Orcseys - always Evil?

[davem]

Originally Posted by DSU

We don't ponder if it had been possible to cure the witch in the gingerbread house from her cannibalistic tendencies, but we are just happy that Hansel and Gretel got to push her into an oven, which actually makes the children murderers, now that I think of it.

I think a lot of adults actually do ponder that - or at least how the Witch got to be such a bad Witch. They also prefer to rewrite the original stories so that the Witch gets either rehabilitated or runs off & is never heard of again. Yet...

As Chesterton put it:"Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy." (A line Tolkien quotes in OFS). As Tolkien says, this seems to sum up the difference between child & adult readers.

Child readers of TH, LotR (& even The Sil, if any attempted it), & particularly of FCL, would not think twice about whether Goblins have been treated fairly by fate, Eru, or Tolkien. They would simply accept that there are Goblins out there (as, for them, there seem to be in the 'real' world), & that Goblins do bad things for which they will be punished (or at least shunned). Children don't actually want, until we well-meaning adults force them, to 'understand' bad, selfish, cruel people. They don't want to know why they are bad, or whether, if things had been different for them, they would have turned into nice people.

And I'd say its the same for the child in us - if we're honest - we don't actually care whether the Orcs could have been nice if they'd had a chance, we don't care whether or not they will have a chance to repent of their bad deeds at some point in the future & become useful members of M-e society. We actually want to see some justice done on them from a great height (& again, if we're honest, most of us would like to see the same thing happen to the 'Orcs' we regularly encounter on the streets, & we care as little about why they are the way the are as we do about the Orcs in M-e.)

Personally, I can't help feeling that all this agonising over the nature of Orcs is just likely to destroy the magic of the story - bit like having the stereotypical Guardian reading Blairite type popping up in Moria to lecture the Fellowship on the sins of Dwarvish colonialism on innocent Balrogs & how Gimli ought to offer an apology for his ancestor's actions in disturbing it, or turning up in Shelob's Lair to tell Frodo & Sam that 'Its more afraid of you than you are of it...'