Orcs and Elves (and Men and Animals)

[mhagain]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

...Being a devout Catholic, and adhering to Biblical Creation...

This isn't actually the case for catholics, though. Biblical creationism is very much not a thing, and literal biblical creationism very much less so.


There's something of an overview here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolut...atholic_Church - it does come with the caveat that I haven't read all of it so I can't personally stand over all of it, but the first paragraph is a reasonable summary of how things sre:

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, any believer ... may accept the belief that the earth evolved over time under the guidance of God. Catholicism holds that God initiated and continued the process of his evolutionary creation and that all humans, whether specially created or evolved, have and have always had specially created souls for each individual.

This totally holds true with my personal catholic upbringing in the 1970s, where factors such as the age of the earth, or evolution of humans and apes from a common ancestor, were never in doubt and were freely taught at catholic-run schools. To a catholic, rigid belief in literal biblical creationism would be a very "protestant" thing and would seem very strange.


This partially gives us the answer. In Tolkien's letters and his reworkings of the Silmarillion mythos from the 1950s on, we see him slowly dismantling the more mythical elements and replacing them with concepts that align more closely with real-world cosmology and history. So the sun and the moon can't have been created just after the death of the Trees, they must have always been there; the earth can't have been originally flat, it must have always been round; men can't have only recently awoken, they must be much older.



So it can definitely be demonstrated that Tolkien absolutely did not adhere to biblical creationism, quite the opposite in fact, and he expended considerable effort in making his feigned history a truer facsimile of real history (and pre-history).


Over the same time something also happened to his conception of his Elves, and they became higher, purer, more noble, more "unfallen". We see an example of this in the number of loopholes he invented in his attempts to disassociate Galadriel from the Feanorian rebellion.



I think in the end he just didn't want Elves to be the origin of Orcs. There were too many questions around immortality and rebirth, and he was no longer prepared to handwave this kind of thing with mythical explanations. By trying to root his work in real-world cosmology and history, he'd undermined the mythical elements.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by mhagain

So it can definitely be demonstrated that Tolkien absolutely did not adhere to biblical creationism, quite the opposite in fact, and he expended considerable effort in making his feigned history a truer facsimile of real history (and pre-history).

I was not speaking of literal seven day creation versus evolution.
My meaning was that in the Bible, Satan is a supremely gifted (and originally beautiful) divine spirit. He is not, however, a creator. He is a masterful liar and corruptor.
That is the parallel I was aiming for.

[Mithadan]

Glancing over the other Myths Transformed texts, I feel like the shift from the simple "they're elves" version came about because of the Athrabeth. Finrod tells Andreth that he cannot believe that Morgoth could change the Doom and nature of a whole people. In that text he was referring to her claim that Men were not supposed to be Mortal, but Tolkien seems to have realised it applied equally to making Orcs inheritably evil. Everything from then on was an attempt to write himself out of that contradiction, by making them either no longer Eruhini, or so crushed by Morgoth's spirit and will that they weren't entirely rational creatures any more.

Huinesoron, certainly the Athrabeth introduces a new idea in the mythos; that Men were, in their original nature, possibly "undying" like Elves but were rendered mortal as a result of some event in the distant and nearly forgotten past akin to a "fall." I do not have the Athrabeth in front of me, but I seem to recall that Andreth attributes the mortality of Man to some act or influence of Morgoth, while Finrod believes (as he was taught in Valinor) that the nature of Man was set by Eru, though he voices concern that, if Andreth's view was true, Morgoth was far more powerful that the Noldor believed. To Finrod, the "marring" of Man by Morgoth is the fear of death and Man's view that the darkness of Morgoth and the darkness are death are one and the same. The Arthrabeth is, in part, a debate between differing views, as well as an attempt by Finrod to understand why Men alternatively fear and revere Elves.

If JRRT's shifting view of the origin of Orcs is attributable to the "fall" (and the marring of Man and the biblical "fall" are not the same, see Letter 153 the metaphysic of JRRT's mythical world is not the same as the metaphysic of the "real World") of Man, then the Arthrabeth is relevant to this discussion. The Athrabeth could be considered, indirectly, to be a rationalization of Tolkien's possible change in view of the origin of Orcs. Yet I am not convinced of this.