Where Rings of Power’s orcs came from is Lord of the Rings’ great mystery

This week’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of PowerTolkien’s deepest lore, as well as the distant dawn of sentient existence on Middle-earth, is explored to answer a question that not even the professor could address: “Where did the orcs originate?”

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power episode 6.]

Image: Prime Video

Many plot threads collide in “Udûn,” the third-to-last episode in the first season of Rings of Power — most notably for our purposes, Galadriel comes face to face with Adar, the elf-like being whom the orcs besieging Ostirith call father.

“When I was a child,” she tells him, meaning a very, very long time ago, “I heard stories of elves taken by Morgoth; tortured, twisted, made into a new and ruined form of life. Are you one of them? The Moriondor. Sons of the darkness. The first orcs.” To her, orcs are “a mistake, made in mockery” of life.

Adar replies that he prefers to be called an “uruk,” and insists that his “children” have no master, no longer work for Sauron or Morgoth, and deserve their own place in the — well, not in the sun, exactly. “Each one has a name,” he counters her, “a heart. The One Master of Secret Fire is our creators, and we are just like you. As worthy of the breath of life and just as worthy of a home.”

This scene is Rings of PowerPicking up the puzzle piece that no one else solved is The Origin of Orcs. But before we talk about the lore at work here, let’s define some of those very Middle-earth terms Adar threw out there.

What does uruk mean?

Image: New Line Cinema

“Uruk” is a sound familiar to anyone who remembers the menacing uruk-hai of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It simply means “orc” in the Black Speech of Mordor, which is another way of saying it’s what orcs call themselves in their own tongue. (Uruk-hai basically means “orc-people” or “orc-folk.” Also Orc Folk is my favorite musical subgenre.)

The “One” refers to Eru Ilúvatar, the supreme god of Middle-earth, who created the world, its gods — the Valar — and its mortal inhabitants (elves, men, etc.). The “Secret Fire” is the divine force Eru wielded to create something from nothing, but it is especially considered to be the ability that creates sentient life, that forges living beings with souls and personhood from mere animal flesh. Eru is the master of the Secret Fire, because only he had the ability to create new lives.

This begs the obvious question: Who made the orcs if Eru could make them?

Orcs are from where?

The short answer is: Tolkien never really decided on an answer to this, because he couldn’t find a way to fix the inherent problem with the concept of a “monstrous race of sentients” before he died.

Galadriel’s idea of orcs’ origin in The Rings of Power It is very close to the of The Silmarillion. Compiled and published posthumously by Tolkien’s son Christopher, it says that “little is known of a certainty,” but it was “held true by the wise” that Morgoth made the orcs “by slow arts of cruelty” performed on elves captured in the dark days before the Valar were able to find them. The minds and bodies of these oldest elves were “corrupted and enslaved” into orcs “in envy and mockery of the Elves” — Morgoth’s envy of Eru’s singular ability to create life. “Deep in their dark hearts, the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery. This it may be was the vilest deed of Melkor, and the most hateful to Ilúvatar.”

Tolkien could have come up other explanations, but he did not have the time. Morgoth made the orcs out of stone in his early legendarium drafts. Christopher selected the Tolkien version in the 1950s. The SilmarillionIn which, it was believed that corrupted elves were responsible for the corruption of the first orcs.

But in later years, Tolkien began to grapple with sweeping and fundamental revisions to Middle-earth’s cosmology that he was ultimately never able to finish or finalize. In these years, Tolkien seems to have seen in contradiction the heroic nature of killing orcs whenever possible. The Hobbit The Lord of the RingsThey seemed to have free will.

Image: New Line Cinema

After all, Tolkien’s orcs had military ranks. The orcs argued with each other, complained about their orders and made sadistic jokes. In a lot of ways, they were the product of Tolkien’s most harrowing personal experiences as a footsoldier in the British army of WWI: a people perpetually in, and welcoming of, war, bureaucracy, and petty obedience, without a sense of community or solidarity other than taking orders. Mordor was a foxhole, full of the worst people and the worst officers, war without brotherhood or honorable cause except “the boss told you to.”

In his new origins for orcs, Tolkien explored the idea that orcs could have been created from corrupted humans, elves, disembodied spirits, and beasts — taken by Morgoth and fashioned into a conglomerate mockery of Eru’s creations. These origins show that the source of evil and dark God imbued them all with his will, which allowed them to bicker, even betray him. But only because they had a universal hatred for all living creatures.

Tolkien operated on the principles that he was a man who fervently opposed apartheid Germany and Nazi Germany. Unfortunately, all he could work with was the tools of an English Catholic born in South Africa during the Victorian period. No matter if orcs are made from stone, or beasts, or corrupted mortals, each origin is just a fictionalized version of the sorts of stories racists have always come up with to explain why it’s OK to brutalize the fellow human beings they’re brutalizing. The idea that a category of person can be inherently evil — the “monster race” — is the thorn embedded in the heart of much of the fantasy media that grew from Tolkien’s work, in ways that are still being unpacked and untangled today.