[Formendacil]

I had to go looking to find this thread--turns out it was the most recently added to LotR thread, other than the ones I've gone through already--and I only have myself to blame!

The whole thread is almost exclusively about orks--and especially about the nature of orks. It's a near-inexhaustible topic, if only because Tolkien himself never settled on an answer, the matter itself presenting a few conundrums.

The question occurred to me: is there anything obvious to discuss for this chapter that is lost as a result of the focus on orkish nature? The answer is, at most, orkish details. The thread did cover Merry and Pippin, who become focal characters for the first time in a long time--Pippin has never been the main character onstage, and since "A Conspiracy Unmasked," he's rarely had much to do. Merry is arguably the secondary of the two in this chapter--he even lampshades that it is Pippin's chapter.

That brings us back to the orks, and I think that although we lookedbat a great deal of orkish nature, the individual orkish characters still have a lot of meat on the bone. Grishnakh, for instance, has a lot of fascinating things to say about life in Lugburz. Granted that he has clearly been given a special mission, he seems to know an awful lot: about Gollum, about the Ring, about Sauron's plans for the winged Nazgul. Is Grishnakh typical of Mordorian orks or an exceptional specimen?

It's easy enough to believe that Mordor would be full enough of treachery and gossip that it couldn't keep a secret, but does this mean there are orks listening a keyholes to Sauron's war councils? It's a lot harder to imagine if you take a movie-image and assume that Sauron is a giant eyeball. Of course, Grishnakh might be an exceptional specimen, a Mordorian James Bond (does that make his red-eye-bearing Mordorian companions who turn up late in the game something like Seal Team 6?) I mean, the Nazgul are oresumably not ferrying grunts across the River: this is the War's most critical operation!

And we don't really realise it as the readers, but the good guys pull a massive skein of wool over the enemies' eyes here: Merry and Pippin's capture is the distraction that draws Sauron's attention (and Saruman's) away from Rauros, the Emyn Muil--and Frodo and Sam. Without Merry and Pippin's presence, the whole "war as a feint to distract from Frodo's mission" ploy would have probably failed--certainly, Sauron might have noticed if there were no hobbits among the splintered members of the Fellowship he was tracking down.