Why does anyone in Middle Earth take the Orcs seriously?

[beastro]

Because they're a bunch of racists. Everyone flat out states that orcs were created from 'corrupted' elves breeding, and there's nothing taboo about committing genocide, which is called hunting several times in the books and films. They're quite obviously a sapient race as they can talk to each other and have social structure, but they've been so downtrodden by everyone that they don't have the technology or organisation to fight anyone with anything except primitive tribal tactics.

Wake up sheeple!

He based his world around that of the Migration Period of the Germanic tribes where they came into contact with the Roman Empire and then either became allies of the Romans or thralls of Eastern invaders.

It was an admixture of broad ethnic groups (Roman/Greeks, Germanic tribes, Asian Steppe peoples, Africans) and the concept of Western Civilizations exceptionalism.

The Elves brought the light of the True West to Middle Earth and then interacted with Men migrating out of the East to the boarders of their land. Only three tribes were friendly, the Edain, and were allowed to settl in Elvish lands, eventually becoming their allies((Like the Foederati) against Morgoth, who had come to dominate the Eastern tribes of Men (like the Huns making thralls those Germans who remained north and east of the Danube).

When Morgoth was defeated most of the Elves left (Fall of the Empire) and the remained of the three loyal tribes were again rewarded and given an Atlantis to live on before they returned to Middle Earth to reintroduce the Light of the West (Crusades) before they too began to decline at the expense of Sauron (The rise of the Ottomans) until his fall.

Racial lineage is mixed in, but the core of it is the War of Civilizations. Decline of civilization always came before decay in blood. From that start it was always corruption, from Morgoth being brought to Valinor and causing strife between the Elves over the Silmarollions to when Sauron was still in hiding, but the corruption was deep enough that all it needed was for history to take it's course and for Gondor and Arnor to simply interact with cultures under his sway.

There's no 19th Century Racial Theory in his works at all, but the Christian "Sins of the Fathers" take mixed in with people just being unfortunate to not be touched by Western Civilization. It's the heart of Sam's comment seeing the Haradrim and their Oliphants and it laced through his works going back to the barely mentioned Dark Elves: Those who never traveled to Middle Earth's Western shores and stayed in the interior, either to fade away or were exterminated/corrupted by Morgoth.

It's not that certain people's are inherently corrupt (The only closest thing he touched on was the utter irredeemably of the Orcs which he was both uncomfortable changing and leaving them as is), but are unwitting pawns dominated and used by a greater evil, and given the Christian theme of his work, the Ultimate Evil.

This again goes along with the Medieval setting and the Christian perspective that Muslims weren't inherently evil, they just didn't realize that they were used by the Devil to whip righteousness back into Christiandom when it began to falter.

So feel free to damn him over his view of Civilization and East vs West, but don't get racism into the mix.

The Orcs are meant to typify the West's perspective of the East in the Middle Ages and the early Modern Era where the Turkish horde of poorly trained, badly led, unmerciful but unceasing and even increasing continued to batter on the Eastern wall of of the West, most of all Vienna (Minas Tirith). They'd fail in the big battles, but their constant raiding continually wore down on the East.

The Orcs are the Bashibazouk.

And this is why I don't think he was a racist, although he did use language drawn directly from contemporary racial theory occasionally (describing orcs as having "mongoloid" features, for example).

Hmmm, what did the majority of the peoples of the Steppes look like, the people know for their periodic invasions of Eastern Europe and infamous for their wanton pillaging and murder until they adopted Christianity and Western Civilization?

The Bulgarians and Hungarians didn't look like they did do today when they first swept into Eastern Europe, just like the Turkic ancestors of many in the Islamic countries did not look Middle Eastern when they first migrated/invaded those lands.

You'll note that not all of them were considered that, nor were they evil. Other thralls of the Enemy were the Haradrim, Africans to reflect Islams spread into their continent, and others who were "swarthy", but still allies of Numenoreans, such as the Men in the Path of the Dead, cursed because they went back on their word (Honouring oaths and severe punishment for violating them, another strong Christian element, being one of the other major themes in all his works).

 

[beastro]

Because they're a bunch of racists. Everyone flat out states that orcs were created from 'corrupted' elves breeding, and there's nothing taboo about committing genocide, which is called hunting several times in the books and films. They're quite obviously a sapient race as they can talk to each other and have social structure, but they've been so downtrodden by everyone that they don't have the technology or organisation to fight anyone with anything except primitive tribal tactics.

Wake up sheeple!

lol

If the Orcs had won the war of the ring, Middle Earth would be entering its industrial age. Instead the elves left and the world entered a dark age.

If the Uruk-Hai and Saruman won, then yes. Orcs? Ehhhh... Less so, especially with Sauron at the helm, what with his dedication to the domination of the wills of all living things.

And I'd trust humanity on our own to industrialize; we've done it before in our world, no?

OT: Numbers, as some have said. That aforementioned history of oppression lends the idea to some payback. I'd not like fighting a huge force that, without exception, hates me for what my ancestors did to them, and is justified in feeling so. And with Sauron at the helm, using the Nazgul and magic to win many a mind game and instill much fear, the people of Middle Earth had reason to be scared.

He's just a contrarian who's read of the Last Ring Bearer.

 

[silver wolf009]

Because they're a bunch of racists. Everyone flat out states that orcs were created from 'corrupted' elves breeding, and there's nothing taboo about committing genocide, which is called hunting several times in the books and films. They're quite obviously a sapient race as they can talk to each other and have social structure, but they've been so downtrodden by everyone that they don't have the technology or organisation to fight anyone with anything except primitive tribal tactics.

Wake up sheeple!

lol

If the Orcs had won the war of the ring, Middle Earth would be entering its industrial age. Instead the elves left and the world entered a dark age.

If the Uruk-Hai and Saruman won, then yes. Orcs? Ehhhh... Less so, especially with Sauron at the helm, what with his dedication to the domination of the wills of all living things.

And I'd trust humanity on our own to industrialize; we've done it before in our world, no?

OT: Numbers, as some have said. That aforementioned history of oppression lends the idea to some payback. I'd not like fighting a huge force that, without exception, hates me for what my ancestors did to them, and is justified in feeling so. And with Sauron at the helm, using the Nazgul and magic to win many a mind game and instill much fear, the people of Middle Earth had reason to be scared.

He's just a contrarian who's read of the Last Ring Bearer.

Who? Me or him? And I'm not familiar with that work.

 

[beastro]

Because they're a bunch of racists. Everyone flat out states that orcs were created from 'corrupted' elves breeding, and there's nothing taboo about committing genocide, which is called hunting several times in the books and films. They're quite obviously a sapient race as they can talk to each other and have social structure, but they've been so downtrodden by everyone that they don't have the technology or organisation to fight anyone with anything except primitive tribal tactics.

Wake up sheeple!

lol

If the Orcs had won the war of the ring, Middle Earth would be entering its industrial age. Instead the elves left and the world entered a dark age.

If the Uruk-Hai and Saruman won, then yes. Orcs? Ehhhh... Less so, especially with Sauron at the helm, what with his dedication to the domination of the wills of all living things.

And I'd trust humanity on our own to industrialize; we've done it before in our world, no?

OT: Numbers, as some have said. That aforementioned history of oppression lends the idea to some payback. I'd not like fighting a huge force that, without exception, hates me for what my ancestors did to them, and is justified in feeling so. And with Sauron at the helm, using the Nazgul and magic to win many a mind game and instill much fear, the people of Middle Earth had reason to be scared.

He's just a contrarian who's read of the Last Ring Bearer.

Who? Me or him? And I'm not familiar with that work.

Captcha.

It's a work on the intetnet written by a Russian from the perspective of Sauron and the people's of the East, showing that they were civilized and the ring was looked on a Industrialism, which the backward, fanatically religious (Let by a Pope-type Gandalf) West hated and exterminated.

LOTR from their perspective is a whitewashing of Middle Earths history. It's typically contraian and ignores the moral and cultural heart of Tolkiens work.

 

[Therumancer]

It should be noted that by the time the story really starts most of the world has already fallen to Sauron's armies. It's actually only a comparitively small portion of the world that is still holding out against them. Minas Tirith is pretty much like the only major stronghold still standing at this point.

It should be noted that the orcs are basically corrupted elves and a renewable resource, Mordor also has huge armies of evil humans (like the guys on the black ships, and those riding the Oliphants/Elephants) pretty much the rest of the globe. I think the movies were a little too orc-centric honestly, as I think the armies being fought should have been a little more mixed in their makeup.

Numbers also tell, as Saruman once put it, what chance do a few hundred have against my tens of thousands? In most cases the bad guys only lose to some incredible occurances. Aragorn leading the ghosts back from the paths of the dead, or pretty much an entire forest getting pissed off and rushing Saruman and tearing his army to pieces.... the books weren't big on action the way the movies were, but the way Helms Deep went if I remember is pretty much there was a huge army, lots of noise, and then when they looked out in the morning the entire army was dead due to the Ents, of which there are lots and lots, and they also "herd trees". In the cases like this the forces being used were pretty much viewed as impossible, The Ents don't really do much, and are generally non-aggressive despite being pretty bloody powerful, the ghosts shoudln't have been something anyone could get on their side.

As a final note it's also noteworthy that you see things through the eyes of what are for the most part the greatest heroes of the world. Farimir, and especially Boromir (who was corrupted for a time, trying to take the ring for what he thought were the right reasons) are princes of Gondor and perhaps the best human warriors of their ages. Gimli is a dwarven lord, Legolas is a prince of the wood elves. One thing about the elves in this world is that they are descended from the gods, being arguably the lowest tier of demi-gods (more mortal than anything) with Gandalf being a step up from that. The elven lords like Galadriel and Celeborn are hugely powerful being a lot closer through their blood line to the divine, you'll notice that while she rarely uses it Galadriel has the ring of water, the rings given to the elven lords were never corrupted like the others though they couldn't be used for fear of that, this in part says a lot about what the elven lords were like.

Aragorn himself is a very good fighter, trains the rangers (like special forces), and on top of that has pretty much one of the greatest artifacts in that world. When Sauron made his first attempt, he pretty much wound up losing in a straight fight to Isildur, Gil Galad (and I forget the third one) the movie didn't really handle that well. Isildur had a sword called "Narsil" which was able to literally cut the ring from his hand, though it was itself shattered. Even broken it was an item of power that also symbolized kingship (think of it as like Excalibur) reforged it was a fraction of it's old power, and it was doubtful it could do the same thing it did before. It was kind of the point of Aragorn's last crusade into Mordor, when all else failed they were going to try to have Gandalf (a demi god of a lower tier), Aragorn (with Anduril) and the remaining heroes throw down with Sauron and try and take him out again, but it was doubtful they would have succeeded, not just because of his army, but simply because there just wasn't that kind of strength in this age (though there was still strength in Men, which was being underestimate), the things they still had weren't what they used to be. That said to anything short of something like Sauron Anduril was pretty much an "OMG" factor all on it's own.

The basic point being that the guys you see represent some pretty heavy exceptions to the general rule. The guys in the fellowship and other named characters oftentimes with named legendary weapons (especially if you dig into it) are not the equivilent of what happens when Private Bob tries to fight the orc hordes.

Also the forces of Mordor are not supposed to be idiots, but the same can't nessicarly be said about the good guys. Again, as I pointed out this had been going on for a while. The bad guys have gotten all their ducks in a row and are basically trying to do house cleaning on the remaining great and good. There is some musing about "oh, if we had only acted sooner" even if I remember. The guys left in Lord Of The Rings are hugely powerful in many cases, and Sauron is rallying to go after them last once he has all of his ducks in a row for a reason. One copy of Lord Of The Rings I read went into some deatils about what happened in other parts of the world while things in the book were unfolding, one of them was about how Sauron's armies were divided into "hands" with each finger of a hand being a huge army. One entire hand was sent after Loth Lorien/The High Elves, they were going to lose due to sheer numbers, but by the time the war ended they had basically cut off three fingers of that hand in the process. Something that of course DOES raise the question as to what would have happened if forces like Galadriel and Celeborn had decided to go proactive and act sooner.

Also for all the focus on the good guys, there are a few villains that aren't considered very heavily either. While he's only mentioned briefly in the books, the "Mouthpiece Of Sauron" is supposed to be a huge deal himself, one of those earth shattering dark wizards. He shows up in some of the games and such where they need another bad guy, but he's canon. Part of the point is that along with the Orcs, the Witch King Of Angmar, Saruman, etc... there are supposed to be dudes like that helping out too that are pretty bloody scary, they just don't come to the fore front because they are holding down the rest of Sauron's territory, it also provides some of the fodder for why you can adventure in post-war Middle Earth in RPGs and such. While good does "cleanse the land" needless to say the bad guys don't give up without a fight, and there was more out there than just some rampaging bands of orcs.

Apologies for the length, I just thought I'd explain it. I am NOT a huge expert on Lord Of The Rings/Middle Earth, so I could have some of this wrong. It's been a while since I've read it, and I hardly have an eidetic memory (though it doesn't totally suck either).

 

[Therumancer]

The only other thing was the flashback when the uprooted Erebor Dwarves tried to retake Moria...

Sorry, i still cant believe that they seriously thought that was a good idea.

Well, they didn't know the Orcs of Moria were as numerous or well organised as they turned out to be, plus they were desperate.

Quite how they planned to deal with the Balrog... although, up to that point, no-one had ever laid eyes on it and survived, so the Dwarves didn't even know what it was.

Well they cant not have known of the Balrog, as its being there was why Moria was abandoned. Considering Gandalf technically died trying to kill it, id say a couple of dwarf legions arent gonna measure up.

Besides, theres plenty of mountains in Middle-Earth. Excepting the Grey Mountains because if i remember correctly theyre full of dragons.

The Moria thing is different in the books. In the book, King Thrór go's to Moria alone and is killed by Azog, so Thráin calls all 12 dwarven clans together and they declare war on the orcs of the Misty Mountains. They kick the Orcs arse from one end of the Misty Mountains to the other, with the final battle happening outside the gates of Moria. After they win, Thráin wanted to go into Moria but the other clans would not go with him, and the dwarves of Erebor were to few to go alone.

Plus, Dain Ironfoot saw into the gates of Moria and saw the Balrog. He then said that it was beyond the power of any dwarf, alive or dead, and that no dwarf would enter and live until a greater power entered Moria and destroyed it. He also killed Azog. The goblins and wargs that chased the dwarves in The Hobbit were just Goblins no one special, and Azog's son, Bolg, turns up at the end, leading the orc/goblin/warg army in the Battle of five armies.

I guess Peter jackson just changed it to make it more personal and drametic.

Yes, the depth is part of the point of Lord Of The Rings/The Hobbit.

To be honest one thing that has gotten me wondering is how they will handle the end of The Battle Of Five Armies because to be honest Beorn doesn't have much of a role up until then. As I remember it Thorin Oakenshield fights his way up to Bulgs vanguard, gets taken down, and then it's "surprise, here comes the semi-invulnerable half-divine werebear!". There is a little bit behind how they manage to get him involved of course, but it's not the kind of thing that would fit into the movie heavily... but then again they are making it a trilogy, which is REALLY drawn out, I suppose they could dedicate half an hour or so just to making "back channel" contact with Beorn and his guys. Though I'd imagine making it as much a surprise for the audience (WTF did that come from) as it probably was for Bulg would be realistic and less boring than focusing on the mechanics of that.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

"I must say that the enclosed letter from Rutten & Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of [Aryan] origin from all persons of all countries? ... Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestatigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine."

Hey, good for him. Sometimes you don't know if the people from history you admire were really racist or sexist or pedophilic or something, and it's very disappointing when you find out that, say, Thomas Jefferson was a filthy philanderer who literally screwed over his slaves. Good to know that Tolkien probably wasn't a racist, even in a time when it was okay to hate Jewish people.

OT, if you do any reading beyond what Jackson's movies tell you, you can see that the orcs were plenty dangerous throughout history. In the First Age, after centuries of war they eventually wore down the elves and drove them to the brink of genocide, and were defeated only with the literal armies of heaven marching on Morgoth and throwing him out of the world.

Sauron's rise in the Second Age was much weaker than Morgoth's, as he didn't command any dragons or balrogs as far as I remember, and still with just his orcs and trolls he almost toppled the world of men and elves. And, of course, though the events of the movies may give one the impression that a small band of soldiers can hold off legions of orc marauders, Sauron was again close to destroying everything even without the power of the ring. Plus, the goblins of the misty mountains and Moria are not on the same level as the Uruk-Hai or the orcs of Mordor. They are much more dangerous than the small, scuttling, deformed cave goblins you see in The Hobbit.

And the main point here is that an orc is not particularly dangerous on its own for anyone who knows where to point a sword. It's the sheer numbers they bring to a fight, vastly outnumbering any army men or elves or dwarves could muster. It's not just a battle of numbers, but also of attrition. Orcs will never stop coming, and men can only train their soldiers at a certain rate, meaning that they are always on their heels if the orcs ever get any momentum going.

 

[Tanakh]

It makes perfect sense, you just need to read it in the context of movie plot dynamics.

Ahhh... lulz, no. Again, reading the graph, not his text, it says something like:

One ninja presents a threat of one (the metric of threat is not specified, but one must assume that one threat is quite high given the context)

However, less than one ninja (maybe a ninja gimp) is even more threatening, what's more, the graph indicates that this thrend extends, so the more gimped the ninja is, the more threatening. And assuming the graph is continuous, having no ninjas is infinitely threatening.

Having the X axis starting at 1 would be much closer to his text, still kinda wrong, but whatev. It's not important, but I do mind stuff that is incorrect.

 

[Therumancer]

The Orcs are simply not a credible threat. If a small band of people can take on and kill an entire battalion of them, how are they even a threat to an actual army? Even when they outnumber the good guys 10 to one, they still get slaughtered.

Well, you have to remember that the protagonists in these movies are all awesome epic heroes. If they couldn't kill a ton of bad guys they wouldn't be terribly memorable, would they?

Well.. in the case of the Hobbit they added a whole bunch of pointless action sequences. In the book, the dwarves are generally pretty damn incompetent and don't ever fight anything with much success at all.

Basically though, yeah.. orcs are weak individually because of their twisted and corrupted origins. They weren't bred to be skilled or noble, they were bred to be disposable peons of evil. The bad guys in lord of the rings don't generally want minions who might theoretically rise up to oppose them.

There's some pretty creepy implications to the whole thing anyway, what with Tolkien basically describing the orcs as embodying all the ugly traits of Asian people, and the whole Nordic racewanking which went on with the elves and human genealogies in middle earth. I'm not saying Tolkien was racist, but he seems to have had some pretty creepy (to our sensibilities, back then it was quite acceptable) ideas about racial purity and the percieved value of "pure" races over "corrupted" ones.

This is why I tend to attack anyone who bothers to mention "racism" out of hand for the most part.

That said, I'll explain this in more detail. In Middle Earth various gods and deities are real. The elves are of direct divine lineage and while mostly mortal are inherantly differant from regular mortals. They could be considered the absolute lowest level of "demi god" in an obtuse way, with the highest nobles with the strongest bloodlines tying them to the divine (Galadriel, Celeborn) being pretty superhuman while still technically being killable.

Sauron is pretty much out to screw with Eru, the universe's creator who won't oppose him directly (which is why such a low end being like Sauron can be such a dillweed). He's corrupting the elves largely to screw with the divine powers and mess with their creation. He's definatly got a kind of "devil" thing going on. "Hey, look at what I'm doing to your world... lulz! Pissed off yet!".

While the orcs are self aware it's probably better to see them through the eyes of a genetic weapon, a group of golems or homoculuses, or perhaps a weaponized version of the Xenomorphs from "Aliens". Warhammer 40k "Ork Spores" and their one time origin as a bio-weapon would also be a fairly good analogy, even if none are perfect. Killing these things off totally is fairly justified because their "intelligence" is just to make them better at profaning and destroying the world. They were created with an intristic magical purpose.

In the end it's admittedly an excuse to have a bunch of knock down bad guys you can see hunted down without much in the way of positive feelings. Sort of like killer robots or whatever. The big differance is that Tolkien never goes into that much detail about things like this (though some of the side writings do to an extent). It's easy to basically sit down and cheer for the genocide of the Daleks in "Doctor Who", wiping out every single "Cyberman" (or trying to), or agree with eradicating every Xenomorph in aliens as keeping ANY alive is by definition stupid (and why a certain corperation is viewed as being one of the most brainless institutions in science fiction). Tolkien's Orcs are pretty much the same way, but they haven't had the same kind of mainstream development to be seen that way. Conceptually sparing a baby orc or something is similar to an evil corperation going "well you know, we'll just bring this one little face hugger back to keep as a specimin and study... I mean it couldn't be all that bad right? Look at it, it's so small and harmless".

Now, keep in mind this is Tolkien's Orcs, and that specific backround. In other worlds the situation is differant, with Orcs just being green people from a warrior culture or whatever, and the Orcs can more or less choose to do differant things. In say AD&D (Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms) they tend to be evil buttheads largely because of the deities responsible for them, but like any race they are free willed and can technically choose to do whatever they want, societal inertia means you generally have rapidly producing evil baddies trying to kill everyone.

In World Of Warcraft it's a gray area, the Orcs were genocidal invaders under demon control, they broke free, but then managed to piss everyone off by trying to still establish their own empire around where other people lived, which lead to some obvious objections. Of course in the final equasion pretty much everyone in WoW is a dillweed in one way or another, doubtlessly to ensure it remains a world of warcraft, not a world of peaceful co-existance which would be boring from a game perspective.

Oh, and going back to the old "Best Of Dragon Magazine" thing where they first started building the humanoid Pantheons for D&D, the actual origin of Goblinoid butthurt is supposed to be that when all of the gods got together to create the world, they participated equally, but then decided each would create a race and to ensure things would be fair they would draw straws to decide whose race would live where. The humans gods drew the first choice, and got to live everywhere, the elves deities second and took the forests, the halflings third and took the hills, the dwarves fourth and chose the mountains, and so on. The Goblinoid deities came in last, and with the short straw had no place worth living left for their people, so that pantheon freaked out and defaced the world to create wastelands and said "our people will live here". The head orc god (Gruumush or whatever) plucked out his eye to make a divine prophecy, that one day his races would be destinied to conquer all othr species and rule for no less than a million years, and then stomped off with all his cronies. As a result the Orcs, Goblins, Kobolds, Ogres, etc... all fight each other to remain strong, and constantly act to take down the other races because they are detinied to one day rule the world in their "proper place" for that great age. They build up, make war, build up, make war, etc... in an endless cycle to wear everyone else down by commandment of their deities. Even in the afterlife they all fight each other so when their souls return to earth for the final battle before the new age they will be that much more vicious.

At least that was pretty much the whole "Orcish point of view" (and that of goblinoids in general) to justify why they do what they do, and why these evil, tribal cultures, bent on "mindless destruction" exist. Given that this is a world where the gods exist and grant miracles through clerics and such, and a lot of these evil deities fit into the "Greater" catagory in many cases, it needless to say adds furor to the beliefs. Perhaps in an ultimate sense genocide is wrong, but when you consider that these guys pretty much define themselves by leading Jihads against everything and everyone (including each other), overrun dwarf ruins, sack and destroy towns, and push back civilization milimeter, by milimeter, you can pretty much see why there is a general "kill on sight" attitude in AD&D, and why a number of good races have special bonuses while fighting them, and attitudes like "the only good orc is a dead orc" Dwarves being stereotypically the most extreme, since they compete with a lot of these races for cave space, and also generally wind up losing the most territory.

 

[Puzzlenaut]

There's some pretty creepy implications to the whole thing anyway, what with Tolkien basically describing the orcs as embodying all the ugly traits of Asian people, and the whole Nordic racewanking which went on with the elves and human genealogies in middle earth. I'm not saying Tolkien was racist, but he seems to have had some pretty creepy (to our sensibilities, back then it was quite acceptable) ideas about racial purity and the percieved value of "pure" races over "corrupted" ones.

I actually think it had a lot more to do with class and its changing dynamics within British society at the time of writing than it had to do with race (someone already posted part of that letter he sent to the Germans in which he absolutely pwned them for their arbitrary racism, so I won't bother to fish it out)

Think about it though:
The Orcs all talk in a brutish manner stereotypical of the working, sporting cockney accents and simplistic sentences and syntax, with the rise of the lower class orcs representing the rise of socialism in the 20th century.
The dwindling of the Numenorian men represents the fading of the power of upper class and their hereditary titles around this time, being weakened and eventually all but destroyed by intermingling with those of the middle classes (regular Men).

Tolkien is nostalgic for the more antiquated, rigid social structures of class, so he shows this dwindling of the upper classes of hereditary peerage as the gateway that allowed for all of civilisation crumbling and regressing, and the ultimate result of this being socialism rearing its ugly populist head in the form of the demonic Sauron.

...

Or not.
Its a cool idea though

 

[Mycroft Holmes]

The important thing to remember is that
1) The heroes of LOTR are pretty fucking amazing at what they do(Not that it saved Boromir from orcs)
2) The bulk of the hobbit was made up by Peter Jackson and/or his script writer.

Azog never pursued the Dwarves at all(No orcs did outside of the goblin caves.) He was never even alive by the time of the hobbit, he died during the flashback battle scene where Thorin cut off Azog's arm. Which also never happened because Azog got his head chopped off by Dain Ironfoot. They totally won that battle and the reason they didn't continue into Moria was not because too many of them died, it was because they saw Durin's Bane(The Balrog) through the gates. Azog's son Bolg however is the commander of their army at the battle of five armies, which probably wont occur in the movies since they resurrected Azog.

Radagast shows up for like two seconds and Gandalf leaves with him to investigate the 'necromancer'(what happens there is never explained beyond that the necromancer is Sauron/Gorthaur.) The little summit meeting at Rivendell does not occur.

And the fight with the goblin king is extremely short and there aren't nearly as many goblins. They are bound and taken to the Goblin king in a not nearly as large cavern. Gandalf who hadn't left them yet to investigate with Radagast(He does that later) was able to use his wizarding powers to break free and smuggle his sword in. Pulls it out and slices the Goblin King's belly open and blasts the room with light, they knowing the two swords carried and seeing their leader get disemboweled flee from the dwarves as fast as humanly possible with a few of them getting captured and killed. It was essentially a sucker punch wherein they killed less than 12 goblins and then ran for it. In the confusion Bilbo gets separated from them. The goblins quickly realize they way outnumber the Dwarves and decide to give chase and do so until the flaming pine cones and the eagles save them. It was not the epic battle the movie tried to make it out to be.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

The Orcs are simply not a credible threat. If a small band of people can take on and kill an entire battalion of them, how are they even a threat to an actual army? Even when they outnumber the good guys 10 to one, they still get slaughtered.

I just saw the Hobbit and it suffered from this "stormtrooper syndrome" just as badly as LOTR did.

According to the book the standard exchange rate is twenty orcs to one Boromir and two hobbits. I'm not sure how many hobbits go into a Boromir.

 

[KeyMaster45]

When not fighting major characters they have a better success rate. They also would've taken out all of Gondor and Rohan's suicide attack if not for the destroying of the ring... That doesn't need spoliers this long after does it?

[HEADING=2]WHAT!!?!?[/HEADING]​

Omfg dude freaking spoilers!! Why would you do that?!?!? Despite what you may think there are still people who haven't read it; people like me!! I mean up until you so rudely spoiled the ending I was actually thinking those two midgets were going to end up getting eaten by a gru before they made it to Mt. Doom. I mean geez dude it's only been 57 years since it came out, so you could at least give those of us with a life some time to read through the damned things.

Next I bet you'll want to tell me that Bruce Willis isn't able to cure the kid in the sixth sense of his obvious mental illness. You'd like to spoil that movie for me wouldn't you Mr. Spoiler Mc'Spoilington?

 

[Knight1172]

I always thought the Orcs were deadly...when they were experienced. I mean, Gothmog's army -utterly wrecks- Osgiliath, and don't tell me it's by sheer weight of numbers because you get close-ups of Orcs annihilating Warriors of Minas Tirith through brutality, savagery and skill.

The thing you have to understand about Tolkien Orcs is that they are roughly the same species (Goblin and Orc are used interchangeably in the books I believe), but, like Men, they get a whole lot tougher depending on where they live and how much fighting they get into. Ignore Uruk-Hai, since they're basically Orcish Master Chief, but Orcs of the Misty Mountains are far more subterranean and thereby smaller and weaker than their Mordor counterparts, who seem to have a bit more in common with Warhammer Orcs...

[HEADING=2]WAAAAAAAAGGGGHHH!!![/HEADING].... in that they fight each other to stay sharp.

Honestly, though, watching the Hobbit? I get what the OP is getting at.

 

[IronMit]

He based his world around that of the Migration Period of the Germanic tribes where they came into contact with the Roman Empire and then either became allies of the Romans or thralls of Eastern invaders.

It was an admixture of broad ethnic groups (Roman/Greeks, Germanic tribes, Asian Steppe peoples, Africans) and the concept of Western Civilizations exceptionalism.

The Elves brought the light of the True West to Middle Earth and then interacted with Men migrating out of the East to the boarders of their land. Only three tribes were friendly, the Edain, and were allowed to settl in Elvish lands, eventually becoming their allies((Like the Foederati) against Morgoth, who had come to dominate the Eastern tribes of Men (like the Huns making thralls those Germans who remained north and east of the Danube).

When Morgoth was defeated most of the Elves left (Fall of the Empire) and the remained of the three loyal tribes were again rewarded and given an Atlantis to live on before they returned to Middle Earth to reintroduce the Light of the West (Crusades) before they too began to decline at the expense of Sauron (The rise of the Ottomans) until his fall.

Racial lineage is mixed in, but the core of it is the War of Civilizations. Decline of civilization always came before decay in blood. From that start it was always corruption, from Morgoth being brought to Valinor and causing strife between the Elves over the Silmarollions to when Sauron was still in hiding, but the corruption was deep enough that all it needed was for history to take it's course and for Gondor and Arnor to simply interact with cultures under his sway.

There's no 19th Century Racial Theory in his works at all, but the Christian "Sins of the Fathers" take mixed in with people just being unfortunate to not be touched by Western Civilization. It's the heart of Sam's comment seeing the Haradrim and their Oliphants and it laced through his works going back to the barely mentioned Dark Elves: Those who never traveled to Middle Earth's Western shores and stayed in the interior, either to fade away or were exterminated/corrupted by Morgoth.

It's not that certain people's are inherently corrupt (The only closest thing he touched on was the utter irredeemably of the Orcs which he was both uncomfortable changing and leaving them as is), but are unwitting pawns dominated and used by a greater evil, and given the Christian theme of his work, the Ultimate Evil.

This again goes along with the Medieval setting and the Christian perspective that Muslims weren't inherently evil, they just didn't realize that they were used by the Devil to whip righteousness back into Christiandom when it began to falter.

So feel free to damn him over his view of Civilization and East vs West, but don't get racism into the mix.

The Orcs are meant to typify the West's perspective of the East in the Middle Ages and the early Modern Era where the Turkish horde of poorly trained, badly led, unmerciful but unceasing and even increasing continued to batter on the Eastern wall of of the West, most of all Vienna (Minas Tirith). They'd fail in the big battles, but their constant raiding continually wore down on the East.

The Orcs are the Bashibazouk.

And this is why I don't think he was a racist, although he did use language drawn directly from contemporary racial theory occasionally (describing orcs as having "mongoloid" features, for example).

Hmmm, what did the majority of the peoples of the Steppes look like, the people know for their periodic invasions of Eastern Europe and infamous for their wanton pillaging and murder until they adopted Christianity and Western Civilization?

The Bulgarians and Hungarians didn't look like they did do today when they first swept into Eastern Europe, just like the Turkic ancestors of many in the Islamic countries did not look Middle Eastern when they first migrated/invaded those lands.

You'll note that not all of them were considered that, nor were they evil. Other thralls of the Enemy were the Haradrim, Africans to reflect Islams spread into their continent, and others who were "swarthy", but still allies of Numenoreans, such as the Men in the Path of the Dead, cursed because they went back on their word (Honouring oaths and severe punishment for violating them, another strong Christian element, being one of the other major themes in all his works).

That was a very interesting read but there's a famous Tolkien quote/reply to weather his work is an allegory of modern events...he seems to disregard all allegory, new or old;
''
For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the World Wars. But the author, J. R. R. Tolkien, emphatically stated in his introduction to the second edition, "It is neither allegorical nor topical.... I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence."
''

I'm not an English major so maybe I am getting allegory confused with something else? 'elves bringing light to the west'...'westerns civilisations perspective of the east', 'reflect spread of islam' etc. Is that allegory or is that something else?

 

[fix-the-spade]

Well they cant not have known of the Balrog, as its being there was why Moria was abandoned.

They knew that something was down in Moria, that it killed the King, drove the Dwarves out of Moria and was so terrifying the Elves wouldn't go within several miles of the mountain anymore.

They didn't know specifically that it was a Balrog, since no one had survived long enough to describe it to someone who might know what a Balrog was.

They may have been hoping it was somehow dissipated or had moved on by the time they attacked? Who knows besides Mr Tolkein?

 

[Angie7F]

doesnt the same thing happen with harry potter?
I mean, all the other witches and wizards seems so weak.

 

[F'Angus]

Probably because they were very successful in zerg-rushing in the books, what with it taking an unkillable army of ghosts to save Gondor during the siege.

That deus ex machina shit is because of Peter Jackson. In the book it isn't even clear whether the ghosts can physically harm anyone.

I think in the book the Ghosts just turn up and scare everyone off...rather than taking down Oliphants.

 

[nuba km]

there were three fights with the orcs one were they killed most of a dwarven army (including the king), one were there were a handful killed by elven archers and one were they got close to killing the main characters but they weren't fire proof/flying eagles. So far they have been only beaten by superior war technology (1 good archer is much more useful then 10 good swordsmen) and superior battle strategies. I mean the best fighter of the group was nearly killed by the orcs.

 

[Ilikemilkshake]

the Game of Thrones series is hardly above...

So glad I read this after I've just finished the 4th book.

Thank you for spoiling something you're glad wasn't spoiled for you.

OT: I still think they're much more of a threat than Storm Troopers. If not for extremely convenient rescues and escapes the tide of battle generally always favoured the Orcs, even despite all the asskicking from the main characters.