So, are orcs doing the nasty or what?
(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!
Rings of Power update/spoiler: I desperately need more of Glug and his husband and baby! pic.twitter.com/gKdUdBS99A
— smuttysmutwriter (@screamzone123) August 30, 2024
And his family planning has spawned one of the most ridiculous and NSFW discussions about what Tolkien wrote about his orcs!
the year is 1965. tolkien is sitting at his desk, scribbling notes about a region of middle earth to the far south. a cup of tea sits beside him, long gone cold. he doesn’t know that 60 years later, the biggest argument regarding middle earth will be whether orcs fuck or not.
— tar-mairon ? (@therealmairon) September 3, 2024
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.
“Best addition to Tolkien lore.” Here’s my problem with the modern age in a nutshell…why is it somehow acceptable to CHANGE an artist’s life’s work? Since when is it okay to vandalize a dead person’s work? The implication is…the man who CREATED this…was…WRONG somehow?!? https://t.co/83FYWGaK6N
— Robert Meyer Burnett, Viceroy of Verisimilitude (@RMBee) September 2, 2024
Tolkien wrote the Orcs as a completely corrupted evil race; born from evil to serve evil with no other redeemable purpose. They represent evil incarnate.
The writers of Rings of Power are spitting on Tolkien’s legacy by trying to paint them as a marginalized group. https://t.co/IDa2rWeQ0J
— Kangmin Lee | 이강민 (@kangminjlee) August 31, 2024
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.
So #Ringsofpowerseason2 has already broken canon with the insane addition of an ORC FAMILY!??
The entire point of Orcs is that there r no females, they can’t reproduce & r born from the dirt. It’s part of their character DNA of being literal hellspawn, nothing human abt em ?? https://t.co/C8608jYF4T pic.twitter.com/K6MbM3RJjO
— daniel goldband (@DanielGoldband) August 29, 2024
“I totally understand literal talking trees banging to create a family but completely draw the line at orcs having sex…”#TheRingsOfPower pic.twitter.com/coAVpQcBEQ
— Caleb Williams (@KnightGambit) August 30, 2024
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.
i just think its funny how some ppl struggle to conceptualize an orc family when like. an orc and his bff were literally planning a holiday together in the rotk book ???
— kylie ? (@sunderedseas) August 31, 2024
I fear the people upset by the orc family have not been doing their Silmarillion homework… https://t.co/Brg7Koq0W9
— The Rings of Power Tea ☕️ (@teawithtrop) August 30, 2024
Season 2 Episode 3 of @TheRingsofPower brought us what was long missing, Orc family life and even an Orc baby. This was something always at the heart of the lord of the rings films, that while barbaric and generally vile, that Orcs still had their own culture. #WorldBuilding pic.twitter.com/bAuVHUapfa
— Rowhan (@rowhanzo) August 31, 2024
The “orc family” thing shouldn’t be so bothersome in itself. The most casual perusal of Tolkien’s text shows there’s no problem with the existence of baby orcs. Duh. But that’s ALL. Where you take it from there is, well, in your own head space. pic.twitter.com/BFisVYjfE2
— Jeff LaSala (@Jeff_LaSala) August 30, 2024
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!
There is no orc family. There is no redeemable quality of a living orc. The only possible redemption of any orc is death.
This is Eru Ilúvatar’s position. Tolkien may have struggled externally with the moral dilemma of orcs; but his creation, Eru Ilúvatar, never did.
— Henry Rearden (@StrikeoftheMind) September 3, 2024
I’ve seen folk fuming about the orc family in Rings of Power, but given I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time considering the interior lives of orcs, I found it to be one of the most interesting things the season has done thus far. pic.twitter.com/tBRllEX5pD
— John Lees (@johnlees927) September 2, 2024
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.
It’s a highly debated topic. Christopher left it pretty vague. He chooses his words very carefully when describing the orcs. He says that it is believed among the wise that orcs came from elves, but he doesn’t say that’s actually the case.
— High King Fëanor – Alpha Chad of Middle-earth (@LostHistory9) October 3, 2023
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.”
Ok it’s getting repetitive, so I promise I will no longer argue with people who say “orcs are inherently evil” and “orcs can’t procreate”, but only if you guys retweet this so there’s a ghost of a chance these Tolkien passages circulate. pic.twitter.com/Rtm2UYckLa
— Robert Joseph? (@robertjoscribe) September 2, 2024
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?
#TheRingsOfPower IF I SEE ONE MORE POST ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT ORCS HAVE SEX I WILL BLOW. LEAVE IT BE.
— s. (@smololovan) September 1, 2024
