[Zigûr]

Does anyone have any personal theories on how Professor Tolkien could have reconciled the origins of Orcs with the metaphysics of the story? Something he might have overlooked? While I think the "corrupted Elves" idea is an elegant one, I do agree that the question of how Morgoth could make their condition inheritable and why Eru would continue to endow them with fëar is problematic. That being said I was never entirely convinced that turning them into corrupted Men was necessarily the best alternative, because it always seemed to me that Men didn't need to be corrupted in the same way as Elves might to become Orcs - that they already Fell further and had a greater vulnerability to Evil without the need for them to be subjected to torments and experimentation.

It's the same as the Sun and Moon origin and Round vs Flat First/Second Age World conundrums I think - the earlier, more mythological stories are so poetic that it's a shame they started to jar so much with the Professor's desire for Arda to seem like a realistic place.

In that regard as a reflection of Professor Tolkien's philosophical ruminations perhaps a definitive origin of Orcs is best left ambiguous - it would certainly emphasise that suggestion in the aforementioned Letter 153 of "Orcism" as a state of character or behaviour being a persistent degeneracy among people in the present day; that the hatefulness and moral decrepitude of the monstrous soldiers of the ancient past are almost a standard of normalcy in the "grey and leafless world" of modern times.