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Orcs need hugs too!

Originally Posted by davem

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....

I'm sure that their population follows the usual bell curve distribution, where most are something, and a few are different at both ends. Where Shagrat and Gorbag fall, I'm not sure. I'm guessing that the orc pacifist-poets remain hidden within the population, as, due to their society, this would been seen as a weakness - acting human - and allow others to take from them with the consensus of the crowd.

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.

But I'd say that they just want to be 'top dog;' not interesting in changing things in a so-called enlightened way, but just dream that one day they would be calling the shots and get all of the loot.

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.

Boromir, Sam, Frodo et al didn't have dreams or desires, or want to buck the system?

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?

It was cool to read that the orcs weren't video-game horde villains, but actually were realistic animals with biological needs as vital as any organism.

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.

I don't think that there was time to 'evolve' them into something more benign. We read of times in the history of Middle Earth when orcs *weren't* multiplying (were they all accountants?), and so maybe we have examples of Pax Orcana when the majority of living orcs were more reasonable (though genetically susceptible to the call of an evil leader).

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?

I think that he was trying to keep the characters both interesting and not so muddy. We could have had Saruman the Repentant, but then he could have fallen away later in the story yet again, and so on...makes one think that killing him on a spiky wheel simplifies the story greatly.

The LotR story takes place in a year. Show me someone who turns around completely in such a time, especially if they've had years (even thousands) in which to become such a person. For example, few addicts simply put down their junk and walk away and not feel any side effects or cravings or backslide or whatever, especially if they've been using for a long time. Theoden didn't shake off his issues quickly, and he even had Gandalf's help. Anyway...

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....

Agreed, though it does point out that people can remain people even during conflict.