[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Boromir88

It's one of my disappointments in the movie, because Grishnakh is shown to be driven by just wanting to munch on some hobbit legs. We miss out on an interesting orc, as well as Pippin's development, to be quick thinking and resourceful! Anyway...

That was a very disappointing whiff.

Originally Posted by Boromir88

because orcs I've assumed just can't be trusted for such an important tasks. Or trusted with "classified" information, such as knowing about the One Ring.

I think that impression comes because of Gandalf's statement about orc trustworthiness when he is speaking with the part of the Fellowship that made it to Isengard. There are also statements to that effect in Unfinished Tales, The Disaster of the Gladden Fields, where Tolkien is speaking in his omniscient authorial voice.

However...

Originally Posted by Boromir88

How did he become such a learned orc?

I think Inzil is right.

Originally Posted by Inziladun

I would think it possible that some of the higher ranking Orcs could have been told that Saruman was looking for a ring, and couldn't be allowed to have it. Even Sauron couldn't keep all his underlings completely in the dark (pun not intended).

Add in the possibility that Grishnákh could have heard rumors about Gollum's earlier capture, or even had a hand in it. And, later, Gollum was allowed to "escape" from Mordor by Sauron. That sort of thing would cause tremendous curiosity among Sauron's servants in the know, and I don't think it's unlikely that some news of why Gollum was important to Sauron could have been discovered by the rank and file.

I think Grishnákh was high ranking in Barad-dur and I think it very likely, given his immediate reaction to Pippin, that he had personally encountered Gollum. He was an emissary, inherently a position of trust. This may have been a role he had fulfilled to many people and places. He might have been a well travelled orc; perhaps even to the level of being an anti-hero of another tale.

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Add this tidbit, from the Chronology: Ugluk and his band, long before G ever showed up, had captured Gollum lurking on the borders of Lorien, and Questioned him. Not only that, but here's the interesting part- from this Ugluk was able to deduce that the Ring had been present. And still more interesting, this last bit of crucial info he elects NOT to include in his report to Orthanc.

Now, how on earth did Ugluk know so much? And how does that color his response to Grishnakh?

Wonder why Ugluk wouldn't have thought that he himself didn't know too much.

Originally Posted by Formendacil

The fact that Grishnákh seems to know more than the other two tells us something

I think he knew more because he worked at Barad-dur and not on the frontier.

Originally Posted by Formendacil

I think there's a tendency to think of Mordor as a secretive society, partly because we know so little about it and partly because to the good guys the Ring (and what they're doing with it) is a great and terrible secret, but we don't actually know what is secret and what is public in Mordor. In a "panopticon" sort of way, I wonder if things might have been more dreadfully public than we think.

In a way it makes sense. When there is no possibility of being overthrown from within what harm is there in lax information security? Especially when there is very little chance of communication between your people and the enemy.

Still, I think given the overall tone of the descriptions of how Sauron conducted his operations, I think he kept things pretty close to the vest.

As an aside, in my early days, I had always thought that Grishnákh was an emissary to the Misty Mountain orcs. I believe now that he must have joined Ugluk around the time that the Nazgul had the winged beast killed by Legolas because Grishnákh was accompanying that Nazgul.

Still, it makes sense that Sauron may have dispatched somebody post haste to Moria after figuring out that the Ring was headed that way.

EDIT: Or perhaps Grishnákh was posted to Dol Guldur at the time..?