Gleanings from the Biography: Recipe for Orcs

[littlemanpoet]

Here and there scattered through the late Humphrey Carpenter's authorized biography of Tolkien or fascinating little references to things, people, place, and events to which had a negative visceral reaction.

Upon reading the first one, I had to laugh. See what I mean.....

[Tolkien] loved much of Paris and enjoyed exploring the city on his own, but he disliked the Frenchmen he saw in the streets, and wrote to Edith about 'the vulgarity and the jabber and spitting and the indecency'.

(p. 75, paperback version, 1977)

Were Parisian street Frenchmen part of the recipe for Tolkien's orcs in LotR?

But you Anglophile Francophobes had better not be too quick to laugh at your cousins across the Channel. Take note:

Conditions were uniformly uncomfortable, and in the intervals between inedible meals, trench drill, and lectures on machine-guns, there was little to do except play bridge (which he enjoyed) and listen to ragtime on the gramophone (which he did not). Nor did he care for the majority of his fellow officers. 'Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors,' he told Edith, 'and even human beings are rare indeed.'

(p. 87)

Am I all wet, or is this a piece of orc-dom? Are there any such references from his Letters?

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Are there any such references from his Letters?

Indeed there are. On a number of occasions, Tolkien uses the words 'Orcs' and 'Urukhai' to refer to aspects of humanity which he found unpleasant, particularly in his letters to his son, Christopher:

Letter #66 (dated 6 May 1944):

For we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs. 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.

(How right he was)

Similarly, in Letter #71 (dated 25 May 1944):

I hope that ypu will have some more leave in genuine Africa, ere too long. Away from the 'lesser servants of Mordor'. Yes, I think that the orcs are as real a creation as anything in 'realistic' fiction: your vigorous words well describe the tribe; only in real life they are on both sides, of course.

Letter #78 (dated 12 Augist 1944):

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

Letter #96 (dated 30 January 1945):

Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children, pouring West, dying on the way. 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 the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilisation in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted.

Of course, these examples all date from after Tolkien's original conception of Orcs, but they tend to indicate what aspects of humanity he identified them with. To him, it seems, Orcs represented all that was bad about humanity encapsulated in a single race.