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Old 06-21-2002, 06:33 PM   #21
Kuruharan
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Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: A Remote Dwarven Hold
Posts: 3,593
Kuruharan is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Kuruharan is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Kuruharan is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Sting

Quote:
and remember, Kuruharan, Gollum is no Orc, he is a creature very much separate from their whole race, and I think Tolkien made that clear; no one would show mercy to an Orc, because they wouldn't be in a position to do so
That wasn't the point. The point was that Gandalf never held his hand from killing things in a fight. That statement related more to what The Half-Hobbit was saying about having the right to defend yourself.

As for never being in a position to have mercy on an orc, I think that just by looking at the nature of warfare one would have to assume that this very situation did come up at some point.

Say for instance, you are standing triumphant on a really gory battlefield and you start prowling around "looking for souvenirs" and trying to find wounded friends. In the course of your exploring you come across an orc that has been knocked unconscious but is clearly still alive. (I picked knocked unconscious because it makes the moral quandry more complex. If he were badly wounded it could be considered more merciful to kill him.)

So you have this orc. He's not dead. He's not badly wounded. He is helpless, and cannot prevent you killing him. What do you do?

This is a creature with just as much malice as Gollum (if not more). Do you kill him? Do you tie him up and take him prisoner? Do you leave him lying there? If you do he will wake up eventually. Best case scenario you (or somebody) will have to fight him again. Worst case scenario, he hangs around your camp that night and cuts your throat in your sleep.

So what do you do?

[Technical note: Full scale battles tend to produce far higher numbers of wounded than killed. Looking at it realistically you would have to assume that multiple variations of the above scenario were played out everytime the forces of good defeated orcs. There is never any reference to orcs being taken prisoner so you have to assume that they were all "disposed of" without mercy.]
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