So, are orcs doing the nasty or what?

Sam Hazeldine as Adar in The Rings of Power
(Prime Video)

 

Whenever a book is adapted for the screen, some refuse to accept the adaptation building or expanding on the lore. With Amazon Prime Video’s The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power season 2, some fans are unhappy with its portrayal of orcs, claiming it “is not Tolkien.”

Spoilers ahead for TROP season 2!

So what is Rings of Power season 2 doing with its orcs?

The Rings of Power season 2 began airing on August 29, 2024, dropping the first three episodes of the season. In the first episode, we saw how, in the aftermath of Morgoth’s defeat, the orcs didn’t believe in Sauron’s grand plan to bring perfection to Middle-earth because he kind of told them that they were expendable and he was their only salvation because the Valar wouldn’t forgive them and the elves and men would look down upon them. Under the leadership of Adar (Sam Hazeldine), then, they give Sauron (Jack Lowden) the boot.

In episode 3, however, we begin noticing that Adar, a.k.a. the orcs’ Lord Father, who set out to build a land (Mordor) for his “children” to live in safely, was rattled with the news that Sauron was alive and making moves. The fear of the servitude that this would bring upon his orcs pushed Adar to go on offense, and he began planning an attack on Eregion, where Halbrand told him Sauron was working with the elves on a new “power over flesh.”

One of the orcs, Glûg (Robert Strange), is not too sure of Adar’s plans, as it will cause the very destruction that they were running from—orc deaths as war collateral. He questions Adar on why they must leave Mordor’s safety and go to war, and when he does that, we see where his concern comes from. Glûg has a family—an orc wife and a wee orc baby!

And his family planning has spawned one of the most ridiculous and NSFW discussions about what Tolkien wrote about his orcs!

Why are some Tolkien fans unhappy with The Rings of Power orcs?

According to certain self-proclaimed Tolkien scholars and purists, orcs are the pure embodiment of evil. They claim that orcs were never written to have families and this characterization in The Rings of Power adds forced “wokeness” into the narrative by trying to make us feel sorry for this abhorred race, which they believe insults the author’s work.

Many believe that the show breaks canon because they’re committed to Peter Jackson’s version of how orcs and goblins (which are different races FYI) came into being, when Saruman made his army of fighting Uruk Hai using dark magic where they were bred in the ground. They never tired, could run great distances without food or water, and unlike the TROP orcs, were not bothered by sunlight. And these fans just can’t fathom orcs are having sex to reproduce.

On the other hand, there are many who have pointed out that The Rings of Power is actually lore-accurate in its depiction of orcs.

The result is a rather intense but hilarious discussion about whether orcs just pop out of the earth or actually have sex with each other and have babies the normal way! Furthermore, should we even care about the redemption of this race even if it has babies? Are they even capable of redemption if they are the embodiment of absolute evil? Decisions, decisions!

The Rings of Power rekindles an old debate around Tolkien’s moral dilemma about orcs

Author J.R.R Tolkien had a moral dilemma when he was writing about the orcs. Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and his idea of Eru Ilúvatar, the God in his universe, was inspired from his own religious beliefs. Therefore, it would be against his beliefs to have Eru create an entire race of absolutely and unforgivably evil creatures because God could never create evil.

Furthermore, the disgraced Vala Melkor (Morgoth), based on the fallen angel Lucifer, did not have the power to create new life, because as medievalist and Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey wrote about Tolkien’s belief, “evil cannot make, only mock.”

And so, in The Silmarillion, Tolkien suggests that orcs could’ve once been elves that were lured by the Dark Lord Morgoth when elves first awoke in Middle-earth. He tortured and twisted them in his fortress of Utumno into dark beings to serve at his command. However, as with most of Tolkien’s ideas, this was not concrete and open to interpretation. In History of Middle-earth, his son Christopher Tolkien mentioned that his father made a note about changing this origin story for the orcs and making it merely one of the versions that elves believed to be true.

As for their procreation, J.R.R. Tolkien provided several answers. In The Fall of Gondolin, it was stated that orcs were “bred from the heat and slimes of the earth” using sorcery, which we see Saruman do in the movies. However, Tolkien also wrote that orcs procreated in the manner of the other children of Ilúvatar. In one of his letters, he wrote that “… there must have been orc-women. But in stories that seldom if ever see the Orcs except as soldiers of armies in the service of the evil lords we naturally would not learn much about their lives. Not much was known.” This indicates that orcs could have had sex to reproduce.

The Rings of Power seems to play in this grey space between Tolkien’s inconsistent ideas to flesh out both orcs’ procreation and their morality. In season 1, Galadriel reveals that Adar could be one of Morgoth’s enslaved orcs and calls him “the Moriondor” in Elvish, which translates to “sons of the dark.” If this is indeed the route that the series has taken, it is only fair to assume that orcs have elvish origins and therefore, if they repented, they could be forgiven.

After all, the Valar had, on occasion, pardoned Morgoth despite all the evil he had wreaked, so why wouldn’t orcs be forgiven if they were victims of Morgoth’s dark schemes? The fact that elves have displayed an unprecedented loyalty towards Adar on the show, and call him “father” suggests that they are capable of some humanly emotions too. In fact, in a letter draft that Tolkien wrote, he described orcs as “fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today.”

So not only do orcs have sex like the race of elves and men would, but they also have morality, only it might be twisted and they’re incapable of using it correctly, as most men are.

Shall we consider this settled then?