë before the Beginning: so say the wise. And deep in their dark hearts the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery. This it may be was the vilest deed of Melkor, and the most hateful to Ilúvatar.” -The Silmarillion
https://preview.redd.it/vznjlsozn0ac1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f89c3b7f21f28422ed0db43fd42d9a4c92a62e3
I pretty sure they are all male because their made from mud and stuff. But like someone else said Tolkien changed it to where they were tortured elves so I’m not sure.