Origins of the Great Goblin

[Troelsfo]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Anyway, I've posited that the Orcs were indeed not necessarily all of the same original stock. Maybe the uruks came from Elves or Men, with the "trackers" coming from the Drúedain, or something like that. Orcs did obviously possess different physical characteristics.

I have more or less given up on the Orcs

The whole question of what the Orcs were, how they came to be etc. is so wrought with problems and huge inconsistencies that attempting to make sense of it inevitably creates some hybrid that is far from anything Tolkien ever imagined. Even within The Lord of the Rings he cannot settle on a single view, and we get passages that clearly reflect (even in the authorial voice) the older view that the Orcs were indeed demonic spawns created by Morgoth in mockery of the Elves, while other passages show the emergence of the new view, that the Orcs are a corruption of some pre-existing creatures.

What we know about the Drúedain was written quite late in Tolkien's life — even later than the various musing about the Orcs that we see in ‘Myths Transformed’ (Morgoth's Ring), and it is impossible to say how the hints there should be seen in connection with the statements elsewhere — all we can know is that any detailed guess, while possibly logically consistent (or as consistent as possible), almost inevitably will represent something Tolkien never imagined.