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You are introducing yourself to the forum with a bang!
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Thanks! [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]
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There are problems with this statement. Elves and Men, for example, had no kinship from the beginning, but they can breed together.
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Well, I took this to mean that it was actually biologically impossible to breed, because Elves and Men do share many similarities, whereas Trolls are "unlike even the largest of Orc-kind" (paraphrased from Appendix F) - so I took this to mean that they were in fact very biologically different, or at least couldn't interbreed.
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Not definitively. He seems to have decided in one essay that they must be Men, but later he says something to the effect of "It is probable, then, that there was Elvish blood in Orcs" (sorry I don't have the actual quote at hand).
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In that essay he could not decide whther or not Orks were ELvish or not - that quote from his conclusion you just gave in fact contradicted the latter half of the essay without giving any new arguments, so I think that he was thinking as he wrote and wasn't quite sure at that time. In his final essay on the subject, however, (I think it's the one after this one) he is positive that Orks cannot be corrupted ELves and are definately fallen Men.
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Moreover, the Mannish origin for Orcs depends upon the round-world cosmogony. If you accept the flat-world version as the "authentic" one (as CRT did), then you have little choice but to say that Orcs are corrupted Elves; they first appear long before Men awaken.
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Hmm, i know about the World changing from flat to round after the Drowning of Numenor, but maybe this isn't what you're refering to (?), as I don't see how this would affect events in the pre-First Age.
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This is an interesting theory, and sounds plausible.
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[img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]
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A question, though: what about Treebeard's comments on trolls? He suggests that the relation between Ents and Trolls is analogous to that between Elves and Orcs. If Orcs are indeed Elvish, does that not mean that Trolls are Entish? (I realize that it is not certain that Orcs were bred from Elves, but it is at least a strong possibility). Of course, Treebeard's accounts are often vague and slightly inaccurate (as when he talks about the "great darkness" coming in and driving out the Elves).
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In Letters Tolkien says that "Treebeard is not me", and was in fact misinformed and wrong about that. [img]smilies/frown.gif[/img] Poor Treebeard, thinkng a bit too hasty there [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img].