Subject: RE: lord of the rings
From:
GUEST,GUEST
Date: 25 Aug 02 - 03:31 AM
Hi all, this is Brendan, The Pooka's son. My dad sent me a link to this thread, just for my enjoyment, not asking me to add anything... but since I'm a major Tolkien nerd these days, one of the posts got me thinking. I hope y'all don't mind if I throw in my two cents.
Re: Bee-dubya-ell's post on the "vagueness" of Tolkien's description of Orcs, and their apparent lack of shared physical characteristics in the movie. There are two explanations I can think of for this, one simple and one a bit more complex.
The simple explanation is that there are different "breeds" of Orc. I don't just mean the Uruk-hai (Saruman's Orcs) and the non-Uruk-hai, which is the most obvious difference in the movie; there are also many different breeds of non-Uruk-hai Orcs. They were bred in different places, at different times, possibly even by different Dark Lords (Sauron was originally only the servant of the Darkest of all Dark Lords, Melkor a.k.a. Morgoth). Often they speak different foul languages, and it would be no surprise if they look a bit different from one another. So some of the dissimilarities you notice may be the result of different breeds of Orcs appearing together in the same scene.
But having just watched the DVD again (my fifth time watching the movie overall -- three times in the theater, twice so far on DVD), I think your point is valid above and beyond these differences between the "breeds." For example, the Orcs of the Misty Mountains should all probably be the same breed, yet they don't look as similar to one another as one might think. How do you explain that? Well, it could just be Peter Jackson's laziness, but I have another explanation. I think Jackson is actually being faithful, wittingly or not, to Tolkien's (albeit unstated) intent.
It makes perfect sense to me that the Orcs' main shared characteristic would be ugliness. They need not share anything else. You see, whereas all the other races you mention were created by Iluvitar (the God of Middle-earth) -- or, in the case of the Dwarves, by one of Iluvitar's top servants -- the Orcs were created by Morgoth or Sauron, who are pure evil. In creating Elves, Men, and so on, Iluvitar intended to create things of beauty, and in order to do so, presumably devised a plan for what these creatures would look like. Elves would be tall, slim and graceful; hobbits would be short and have hairy toes; etc., as you say. But Morgoth and Sauron would not have put any such thought into the physical attributes of their creations. All they would have cared about was creating slaves that suited their evil needs. As such, their creatures would share a total lack of beauty -- that is, they would all be hideously ugly -- but they would not necessarily share much of anything else. It takes care and attention to create things that are beautiful and similar; but evil and malice may create things that are ugly and dissimilar.
Does that make sense? It's just an interpretation, but I think it helps explain why Orcs are hard to describe beyond generally being ugly mothers. :)
--PookaSon
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sj
