The Rings of Power and the trouble with orc babies

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Sauron is pure evil. He is the acolyte of Morgoth, a Satan figure in Tolkien’s mythos. Morgoth creates sun-hating minions, the orcs, during his reign of darkness — hellspawn, in other words, created by a devil figure to do his bidding. These are the villains our protagonists most frequently encounter, and their status as dispensable adversaries serves the function of challenges to be overcome, through trickery or battlefield carnage, so that the One Ring might be destroyed and with it, the spirit of Sauron, who seeks to enslave the peoples of Middle-earth. 

The Rings of Power’s second season seems intent on asking: But what about orc personhood?

A minor stir was caused in episode three when an orc character named Glûg is shown with an orc wife and orc baby. Glûg is a deputy to Adar, a fallen elf tortured by Morgoth, who’s currently in charge of Mordor, the parcel of land the orcs forcibly took from a population of Men in season one. (Adar and Glûg are invented characters for the show.) In previous episodes, Glûg wants to remain in the orcs’ new home rather than march to war. Later, it dawns on Glûg that perhaps Adar does not care about the orcs, whom Adar calls his “children,” as evidenced by battlefield maneuvers certain to result in high orc casualties. 

Having dispensed with the aforementioned storyline of the Men forcibly removed from their homeland, it seems that the writers might be casting about for a new population through which they can examine suffering and oppression, and they landed on orcs. The problems with this approach are manifold. 

A war machine does not make for a good metaphor

Orcs are canonically bad in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, even if Tolkien pondered their humanity in subsequent writings (more on that later). Here’s how Tolkien introduces them in The Hobbit (“goblins” and “orcs” are synonymous): 

Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them.  

Under Sauron’s influence in The Lord of the Rings, orcs could charitably be understood as victims — cogs in a war machine — their cruelties the result of Sauron’s own cruelty. Yet even away from the domination of Sauron and left to their own devices, as Bilbo finds them in The Hobbit, they are “cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted.”  

Creatures of Satan, naturally bad: At their core, orcs are distinctly unlike humans. This is important because the fantasy genre frequently explores real-world oppression through make-believe people. Not that this was Tolkien’s approach; his style is more mythic than allegorical. It’s the subsequent 60 years of fantasy storytelling that has made use of fantasy populations to explore real-world systems of oppression (mutants in X-Men, orogenes in The Broken Earth trilogy, among many more examples). 

But for the metaphor of oppression to work, it has to be rooted in some kind of overlap between the fantasy population and the subjugation of actual people. Real bigotry exercised through government policy is an enduring theme of X-Men’s mutants; orogenes are scapegoated and killed because of the powers they’re born with in The Broken Earth. With orcs, there is no overlap to draw on, no there there. Tolkien — and Morgoth — created them to be agents of evil. The metaphor falls flat when there’s nothing on the other side of it. 

The racialization of orcs cannot be wiped away

Tolkien’s creations are so influential that it’s easy to assume our modern conceptions of elves, dwarves, and orcs are as he wrote them. But it’s less of a straight line than a branching tree, with Tolkien at the root and evolutions and interpretations branching from a shared lineage. Untangling even the roots can be difficult.

There has been much debate about whether Tolkien wrote racist depictions in the orcs and the Men who aligned with Sauron. Though Tolkien describes orcs mostly through their actions, the few recurring visual descriptions include traits such as “swarthy” and “slant eyed.” The oliphaunt-riding Haradrim who join Sauron’s side in the War of the Ring are described as “black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues” with “harsh” sounding language. This is as bad as it gets in the canon proper; the physical characteristic Tolkien seemed most preoccupied with in these stories is stature. 

But more emerges in the Legendarium, which is just shorthand for the entirety of Tolkien’s mythmaking, most of which was published posthumously, as well as his letters, which contain the infamous description of orcs as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” That description may not be found in the published books, but the spirit of the sentiment certainly is, even if it is implicit. 

Then there’s what’s explicit: For the most part, Tolkien’s various groups are so specific, and have become so iconically defined, that they are identifiable without race or ethnicity, ripe for The Rings of Power’s colorblind casting. Orcs are conspicuous outliers in this regard, with actors’ skin hidden under thick layers of sickly makeup. This makes it all the easier to project the modern ideas of orcs onto them — the ones that don’t stem from Tolkien at all, but use his creations as fantasy shorthand that, through repetition and time, have turned creatures like orcs into the tropes we recognize today. 

Dungeons & Dragons is the most responsible for this; for decades, fantasy storytellers have been playing in Tolkien’s backyard, cherry-picking elements from his fantasy and transforming them into a kind of ethnographic adventure through a fantasyland textured by colonial shades of racism recognizable to players. Dungeons & Dragons taught fantasy fans to understand orcs as a fusion of racist tropes, combining a barbaric other and a vaguely native people of tribes and clans. Players can play as half-orcs with a “sloping forehead, jutting jaw, prominent teeth, and coarse body hair,” which in the official handbook was for years accompanied by a drawing that emphasizes Tolkien’s Asian caricature (the problematic visual depictions are all but excised in the new edition). Tabletop games like Warhammer and many video games have reinforced racist depictions of orcs, and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings didn’t help. Jackson’s Uruk-hai are coded in the “scary Black men” trope, a significant departure from how Tolkien describes them (mostly more sun tolerant and larger than orcs). 

The Rings of Power is a direct descendant of Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien’s material, but all the cultural understandings of orcs seem to bear on decisions the show’s writers make. The writers seem to feel the responsibility of doing something with orcs, but instead of unpacking any of their baggage, they ignore the uncomfortable connotations in favor of a paste-on oppression narrative.

It’s almost as if, because orcs exist in such a distinct category of their own, The Rings of Power seeks to turn the orcs into a racialized population. This results in an oppression utterly devoid of context, so nonspecific as to be nothing. It’s an easy win to be against the concept of oppression; it’s much harder to actually say something about oppression. The reason X-Men, for instance, is interesting is not because oppression just exists, but because the mechanisms of oppression of mutants reveal how similar mechanisms harm real-world people — something that was very much on the mind of its creators during the civil rights era.

There’s no story — no interesting story, at least — in “oppression in general is bad.” For orcs’ oppression to mean anything, their suffering needs to be recognizable to us, the mechanisms of their oppression understood. That is to say: There must be an obvious corollary to an actual oppressed population. The writers are gesturing, however tentatively, at comparisons to everyone from Israeli Jews to exploited soldiers with their storylines of “Mordor as the only homeland for orcs” and “Glûg as unwilling conscript.” But perhaps the gestures remain so tentative because going any further into the allegory risks the obviously offensive. Who wants their oppression to be seen through the lens of orcs? 

Maybe orcs are vehicles of evil who don’t have babies, and that’s fine 

Humanizing orcs was always going to be difficult. But there’s an obvious alternative: In place of writing orcs as any kind of recognizably marginalized population, they could just be evil. 

Evil is a powerful force, lurking in the shadows of the night. The malevolent forces of the world hide there; the ghouls who give us nightmares and ill omens and bad luck. Evil is a necessary and primal concept that motivates our most powerful stories (see: the Bible, all myth). Banding together to fight against it is the best unifier there is, in the real world and the world of Middle-earth. 

It would seem Tolkien understood this when writing the orcs. Here’s a population of wicked beings, created by Morgoth (again: Satan) and in service of a warlord set on conquering the world and subjecting all its people. Tolkien depicts orcs again and again as killing innocents, enjoying torture, and enacting the sort of casual cruelty you’d expect from villainous minions. The overwhelming story Tolkien tells of orcs is not of a people suffering under a dictator, but the mindless and expendable soldiers Sauron uses to attempt to conquer Middle-earth. 

By comparison, he wrote vanishingly little about the systems needed to support all those (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) orcs. Imagine if he had sacrificed the potent locale of Mordor in service of thinking through the problem: Much farmland would be needed to grow crops, but plants can’t grow in a land of shadow where volcanic ash blocks the sun. Tolkien elided this particular bit of mundane world-building, which is good, as it doesn’t sound very interesting to read. 

Likewise, how orcs procreate is not discussed anywhere in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, but is mentioned almost as an aside in The Silmarillion. This may seem like a technicality, but it’s not. Dig deeply and greedily enough in the Legendarium and you can find a cavern of (sometimes contradictory) world-building that, for good reason, isn’t present in stories of the Ring. A second piece of marginalia supporting orc humanity includes the sentence in a letter, unsent because “it seemed to be taking myself too importantly,” that finds the author discussing the theology of his creation and calling orcs “naturally bad” after nearly writing “irredeemably bad.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what Tolkien chose to include in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit should be given more weight than what he chose to omit. If Tolkien, a deliberate writer and a devout Catholic, had wanted to get into the moral morass of what orc babies and their attendant loving and nurturing implies, he would have. Given everything that is on the page — the thousands of years of elves, Men, and dwarves and their fractured populations warring, allying, and achieving great feats — one wonders why the writers’ room of The Rings of Power is venturing into orcish territory at all. 

It’s a tall order to adapt all that myth into a television show. But we know how it will turn out: In the face of Sauron, an alliance of the free peoples of Middle-earth (most of them, anyway) will put their squabbles aside and fight Sauron’s forces — that is to say, orcs. And if the writers are true to Tolkien, our heroes will have no compunctions about killing many, many, many orcs. If our heroes do have compunctions because there have been several seasons’ worth of orc sociological theory, the writers have a difficult set of questions to answer: What does it mean to humanize cogs in a war machine? How do creatures with minds so weak they bend to the will of Sauron engage in free will? If orcs are more than hellspawn, what are they pointing to and what do they stand in for? These are questions Tolkien struggled with and ultimately didn’t answer. It doesn’t look good for The Rings of Power’s writers’ room.