[davem]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

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.

So where are the 'majority' of Orcs who do not become thugs then? Given the number of Orcs available to Sauron in the book if the thuggish Orcs constitute merely a 'minority' then the corpses of the majority of good, decent, compassionate & forward thinking Orcs, the ones with ambition, the ones who want to get themselves out of Mordor & make something of their lives, must be ten deep across the whole of Mordor - unless the other Orcs have come up with their own equivalent of Soylent Green....

Sorry, the Orcs must be corrupted, ground down & twisted into the sub human monsters we see in the book....except, some of them do dream & hope - & it matters not at all for the purpose of this argument that they dream about loot, murder & rape - what matters is that they dream about 'freedom' from Sauron, breaking free from the restriction, the fear, the hopelessness which is all they have known. And for my argument here what matters is that that very desire, those very fears, make them out of place in Tolkien's fairystory world. Every other being, from every other race, obeys the rules of the world they inhabit. None of them, Men, Elves, Dwarves, Balrogs, as we encounter them would fit into the Primary World - they are all true to their fairy story origins, but these Orcs are not. They have strayed out of some 'realistic' novel & have no place in Faerie. Luckily, they are dispatched quickly & so can be forgotten.

As Bb asks, why did Tolkien give such a 'modern' voice to the Orcs? Indeed, why did he make them such modern people? With such a modern attitude?

Perhaps because Mordor is the ultimate 'modern' state & so produces 'modern' rebels. Yet, & here perhaps is the most interesting issue raised (to my mind, of course), there is no desire on Tolkien's part to have these rebels 'saved', for that first, tentative reaching for freedom from the crushing weight of Sauron's heel, to have a chance to develop into something beyond looting, rape & murder. They are 'evil' so they are damned.

And that's another interesting thing about Tolkien's world & the philosophy which underlies it - many 'sinners' are offered the chance of forgiveness & redemption, but how many of them actually take it? And why not - think of them - Gollum, Denethor, Wormtongue, Saruman? Not a one of them repents. What is Tolkien actually saying there - that offering forgiveness & the chance for repentance is good for the one who makes the offer & shows his 'enlightened' state, but is ultimately pointless, because once a bad guy always a bad guy?

And that brings us to the incident with the fallen Haradrim

It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.

That tells us absolutely nothing about the dead man - it merely shows us Sam's sensitive nature - the man himself could well be a 'thug' who only wanted to do a bit of looting, rape & murder, & maybe deserved to cop it....