LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 03 - The Uruk-Hai

[davem]

Originally Posted by SpM

Do we see 'Orcish magic' in action here? While clearly not as wholesome or as pleasant, the Orc draught and Uglúk's medicine would appear to share some of the same properties as Elvish provisions.

And who brewed the draught? And the 'antiseptic'? In other words, how 'advanced' is Orcish society? They do appear to have a moral value system - Gorbag's 'Regular Elvish trick' comment in response to finding Frodo lying in the pass. In other words, as far as he is concerned Elves are not moral beings in his eyes, as they behave in a contemptible way as regards their fallen comrades. It seems from Shagrat's response that he doesn't take this as being an ironic comment (Shippey goes into this in depth).

We also have comments in this chapter about orcs being 'good lads', which almost seems to imply that if they don't care about their own kind (in the sense of feeling compassion for them), they do value them in some way.

These don't seem to be the same Orcs we encounter in the Silmarillion. But do they have free will? And if they do, why don't they use it to behave in a more 'humane' way. The orcs in this chapter are not stupid, 'robotic' brutes (as in the movie), they are inteligent, reasoning thugs.

What interests me in this context is Tolkien' use of the term in relation to human beings - there's an example in George Sayer's essay 'Reflections of JRR Tolkien' (in the 1992 Centenary Collection:

Though he was generally interested in birds & insects, his greatest love seemed to be for trees. He had loved trees since childhood. He would often place his hand on the trunks of ones that we passed. He felt their wanton or unnescessary felling almost as murder. the first time I heard him say 'ORCS' was when we heard not far off the savage sound of a petrol-driven chain saw...

Did he really believe that the man using that chain saw was an 'ORC'? Did he really believe that he was no better than Grishnakh?

Are we getting an insight into Tolkien's own moral value system here? Is he showing us that the Orcs do have the capacity for moral thought, but have consciously rejected the 'Good' - & more importantly, did he believe that some human beings do exactly the same thing?

Yet, not all human beings behave in an Orcish fashion, but [i]all/i] Orcs do. I suppose it coould be argued that Tolkien isn't presenting us here with a fully developed race of beings, good, bad & indifferent - as he is with Elves & Men - but with a 'type' of human being he had encountered in 'real' life. 'Orcs' are the 'enemy' for Tolkien, because in a sense they were his primary world enemy in a mythological setting. They were the 'chain saw wielding tree-murderers' he heard while walking that day with George Sayer.

And the more interesting, but more difficult, question is, did Tolkien believe those foresters were equally beyond redemption? Perhaps that's the real 'moral' question here: not how an entire race could be iredeemably evil & deserving of death, but what they symbolised for Tolkien, & whether he felt some people really were 'Orcs'.

Perhaps if we can answer that we can make a stab at the 'Orcish question'. Elves & Men are aspects of the 'Human' as Tolkien said - & we can accept that easily enough, but if Orcs aren't simply the 'bad guys', the necessary 'two dimensional' enemy for his heroes to slaughter without worrying about the morality of the act (as they certainly deserved what they got), but are also an aspect of the 'human' for Tolkien what does that tell us about him?