Sauron the Gene-maker

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

I'm just saying that one has to consider the Hobbits at that point were absolutely miserable. So, perhaps, these obnoxious flies seemed simply orkish, but weren't necessarily Sauronian.

Perhaps. It's just odd that Mordor is the only place we see such flies. Normal flies can be nasty too, and the idea of the passage doesn't change if the red blotch part was taken out of it. Like maggots and midgets, they would just be creating the atmosphere. But instead they become "special edition" flies.

I'm not saying Tolkien implied genetic engineering, in the literal sense, with that description. But it's something to speculate about for fun, and I feel that red-dotted flies didn't just happen to live in the land where everything had a red eye painted on it.