LotR -- Book 3 - Chapter 03 - The Uruk-Hai

[The Saucepan Man]

Just a quick post to highlight some more passages from the Letters relevant to the current discussion of Orcs.

... the Orcs - who are fundamentally a race of 'rational incarnate' creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. [Letter #153]

The letter is a draft (to Peter Hastings) dated September 1954. So at this stage Tolkien regarded Orcs as rational beings. And, as davem has noted, he also regarded them as representing a certain aspect of human behaviour. There are similar references earlier on, in his letters to his son, Christopher:

There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in this present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary or inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. [Letter #96: January 1945]

Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side .... Well, there you are: a hobbit amongst the Urukhai [Letter #66: May 1944]

Although the comparison of Orcs and Men was by reference to their nature rather than its origin:

Urukhai is only a figure of speech. There are no genuine Uruks, that is folks made bad by the intention of their maker; and not many who are so corrupted as to be irredeemable (though I fear that it must be admitted that there are human creatures that seem irredeemably bad short of a special miracle, and there are probably abnormally many of such creatures in Deutschland and Nippon - but certainly these unhappy countries have no monopoly: I have met them, or thought so, in England's green and pleasant land).[Letter #78: August 1944]

Must dash now. It's late ...