Do the Orcs Love their Children, Too?

For those willing to take a dive into the most feverish of right wing fever swamps, Tolkien Reddit is having a moment. Because you see, on the Rings of Power a brief scene depicted an orc expressing concern over the fate of his orcish wife (spouse? domestic partner?) and orcish baby. It has been determined that this is Objective Wokeism at Its Worst, designed to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids and undermine the Fine Men of the West with relativism and post-modernism and sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden and so forth and what not.

I am willing to believe that there are those among you who have not contemplated the mating habits of orcs. JRR Tolkien certainly did, although he was not consistent on the point. Most of the time he agreed, explicitly, that orcs multiply in the same manner as elves, men, hobbits, etc., although awareness that this generated certain theological problems (can orcs accept in their hearts the Light of Illuvatar? do dead orcs pass into the Halls of Mandos? what explains the scandalous under-resourcing of LDS missionary activities in orcish communities?) did make him hedge now and again. The Jackson adaptations offer a different manner of breeding for a specific kind of orc (Saruman’s version of the Uruk Hai) but don’t tell us how a more typical Mr. and Mrs. John T. Orc might conduct their domestic economy. For the most part fans of Tolkien over the years have preferred the “orcs are a corruption of elves and thus reproduce in the manner of other Children of Illuvatar” explanation of orc society which makes it easy, in turn, to explain why orcs seem to multiply so fast after catastrophic demographic disasters. This means, in consequence, that there are Daddy Orcs and Mommy Orcs and little Baby Orcs somewhere in this world, even if we don’t see them in the text or on screen.

The thing to remember about Tolkienian mythology is that it’s almost entirely based on first, second, and third hand reporting from the participants themselves; there is no omniscient narrator. What we know of the orcs is what Elves and Men decided to write down about orcs, which is a subset of what Elves and Men knew about orcs. I would add that this is why innovations such as the “Dark Wizard” in the Rings of Power do not necessarily contradict Tolkien; maybe the elves didn’t know anything about it, maybe they didn’t think it was very important, or maybe they decided for other reasons that they didn’t want to talk to Bilbo about it. This isn’t the case with everything Rings of Power has tried (I find the mithril thing clever in an annoying way, and there may be much to answer for with respect to the Stranger), but Tolkien’s canon is far more flexible than it’s sometimes given credit for.

Back to the orcs. Tolkienian orcs are NOT D&D orcs; the latter tend to hew much more closely to what we know of stateless peoples, while the former continuously find themselves in state-like political communities, both of their own creation and under the control of foreign rulers (Morgoth, Sauron, Saruman, etc.). It is certainly possible that there are communities of orcs that are outside the control of various Dark Lords, and that these communities live differently; we don’t know, because the Elves didn’t bother writing it down. Tolkien’s orcs are far closer to the goblins and hobgoblins of D&D lore than to the orcs, although this may vary a bit across systems.

Tolkien’s orcs are hard to peg down as racial proxies. There’s a bit of Zulu, a bit more of generic Arab, more German than most folks are willing to admit, and a hell of a lot of British urban proletariat. By contrast, Jackson’s orcs have largely been Africanized (watch the Moria arc of Fellowship back-to-back with Black Hawk Down, and you’ll see what I mean). Thus, it’s tough to derive much about orc society from comparison to any particular human society. They are (weirdly) technologically advanced, generally compete for living space with dwarves, and are prone to inter-communal violence. On this last it’s noteworthy that the elves and the dwarves both have deep remembrances of their periodic Kinslayings, while the orcs refer to such events as “a day that ends in y.” Orcs cannot live in the sun; they can bear it, but they are largely limited to living underground or in conditions of minimal sunlight. Orcs seem to have politics of a sort, with various kings and chieftains governing sub-communities of various sizes.

Thus far that doesn’t tell us much about orcish domestic arrangements. We know that orcs seem to have familial attachments. Power in at least some orcish societies seems to pass along patrilineal lines, although we don’t, for example, know whether Bolg Son of Azog is the actual biological son of Azog or whether he has, in the manner of many human societies, been adopted into a position of authority. Even with regard to the aforementioned scene in Rings of Power, we have very little insight into the exactly what we’re seeing. Is this a father expressing concern for wife and child? A brother or grandfather for sister or daughter and child? Does the orc in question have a genuine attachment, or does he have all the affection for his partner and child that Henry VIII had for his wives and progeny? We don’t know, and that’s just fine; the writers have left ample space for the viewer to decide what precisely is going on.

However, if there’s one thing we know about Tolkienian orcs it’s that they don’t seem to be very good at war. Granting that the victors have written these stories, the only time that orcs seem to have much military success against Elves, Men, or Dwarves is when they are assisted by some other important ally, be it balrogs or dragons or nazgul or some of the more exotic creations of Morgoth and Sauron. To be sure the existence of the sun is a massive advantage for Elves and Men, but orcs seem to do poorly even when fighting under conditions of darkness. It’s possible (likely!) that orcs lack motivation. Because of their aversion to the sun, orcs are literally unable to live in most of the lands where they fight Elves and Men. This undoubtedly saps their willingness to give it all for whatever Dark Lord happens to have impressed them into service. But given that orcs don’t seem to be at much of a disadvantage in terms of physical strength, this seems to imply that they aren’t very good at cooperating with one another. War is the ultimate collaborative activity; if you can’t trust the people you’re working with, then you’re not going to be very good at the tactical level (which demands intense interpersonal trust and cooperation) or at the operational level (which demands careful long-term planning and reliable communication). If orcs struggle at war, it may be because they don’t tend (for cultural or biological reasons) to live in communities that generate much social trust.

That, in turn, might incline us to ask questions about what orcish family relations are really like, and thus whether typical orcs actually care that much about their mating partners or their offspring. This has to be balanced, however, against the fact that orcs do seem to consistently develop close-knit communities; we almost never hear of a single orc deciding to do anything on his or her own, while we definitely do hear about the travels of solitary humans, elves, and orcs. I think that you could probably, if you wanted to do some work, come up with a theory of how the need to live underground and away from the sun created certain orcish cultural patterns that makes them communal on the one hand but fractious and bad at war on the other. That helps solve such questions as “how do they mate if they’re always so angry at each other?” and “how do orcs date?” and of course “is there an Orc Tinder I’m unaware of?”

But these are interesting questions to ask! “Why do these wokesters want to ruin my fun by making me feel bad about killing orcs and orc babies?” is not an interesting question to ask! It’s great world-building when you can ask these kinds of questions instead of just saying “orcs are evil, duh.” I’m dumbfounded as to why anyone who has invested in this world would prefer to simply ignore or dispense with these questions, much less get angry when someone else raises them! And yes, I know it all boils down to reactionary politics, but good lord reactionaries seem to want a dull, dull world. I suppose in the end the concern here is that the libtards will allow asylum-claiming orcs to take over neighborhoods in Dol Amroth and eat all the cats.

In my head canon orcs do love their babies and their partners and their brothers and their sisters, so much so that they often fight others orcs on their behalf. I think the answer to the question “why haven’t we seen the female orcs?” is that we have; they fight alongside male orcs in the armies of Morgoth and Sauron, but elves and men can’t be bothered to learn the visual differences between male and female orcs (they can barely manage with dwarves!). One reason I think this is that if female orcs didn’t fight, orc society would probably be led by some EXTREMELY old orc matriarchs who remember meeting Morgoth personally, and that doesn’t seem to be the case (as far as we know). But this is just how I like to think about orc society; the evidence we have bears many interpretations.

Anyway, where there’s a whip there’s a way