[davem]

This chapter struck me on my first reading as a kind of ‘linking chapter’, simply a way of accounting for Merry & Pippin’s necessary appearance in Fangorn, but obviously there’s much more than that going on. This is the first (only?) time in the whole legendarium where we see Orcs as more than simple ‘monsters’. We see, for instance, that they aren’t simply stupid thugs (well, not all them).

Forgive this long quote from Brian Rosebury’s Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon:

With the Orcs, whose speech is intended to suggest a closed militaristic culture of hatred & cruelty, Tolkien draws on a number of models. Indeed, there are at least three different dialogue-types for Orcs, corresponding to differences of rank and of tribe.. (None of them, incidentally, is ‘working-class’, except in the minds of critics who - themselves, it seems, unconsciously equating ‘degraded language’ with ‘working-class’ language - have convinced themselves that the Orcs’ malign utterances betray Tolkien’s disdain for ‘mere working people’.) The comparatively cerebral Grishnakh, for example, talks like a melodrama villain, or a public school bully.

The Uruk-hai, Grishnakh’s rivals, are an arrogant warrior horde, not without a certain esprit de corps, and are given to yelling war cries. (‘Bring out your King! We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We will fetch him from his hole, if he does not come. Bring out your skulking king!’) Lastly, the dialogue between individual Orcs at moments of animosity (which is most of the time) is brutal & squalid in a rather underpowered way.

If Tolkien is reduced here to stylised snarls, & bowdlerised suggestions of excremental vituperation, one recognises his difficulty: more overt obscenity & violence would not so much have offended twentieth-century sensibilities as have evoked, incongruously, the world of the twentieth-century crime novel. Most readers, engrossed in the narrative, will absorb this functional, & sufficiently expressive, dialogue without being unduly detained by its artificiality or derivativeness.

We see they are clever, cunning, articulate (in a letter to the producer of a BBC radio adaptation Tolkien points out that they don’t ‘drop their aitches) & even bi-lingual:

One of the Orcs sitting near laughed and said something to a companion in their abominable tongue. 'Rest while you can, little fool!" he said then to Pippin, in the Common Speech, which he made almost as hideous as his own language. ...

To Pippin's surprise he found that much of the talk was intelligible; many of the Orcs were using ordinary language. Apparently the members of two or three quite different tribes were present, and they could not understand one another's orc-speech.

This mention of ‘tribes’ of Orcs would seem to imply differnces in Orcish culture - even to the extent of having devloped seperate languages which are so different they cannot be understood by Orcs of other tribes. In short, these creatures are not simple stupid savages, but inteligent creatures. So, Tolkien is clearly wanting to disabuse us of any idea that they ‘don’t know any better’. They are vicious & cruel & take pleasure in the fear & suffering they inflict, & they know full well what they’re doing.

This shows how wrong critics like the ones mentioned by Rosebury are: ‘critics who have convinced themselves that the Orcs’ malign utterances betray Tolkien’s disdain for ‘mere working people’’ (ie John Carey in the Listener). These orcs are not members of the uneducated ‘working class’; they are educated thugs.

Why is it necessary for Tolkien to make this so clear - possibly because we are about to witness the wholesale slaughter of these creatures by our ‘heroes’, but more likely because Tolkien wants us to understand the real nature of ‘Evil’ - that Evil is not something that arises from ignorance, from not really knowing what you’re doing. Evil beings in Middle earth areaware of what they’re doing, & its that very awareness, that deliberate infliction of suffering on others in full consciousness, that makes it necessary for our ‘heroes’ to stand against them - its a moral necessity to oppose that evil.

This chapter brings that home - there can be no sympathy for the ‘bad guys’ from now on. This isn’t a battle between two groups, both of whom are ‘morally ‘equal’ but on opposite sides’. The ‘Evil’ side is not ‘Evil’ simply because its the side our ‘heroes’ are fighting - its not an ‘abusive’ label they’ve applied to their enemy. The Evil side is Evil, & there is a moral imperative in operation.