[Troelsfo]

Originally Posted by Galin

Good digging! I'm perhaps wrong -- or didn't dig deep enough myself -- but I have a vague memory of not finding Frodo's statement in any of the draft texts represented in HME,

You're right, the statement is not there expressly.

Originally Posted by Galin

I don't have Sauron Defeated at hand at the moment, but when you write: '... Frodo's statement enters at the earliest in the first fair copy manuscript, denoted D in Christopher Tolkien's explanations in Sauron Defeated.'

... does this rule out that it entered later?

I suppose it doesn't rule it out explicitly, but I would say that it does rule it out implicitly.

Christopher Tolkien writes

Originally Posted by Sauron Defeated, p.26

From ‘“That's done it!” said Sam. “Now I've rung the front-door bell!”’ a draft text ('C') takes up. This is written in a script so difficult that a good deal of it would be barely comprehensible had it not been closely followed in the fair copy D.[12] The final story was now reached, and there is little to record of these texts.

and notes in note 12 that

Originally Posted by Sauron Defeated, p.30

The very rough draft C stops near the beginning of Sam's conversation with Frodo in the topmost chamber (RK p. 187), and from that point there are only isolated passages of drafting extant; but the latter part of D was much corrected in the act of writing, and was probably now to a large extent the primary composition.

After this, Christopher Tolkien goes on to note differences between texts C, D, the later fair copy E, and the final text without noting anything about Frodo's statement despite the focus he has given throughout the whole of The History of Middle-earth series to the matter of the origin of the Orcs, then I think it is reasonable to assume that if this statement had not been present in D when “the final story was [...] reached”, then he would have noted this.

Actually I am a little surprised that he doesn't note this point at all — I would have expected him to comment on this point, though at that point he might have had other things on his mind Still, if this statement not been present in text D, then I am certain that this would have been noted.

<snipping suggested chronology>

Originally Posted by Galin

That would seem [to me] a bit more 'tidy' as far as the external chronology goes, in conjunction with this change in thinking... but again I'm not sure it's possible and may be missing something.

I agree that it would be more tidy, and would have to acknowledge that the presentation in Sauron Defeated cannot entirely rule this out, though I think the odds are not in favour of it (the whole episode about Cirith Ungol, including the earlier discussions between Shagrat and Gorbag, seems to me to suggest this newer view — I can hardly imagine the earlier Orcs, created in mockery of the Elves by Morgoth from stone, having the kind of discussion that we are, through Sam, allowed to witness between these two captains. The evolutions of Tolkien's legendarium is, unfortunately, quite often not tidy — take the issue of the round vs. the flat world versions of the cosmogonic myth: we know that Tolkien was playing with both ideas during the time he wrote LotR and we can see traces of both in the text (the round-world version is best seen in e.g. Gimli's song about Durin in Moria: “No stain yet on the Moon was seen, / [...] / When Durin woke and walked alone.” Durin awoke in the First Age long before the rising of the Moon and the Sun according to the flat-world version).