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

[Formendacil]

I have been, very slowly, rereading The Lord of the Rings this summer (so much less free time than when I was half-employed...) and, having both pushed on into "Treebeard" and having found myself pining for meaty Barrow-discussion, I thought I'd dig up this old thread. Nor have I been disappointed.

There are nuggets aplenty in here, and a few that have me wondering/thinking.

Originally Posted by Nilpaurion Felagund

This thing troubles me in this chapter:

Why is the badge of Saruman white? Why not a rainbow? Or anything multi-coloured?

There's a bit of speculation here, but I wonder if there might have been more--this might have almost warranted a thread in itself! (Assuming such a thing did not exist back in the day--after all, this was before I even joined the Downs!)

The reason this comment struck me with particular reference to the chapter at hand, however, is this: the whole thread revolves around orks. They are the centrepiece of the chapter and thus of the discussion, and even taking into account "The Choices of Master Samwise" and "The Tower of Cirith Ungol," this is the most substantial account of them we have, encompassing the entire chapter and three different branches of their kind (Northern, Isengarder, and Mordorian--Grishnákh has always seemed clearly distinct from the Northerners to me, a point that I think the movies have somewhat obscured.)

Anyway, this chapter is all about the orks, and the picture is vivid: orks are not pleasant. Yet, in connection with the comment of Master Felagund quoted above, I have to wonder if the Isengarders at least might not be clean. The white page, says Saruman, can be overwritten, and I say that the white car gets muddy easily, and I can't imagine the White Hand being much better. Yet the Uruk-hai, with their martial pride, seem likely to want to keep their emblems clear. Does this mean they're likely a rather clean people?

On a related note, perhaps it's only those who hold that "cleanliness is next to godliness" that would have a problem with this connection in the first place.

Originally Posted by davem

...the symbolism of the Dragon as 'Death' & how the Orcs are different in the sense that they are potential victims of this cosmic 'fact' - hence the Dragon would not need to 'repent'. The Orcish question arises only if Evil is a corruption of Good, not if it is a fact in itself. If Evil is an equal & opposite force then Orcs would be a physical manifestation of it as elves & men are of Good. Hence the opportunity for repentance is only necessary if the Orcs need a chance to return to what they had been created to be, not if they are what they were intended to be.

So the question Tolkien confronts us with is about our own beliefs - whether we are Manichaeans or Boethians....

It's a pity davem lost the original draft of that post, because, ten years later, I would like to read it; the surviving redaction is intriguing. I like the comparison to dragons, and I agree that the reason free will crops up so much with orks and not so much with dragons may well have to do with the utterness of their evil. Tolkien himself, in all his post-LotR attempts to niggle an answer to the "Problem of Ork-Evil" does not seem to have minded that dragons, as sentient beings, ought on the face of it to have a similar free will problem.

(Mind you, there are other issues that bear on it, such as the fact that dragons could far more plausibly be bodies incarnated by evil Maiarin spirits, or the fact that Orks are meant to be a deliberate perversion of the Eruhini and thus fraught with extra complications dragons are free from, but I think the basic idea here still has merit to consider.)


Turning to the chapter itself, rather than this distilled brandy of a discussion, it struck me in reading just how creepy Grishnákh is. More so than any other ork, and possibly more so than any other villain in The Lord of the Rings, Grishnákh seems wicked. By contrast, Uglúk seems almost honest--Grishnákh's contempt for him makes the Uruk-hai seem almost like noble warriors.

...but then I catch myself remembering, at the end of the chapter, how Merry and Pippin feel about the prospect of the Uruk-hai winning the battle against the Riders. To them, it is clear, Uglúk and his ilk are every bit as bad as Grishnákh; it is only me, as the reader, that sees Uglúk as markedly better. A reminder, perhaps, that the lesser of two evils still looks pretty evil.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

Anyway, this chapter is all about the orks, and the picture is vivid: orks are not pleasant. Yet, in connection with the comment of Master Felagund quoted above, I have to wonder if the Isengarders at least might not be clean. The white page, says Saruman, can be overwritten, and I say that the white car gets muddy easily, and I can't imagine the White Hand being much better. Yet the Uruk-hai, with their martial pride, seem likely to want to keep their emblems clear. Does this mean they're likely a rather clean people?

To touch on this one point, I don't see the Isengarders as being particularly clean. When in their custody, Pippin noted the "filthy jowl and hairy ear" of one of them. Aside from being physically stronger, and maybe a bit more disciplined than usual, they seem like other Orcs pretty much.

As for the badges, when Aragorn finds the shields of the dead Isengarders slain by Boromir, it is seen that they have "a strange device: a small white hand in the center of a black field; on the front of their iron helms was set an S-rune, wrought of some white metal".

The white hand on black could have been a way for Saruman to show a dominance of the White (his own twisted version of it) over the Black, represented by Sauron. Or, maybe an alliance between the two.

That the "S" was white would merely be in keeping with the hand's color.

[Formendacil]

I had to go looking to find this thread--turns out it was the most recently added to LotR thread, other than the ones I've gone through already--and I only have myself to blame!

The whole thread is almost exclusively about orks--and especially about the nature of orks. It's a near-inexhaustible topic, if only because Tolkien himself never settled on an answer, the matter itself presenting a few conundrums.

The question occurred to me: is there anything obvious to discuss for this chapter that is lost as a result of the focus on orkish nature? The answer is, at most, orkish details. The thread did cover Merry and Pippin, who become focal characters for the first time in a long time--Pippin has never been the main character onstage, and since "A Conspiracy Unmasked," he's rarely had much to do. Merry is arguably the secondary of the two in this chapter--he even lampshades that it is Pippin's chapter.

That brings us back to the orks, and I think that although we lookedbat a great deal of orkish nature, the individual orkish characters still have a lot of meat on the bone. Grishnakh, for instance, has a lot of fascinating things to say about life in Lugburz. Granted that he has clearly been given a special mission, he seems to know an awful lot: about Gollum, about the Ring, about Sauron's plans for the winged Nazgul. Is Grishnakh typical of Mordorian orks or an exceptional specimen?

It's easy enough to believe that Mordor would be full enough of treachery and gossip that it couldn't keep a secret, but does this mean there are orks listening a keyholes to Sauron's war councils? It's a lot harder to imagine if you take a movie-image and assume that Sauron is a giant eyeball. Of course, Grishnakh might be an exceptional specimen, a Mordorian James Bond (does that make his red-eye-bearing Mordorian companions who turn up late in the game something like Seal Team 6?) I mean, the Nazgul are oresumably not ferrying grunts across the River: this is the War's most critical operation!

And we don't really realise it as the readers, but the good guys pull a massive skein of wool over the enemies' eyes here: Merry and Pippin's capture is the distraction that draws Sauron's attention (and Saruman's) away from Rauros, the Emyn Muil--and Frodo and Sam. Without Merry and Pippin's presence, the whole "war as a feint to distract from Frodo's mission" ploy would have probably failed--certainly, Sauron might have noticed if there were no hobbits among the splintered members of the Fellowship he was tracking down.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

It's easy enough to believe that Mordor would be full enough of treachery and gossip that it couldn't keep a secret, but does this mean there are orks listening a keyholes to Sauron's war councils? It's a lot harder to imagine if you take a movie-image and assume that Sauron is a giant eyeball. Of course, Grishnakh might be an exceptional specimen, a Mordorian James Bond (does that make his red-eye-bearing Mordorian companions who turn up late in the game something like Seal Team 6?) I mean, the Nazgul are oresumably not ferrying grunts across the River: this is the War's most critical operation!

My personal opinion is that, yes, Grishnákh had some kind of connection to Mordor's internal security: "That is a very interesting remark [...] I may have to report that." Perhaps less Bond and more something like the Gestapo or NKVD. He also mentions someone called "the Questioner" whom I could easily see being one of the Mouth of Sauron's cronies, if not the Mouth himself.

And we don't really realise it as the readers, but the good guys pull a massive skein of wool over the enemies' eyes here: Merry and Pippin's capture is the distraction that draws Sauron's attention (and Saruman's) away from Rauros, the Emyn Muil--and Frodo and Sam. Without Merry and Pippin's presence, the whole "war as a feint to distract from Frodo's mission" ploy would have probably failed--certainly, Sauron might have noticed if there were no hobbits among the splintered members of the Fellowship he was tracking down.

It occurs to me in regards to this that a more cynical Elrond and Gandalf might have sent out multiple parties featuring hobbits to keep the Eye unfocused.