Quote:
Originally Posted by Galadriel55
Yes, plenty of real world animals have "decoy" eyes, but I don't think that Mordor flies just happened to have them naturally. For one thing, it's too much of a coincidence. The sentence itself begs the question by comparing the flies with orcs. I know I'm the one who brought up evolution, but I was just making a joke on the colour scheme. It's just too random if the flies' appearance had nothing to do with Sauron's presence.
As a side note, the paragraph prior to this sentence describes the twisted nature still struggling for life:
Everything here perhaps once used to be natural, but became too perverted to be so. The only way to survive is to be disgusting. Whether this influence was imposed knowingly or not, it seems that the flies belong in there too. Once just flies, now little mean red Saurons.
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I would suggest that the Hobbit's description may have been too literal, or at least the description mirrored the negative perception of the ghastly surroundings they had to drudge through. If you look at the words "marked like orcs with a red eye-shaped blotch" then it opens it up to a wider interpretation. What were they "marked like" that gave the impression of being orkish? And did they just have a blotch of red on their backs that may or may not be "eye-shaped" on closer inspection?" That they were "dun or grey, or black" indicate a bunch of different sorts of flies, did they all have identical blotches? And why didn't the swarms of Morgothian midges not have some sort of markings?
I'm just saying that one has to consider the Hobbits at that point were absolutely miserable. So, perhaps, these obnoxious flies seemed simply orkish, but weren't necessarily Sauronian. They appeared "like" not a one-to-one description.