[William Cloud Hicklin]

Please do keep in mind that Shagrat and Gorbag are NOT 'real, true, grumbling soldiers:' they aren't talking about going home and opening a pub, their wish is to go loot, murder and rape on their own rather than for somebody else.

Tolkien's problem with the Orcs operates on a theological level, not a practical one. Frankly I get rather annoyed at the school of criticism, so dominant today, which demands (a) 'realism' and (b) moral ambiguity. The abstractive process Tolkien called 'Recovery" can with perfect validity take the form of distilling good and evil one from the other.

I put 'realism' in quotes because the supposed 'realism' of academe often bears little resemblance to the actual world. It produces notions like the following: " if they are stupid & vicious as well we are forced to ask ourselves whether we could expect anything else, given that they are brought up without education, ambition, or hope for the future.." Well, here I'm on my home ground, criminal law. Yes, we can very well "expect anything else." I assure you, the majority of young men from the ghetto "are brought up without education, ambition, or hope for the future," and yet they do NOT become thugs. Actual empiricism, real-world evidence, here as so often elsewhere is the death of the flat universalisms so indicative of a priori thinking.