As I recall Aragorn came in one day he was very upset and he told Arwen," I killed them all not just the men but the women and the children I slaughtered them all like animals."
Seeing as Orcs are possibly corrupted elves, it is possible that the orcs that did survive and hid away may have eventually suffered a similar fate to the elves that refused to leave Middle-Earth - they dwindled and faded becoming spirits, not of dell and cave, but of fear and darkness, haunting the lightless places far from hope
"And Sam wandered through the mountains of Mordor until the end of his earthly life, killing little baby orcs in their little baby orc cradles." -J.R.R. Tolkien, propably
You know that this is exactly what George Martin would do if he had written The Lord of the Rings. He'd spend several chapters exploring how Sam kills the little baby orcs in their cradles and how it makes him feel. And we'd still end up liking Sam even though he's a genocidal murderer.
Middle Earth became a lot easier to wrap my head around when I realised to treat it like an alternate history. Tolkien tells us things you may only expect to learn from historical record. Religious ideas, fables and historical accounts. Like his description of orc women just being basically "I mean, logically they must be there, but they didn't do anything noteworthy so it doesn't come up." We're often used to canon just being explicitly stated by creators.
One might suppose, mightn't one, that orc women were little distinguished from orc men (like, perhaps, Dwarf females are hardly distinguished from Dwarf males). And so, it might be that plenty of the orc armies were populated by males and females alike. Can anyone say that Shagrat or Snag were male or female? I haven't checked pronouns, but it seems like female orcs and male orcs could easily be seen to make equivalent conscripts to the dark armies.
@@procrastinator9 I think they were probably treated like cattle by the male orcs which would savagely rape them when they weren't out fighting. and the brood would probably fight and kill and possibly eat each other and possibly the mother to survive. The adults orcs probably killed and ate a few too that they deemed were weak. The mother orcs and baby orcs just weren't able to look after themselves after. Females may have been massively overfed or dismembered so they couldn't even move.
@@procrastinator9 considering the qoute from Tolkien himself at 6:28 in the video it can be infered that even Orc Women didnt fight in the armies. I know its a popular idea to insert women into combat roles in fantasy now but it wasnt when the lore of Middle Earth was written and its far more realistic to view female Orcs not participating in the majority of fighting just as it was for human women.
Tolkien's statement that "Orc are capable of redemption" was made AFTER he had written his major works including the Trilogy. It was upon reexamining the Shagrat and Gorbag dialogues that he admitted that he had created beings capable of friendship, self-awareness, and genuine free will. Tolkien seems to have regretted his many lines dismissing them as vermin rather than as a corrupted creation of Iluvatar. So I think if Tolkien had written a larger narrative during the years in which he wrote the LOTR appendices, that Aragorn would have "cleansed" the Orc race when he encountered them, but if we had a historical summary in the proposed "New Shadow" sequel I think a few lines of Orcs being given some mercy based upon a promise of reformed behavior could have been included.
This is my take on it as well. Remember their grumbling and seeming rebellious talk in Mordor? It showed even though Sauron had great influence over them, some still thought for themselves.
It was the Shagrat and Gorbag dialogues--and what followed afterward--that actually proved the Orcs really weren't redeemable. Yes, they chat and grumble about their superiors, and in general behave more or less like a couple of old soldiers running into pals. But unlike two soldiers running into pals...Shagrat and Gorbag and their followers *immediately* turn on each other the second a conflict arises. The Orcs in the stronghold of Cirith Ungol quite happily slaughtered each other before Sam arrived. Gorbag knifed Shagrat, and Shagrat then throttled him. Quite simply, the Orcs probably killed each other off quite quickly without a greater power to keep them from murdering each other.
@@PhilowenAster That is because the Minas Ungol orcs (who appear to be the same as the Minas Morgul ones, since the Ungol ones have a moon, which represents Minas Ithil), were rebels: since Shagrat (the Ungol leader), was happy because of the promise of loot in the war, rebellion does not seem logical. This implies that whilst orcs would rebel because they hate Sauron, rebels were backed by the West. This would indicate after the northern fortresses were destroyed, the Morgul orcs were allowed to have a reservation whereas ordinary ones were enslaved.
@@alexvaraderey @loveconqueror Sure, because for Tolkien and Pratchett both, everything revolved specifically around *US* elections or voting patterns.
The school orc children in their orc schools, the orc pensioners in their orc care homes.. The ice cream sales orcs on their ice cream wargs, the orc librarians, the orc influencers... The list is endless, poor old orcs!
My head canon: Aragorn didn't need to, without a fallen Valar / Maiar to 'empower' them as they were corrupted by Morgoth to be, they would fade to either die or just lose corporeality. The corruption of the orcs was the most evil thing Morgoth did, even more than his 'Ring' because the life Eru created to live in the Ring scarred Earth was adapted to survive in it while the Elves were called to Valinor... but the orcs? They were doomed to extinction since they couldn't exist without some angelic being to grant them power.
Orcs and other evil creatures in that setting were twisted and perverted creations, filled with the malice and wickedness of the power that ruled them. They lived artificially cruel and horrifying existences, which could not have emerged naturally and without a supernatural force filling them with a sense of purpose and driving their actions toward that end. Their societies were not naturally stable, and as observed in the books dissolved without the unifying influence of Sauron's will. Goblin/human hybrids already canonically existed, so disappearing like neanderthals or denisovans into the human genetic background isn't out of the question. Those few that did not self-end, did not get ended by others of their own kind, or were not hunted down by the free races, would have retired to dark places and gradually changed to something that could eventually have been absorbed into human populations. Not so unlikely as you might think, all natural systems and animals trend toward the golden mean. Under 'normal' selection pressures, orcs and goblins would lose a lot of their mutated appearance and hyperviolent social tendencies, simply because they are strongly selected against.
Orcs were a slave race for like 9,000 or so years under Morgoth then Sauron unless I remember wrong somehow. It's not surprising their 'society' would fall apart suddenly without a master, even without any magical excuses. They simply wouldn't know how to manage themselves.
They don't die out brother. When their dark lord gets defeated, they hide in mountains and dark places and multiply. Orcs of Gundabad and Orcs of Moria are two examples. They did not answer to Sauron, they were independant and had their own hierarchy.
@cenktuneygok8986 But prior to the LOTR trilogy, there were always Morgoth and/or his direct lieutenants stalking Middle Earth. After... none could / would claim that mantle, even Saruman wanted nothing to do with orcs / uruks after his humiliation at Isengard but rather gathered his human agents to go after the hobbits. The orcs I think need some fallen angel to take up the mantle of Morgoth's Ring and thus give them purpose and power.
Sauron is only a maiar so I can’t imagine his power would be enough to sustain the orcs between the fall of morgoth and the forging of the rings. My headcannon would be that they fell into disarray without a central ruler. Quickly leading to civil war which ends up with small factions with loads of infighting leaving the population to dwindle. It would be a nice contrast to how the elves are making their exit from middle earth. Though the beauty of the lord of the rings ledgendarium are these open ends we all get to imagine ourselves.
Further than you might think. Probably all the way to Cirith Ungol if they get extraordinarily lucky. Gollum would have caught up to him in Emin Mùil. Que Taming of Smeagol and guided all the way to Mordor. No way he's getting the Shelob though.
I see three plausible explanations for the utter disappearance of Orcs by the time you reach the Seventh Age (when we live): - they died out naturally, deprived of a co-ordinating will, through infighting and lack of child-rearing. - they were genocided by the victorious armies of the West - with no Maiar encouraging their corruption, they became more civilised, ultimately merging and inter-breeding with the elves and humans they were created in twisted mimicry of (or bred from), and ceasing to exist as a separate race.
Plot twist: orcs are actually the only creatures that survived until the 7th age! We’re all actually orcs, we’ve just deluded ourselves into thinking we’re decent human beings… hey, it would explain a lot!
They were mostly killed in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Ring. After that I doubt much effort was expended on finding them except when they presented themselves as a problem. Then they just withered away.
The most plausible explanation is that they never existed as such, nor did elves or dwarves or anything else. They were all just men whose portrayals were mythologised.
The Hobbit contains a passage about the goblins potentially being behind those weapons that kill large numbers of people at once, as they delighted in such things. So perhaps not the big orcs, but the goblins lived on for some time, as bugbears for people to fear, but never numerous.
That implies they were behind the creation of explosive weapons and ballistas, the latter of which can be presumed to be Sauron's and Numenor's engines of war. If they created explosive weapons, that could imply they were around in 5000 BCE, when Hindutva thinks explosives came to India. In the 19th century, people still believed in goblins and the orco (the Franco-Italian ogre or orc), and such belief would only have come to an end with the destruction of rural culture in the Second World War. I think soldiers still believe in gremlins.
By that standard, we should not talk at all since almost none of us wrote a book of that magnitude in the first place, no? Or do you think I can persuade you into an idea that a person can be critical without having the ability to perfectly reproduce the object of their critique?
@@ObscurusAnimus I mean, Martin is an author whom the more deeply you look at his works, the worse they become. The irony of him critiquing Tolkein about realism when his novels consist of repeatedly having tens of thousands of people die randomly, armies appearing out of thin air, and more without there being any noticeable affect or long term consequences is quite humorous. Between that and him basing his world off of renaissance propaganda made to slander the medieval ages, it isn't surprising he is too lazy to finish his series once achieved his main goal of money.
I always wondered - what became of Mount Doom after the war and the destruction of the ring? I often hear about what happened to Mordor, it's lands distributed and the whatnot, but what of the mountainous volcano itself? How long after Sauron's defeat did it stop erupting? Was this it's last eruption, or did the people of middle earth live in fear of it erupting again? Was it forever looked at with fear?
I think in the movie, after the One Ring is destroyed, and Sauron falls, Mount Doom basically blows itself up, like Mount Saint Helens did. Or Mount Vesuvius. Both of those volcanos are still active today, but are basically shadows of their former selves. Erupting only in fits and burps, and not in calamitous explosions, like they used to. So Mount Doom probably stayed active, but only occasionally, and only as more of an annoyance than as an actual hazard to all life.
@@jacob4920 Mount Doom was only a hazard to anyone in the surrounding area: it was NOT like "The Rings of Power," in which a major eruption can affect almost all the way to Nurn. Vesuvius did NOT blow itself up, and has had major eruptions over the centuries: there have been no repeats of Pompeii or Herculaneum or Stabiae because no one has built so close since then, until the industrialization of Naples.
Aragorn probably wouldn't have bothered hunting down orcs if there were no signs of them threatening Gondor or it's allies. As for the Orcs themselves, they were capable of comradery in small groups, they probably split into tight knit clans and became more insular until they fizzled out. If Middle Earth were a permanent fantasy world, like World of War craft, then over thousands of year, outside of the influence of a dark lord, they may have "mellowed out."
Exactly this. Aragorn was consumed with rebuilding humanity, particularly Gondor, in Middle Earth. There was no need for him to hunt down the Orcs unless the Orcs rose up as a threat once again. Without Sauron, this was not possible.
In 2nd age there were powerful orc kingdoms in the east. And they had little interested in serving Sauron. It took ol' Mairon several centuries to force them to serve him. So its not impossible they could have existed independently after 3rd age as some sort of polity.
In "The Peoples of Middle-Earth" it said orc babies were born in earth, and weak babies such as female ones were chopped up and fed to the babies to improve the variety of the crop. Most human women orcs had sex with died in childbirth, but those degraded and of low manners enough could survive. Interestingly, being born in mud sounds like a mud bath combined with a water birth, and I would think a combination of cannibalism and infanticide is found amongst stratified headhunters (since stratification equals female infanticide). Having orc-habits sounds like adopting orc culture: orcs were called "most repulsive and degraded versions of the (to Europeans) least-lovely Mongol-types," and indigenous Americans had a relative lack of pain in childbirth due to the Mongolian spot and due to having a head intermediate that of a Asianid and Europid head.
@@WillFredward7167 To be fair, most children in history died before their first birthday: I would think most died at birth or afterwards. Bolg would have been born in mud but being a Boldog (more precisely being the son of Azog), he would be a Maiar more powerful than the Istari (since he would not have the restrictions of the Valar and not be disguised as a mortal per se, since Boldogs are implied to be greater than Black Uruks), and thus being born would have been easy. Rich and middle-class orcs would also be okay, and as I have implied above orc-women (so in Tolkien's eyes ancestors of Turanian, Turco-Mongol, and Jomon women), and human women of orc-habits (in Tolkien's eyes indigenous Americans), would have a relative lack of pain. Stratified hunter-gatherers (i.e. New Guinean Highlanders of Bougainville), were not suffering, so orcs wouldn't be (when not in direct contact with Morgoth or Sauron of course).
This subject comes up with exhausting frequency, actually. Other similar channels have covered it. It's a constant question in online forums related to tabletop roleplaying, and at any game table where alignment to good or evil or a cause, is a factor.
@@jeremysmetana8583 I think the main reason this comes up is ever since Rings of Power showed an Orc family with a kid there's been a lot of people arguing and debating if that is lore accurate. In fact I could be going crazy but I'm pretty sure InDeepGeek covered this before, I think this part of his continuing series of redoing some of his older videos
@@xxDEAGORxx He covered it before in "Azog the Defiler - Explained", when adressing that Bolg is Azog's son Edit: Apparently also did a video specifically about that topic 2 months ago, which I got recommended just now
I may be remembering wrong but I don't think Orcs actually really... give birth? Aren't they made artificially, pretty much fully formed? I may just be thinking of the orc-pit scene from the FOTR movie.
I expect it was more a cleansing of opportunity. Aragorn probably didn't go out purposely hunting the orc remnants, but dealt with them if they popped up somewhere causing trouble. Without the warriors, the orc caregivers and offspring probably didn't last long.
I found this channel some while ago, when a video came up in my feed, something about "LOTR from Sauron's POV." I thought it was going to be something comedic, and figured I could use a good laugh, so I watched. That ONE video was enough for me to not only not mind standing corrected, but to subscribe, and I've pretty much immersed myself in all the lore that this channel provides. Keep up the awesome work!
Pretty much the same with me, a random recommend a couple of weeks ago led to me devouring all his content. I guess the RUclips algorithm occasionally works.
Tolkien in the Unfinished Tales pretty much said that after the final fall of Sauron The Orcs generally went back to doing what they always did when Melkor or Sauron were out of sight and out of mind; they stayed within their own communities in the caves and mountains and pretty much minded their own business. Some even set up their own above ground communities and farmed and traded with Men and Dwarves.
I presume you meant that they continued on with engaging in raids like they did after Morgoth fell, and presumably continued to trade "with wicked dwarves" like they did in "The Hobbit" and wicked men. When I read "The Return of the King," I assumed "the slaves of Nurn" were human, but since "slave" is used to refer to Sauron's servants, I think they also included orcs, trolls, and such.
It seem that one of two things happened to the orcs "off-page" after The Lord of the Rings: 1. The elves, dwarfs, and humans killed off most of them. 2. They just slowly died off, on their own. They didn't have a home, or place to live. They were always fighting and arguing with each other. Then the #1 thing is they didn't have any leadership after the death of Sauron.
Yep exactly. They never really exhibit any level of "civilization" that would allow them to thrive without some powerful entity driving them. They were created to serve power. Take the power away and their entire purpose is lost and they descend into total chaos and endless fight for supremacy. Time does the rest, no need for any "genocide".
More or less how I figure it went too. I dont think logistically, every orc could be found, let alone killed, which is where #2 factors in, like you mentioned.
He didn't have to. Without a single Unifying presence like Morgoth or Sauron Orcs degenerate into constant infighting. And they just slink underground or to the inhospitable corners of the map. In addition they are corrupted Elves. When the One Ring was destroyed they started to diminish just at a much much faster rate.
Except he and Eomer did, with the armies help of course. It's canon and plainly written in the text that campaigns of extermination were led in the years after Saurons fall against the orcs. A widespread...genocide took place.
@@uriustosh I'm assuming you're referring to the Appendices: "For though Sauron had passed, the hatreds and evils that he bred had not died, and the King of the West had many enemies to subdue before the White Tree could grow in peace. And whenever King Elessar went with war King Eomer went with him; and beyond the Sea of Rhun and on the far fields of the South the thunder of the cavalry of the Mark was heard, and the White Horse upon Green flew in many winds until Eomer grew old." It could be referring to orcs, but it's hard to imagine them forming working armies once they're no longer controlled by a Dark Lord. It's more likely those wars were against the Men who had been loyal to Sauron. I imagine that in the power vacuum following the fall of Barad Dur, every would-be warlord made a grab for what they could.
@@katherinegraham3803 The eastern orcs, the Gundabad orcs, the Baldogs, the Misty Mountains orcs, the Grey Mountains orcs, the Iron Hills orcs, the White Mountains orcs, the Withered Heath orcs, the Eriador orcs, the Forodwaith orcs, and the orcs who would live in Dunland with the Dunlendings, do not need Sauron: in "The Nature of Middle-Earth" it is revealed Utumno and Angband still exist, which means their orc populations would have recovered. The Haradrim and the Easterlings sued for peace, among other peoples, which means Aragorn, Eomer, and Aragorn's sons, would have fought men but also orcs, Wargs, and trolls: I would think also dragons and eastern Elves who were corrupted by Morgoth.
What really stands out to me about all this is that Tolkien was smart enough and moral enough to recognize the ethical problems in the orcs and tried to mitigate it here and there but later writers copying him largely didn't instead embracing the idea of a disposable race of evil creatures for the main characters to slaughter.
From what you describe it's easy to imagine they dipped below the threshold for survival without need of infanticide. Magic not withstanding that is, in which case something ponderous might lurk with no desire for conquest that was never theirs to begin with! Would we even recognize them so long after? It's still fun to think of such things existing.
The quote "most repulsive and degraded versions of the (to Europeans) least-lovely Mongol-types" implies they are the same as Altaic people: Uruk-hai is derived from the Mongol tribe called the Uriankai, "They make no beautiful things, but many clever ones" which is what a Victorian would view the siege weapons of Genghis Khan, they like gunpowder, there is a Japanese theory that the Jomon (not the proto-Jomon), were the Xiongnu, Turkic peoples would be considered ugly to both Europeans and Mongols due to looking very different from both, and Turco-Mongols attacked Europe.
@rikhuravidansker I was thinking more of divergent individuals rather than the identity of a people. Seeking not to be defined by outside forces. If Golem was once like a Hobbit then such divergent people might change in ways deliberately unseen.
@@Gotblade Since a clear description of Gollum is not given, this implies he looks like "a weary old hobbit... a starved old pitiable thing": the reason he is not recognized as such is because hobbits look human. Gollum being "a starved frog" who looks like a Nameless Thing suggests that he is a bug-eyed pigeon-chested gimp with a chest as broad as a barrel, with skin being pale and swarthy patches.
@rikhuravidansker Peter Jackson's depiction of him before the ring was reasonable surely. I'm suggesting the inverse for creatures distancing themselves from magic that distorted their form and now is waning in influence.
@@Gotblade There are many humans who are bug-eyed, pigeon-chested, with barrel-broad chests, or with patchy pale and swarthy skin. Gollum is a member of the gentry (since Tolkien said "everyone in his small community was related of course," although Tolkien no doubt meant that the gentry were related, we can assume Gollum's grandmother was a Lady of the Manor, the lowest rank, and thus would live alongside inbred peasants), and thus would be inbred, and Gollum's appearance and behaviour is that of a crazy hermit or mountain man.
GRRM has done exactly that. It's part of the reason why he hasn't finished the main story. GRRM has published side works from the ASOIAF universe that are longer than everything Tolkien published about Middle Earth, LotR included...
@@bipolarminddroppings The difference is Tolkien finished the main narrative along with inventing languages and whatnot. I get the point you’re trying to make, but Peter Jackson successfully adapted LOTR because he had the whole story. Meanwhile George is complaining about show runners in blog posts. You tell me which is a more successful universe.
@@Matt-xc6sp showrunners who complained about not having a finished series as a blueprint but who truncated Feast heavily and just mangled Dance cutting out most of its major plot lines. That show was travesty as an adaptation by season five and lapsed into something like self parody in its final season.
My many, many readings of the Hobbit & Lord of the Rings always led me to believe that the mentions of the increases in the population of Orcs meant that something must be causing it. What if Orcs are too selfish to sustain population without being pushed into it. When Sauron & the nine die, so will their population die out. After all there is no mention of additional food sources or the Elves backing off their war against the Orcs.
I guess if I were to hammer out a headcanon - it would be that after the destruction of the Ring, Mt Doom became a normal volcano rather than itself being another focal point of Sauron’s evil. That being the case it stopped casting Mordor into perpetual ashen twilight, and what was Mordor became a fertile land (volcanoes do that) that experienced day and night like everywhere else. That latter point means orcs had to abandon the surface and humans moved in and settled. There would of course be surface raids by orcs but humans can fight those off without necessarily venturing underground to kill orc women and children, and eventually any orcish tie to that territory fades away. In the long run I would of course hope that, as evil is fundamentally about choice in Tolkien’s world, orcs found peace in their freedom from control by dark Ainur, and in future ages formed common peaceful coexistence with the dwarves as both vanished from human history far beneath the surface world.
@ if Mt Doom was an ordinary volcano, Mordor would be one of the most fertile places in Middle Earth and not a blasted wasteland cast in eternal twilight by its smoke. It may have originally been an ordinary volcano but it was clearly altered by the evil of Sauron and the ring’s forging. Remember the center of the ring’s pull getting stronger was Mt Doom, not Barad-dur.
@@glamourweaver Tolkien said regarding the well-known failed 1960s movie production that parts of the American Southwest and West look just like Mordor, meaning that Gorgoroth looks like the Sonoran and Mojave deserts, the badlands, Death Valley, the Sand Hills, the former Dust Bowl, and Texas west of the Pecos: it does not look LITERALLY like Hell, and it looks better than the Sahara (when not raining of course). Indeed, it is said Bag End when it is filled with garbage looks worse than Mordor, meaning the only thing wrong with Mordor is the fact it is home to the Enemy. The Afar Depression also inspired Mordor, as did the rocky tors and bleak moors of England and Scotland. Mordor was created by Morgoth, not Sauron, and the Ring was attracted to where it was made, no doubt because the materials were there. (Silmari, of which the Silmarils were made? I would think silmari could be crystalized rare earth elements, and thus radioactive, growing around titanium.) The smoke is caused by Sauron, and seems to be the dark fogs you see on the moors and tors, as well as the snowfall you see from Snowdonia, Ben MacDui, and the English Highlands, and the rain on the Flannan Islands: it would also seem to be the smoke from the Slag-Hills and vents of Song Chinese-style industry (no doubt including the northern fortresses like the city of Minas Morgul).
Just like how the 3 Elven rings sustained Elves, Sauron’s will sustained Orcs. With that removed the Orcs simply failed as a race. Without the 3 rings the Elves would have failed too had they not sailed West.
If murderous, treacherous, monsterous ghouls kill themselves absent the candid direction of a Dark Lord to marshall them to the purpose of genocide, then it is, in fact, a matter of pest control to eliminate them. "Used to be a bunch of assholes that lived in this part of the building here. But we systematically removed them like you would any kind of termite or roach." -James Keenan Maynard.
I think Aragorn personally would have killed raiding orcs when they posed a threat to Gondor and ordered his men to do the same, but I doubt he killed them all. My personal thought is he saw what happened to the orcs as Sauron was destroyed and realized that they were essentially defeated once and for all. Why kill an enemy so broken when you can let them destroy themselves?
The orcs that survived, first the war for the Ring and then the orc civil war(s), adapted to their new "home". Their miserable living conditions meant that only the strongest and best fit for life underground would thrive. Orcs as we know them would eventually die out and a new species would emerge.
They already survived similar periods in their history at least three times (fall of Utumno, fall of Angband, first fall of Sauron in the War of the Last Alliance), so there is no reason to suggest they wouldn't survive this time as well.
A good example of what could happened to them is when Sam sees gollum kind of turning back in to a very old Hobbit, because even if he failed at the end he was in the path to redemption. So my guess is the once that are evil die, mostly killing each other because without a master orcs just can stand one another (look what happened in Cirith Ungol and those where under the influence of Sauron) The few that redime themselves probably turned back in to elves or something in between. Maybe they are the ancestors of the pucks and the bogarts and all those creature that are not evil but like to cause trouble, like the eleves that stood in middle earth turned in to faeries.
I think we have to consider that having Orc's reproduce in the normal way isn't the same as them having a family life. When Shagrat and Gorbag discuss setting up on their own, females and children play no part in it. I suspect that orc s*x was casual and that there was no ongoing commitment from the male, that orc childhoods were brutal and short. That there were no cradles and that when orc society collapsed, female orcs, whose function was to reproduce soldiers could no longer survive. They and their children would not need to be hunted, they would die out anyway.
Running households is necessary for society's survival, so orc women would have thrived alongside the men: also, Goblin-town is implied to have many different buildings, meaning orcs must have a diverse economy.
I do believe that Aragorn would've genocided the orcs. Few people alive knew what the Orcs once were and even fewer would even begin to entertain the idea that they could be redeemed. But I don't believe Aragorn would've killed them out of vengeance or even as a preemptive action to snuff out any potential future threat, I believe Aragorn would have done it as a sort of mercy killing. It is blindingly obvious that these orcs enslaved by Sauron became hopelessly lost after the disappearance of their magical dictator, the only fate that would befall these creatures is an agonizingly slow death. Killing the Orcs would not only end their suffering, but prevent any undue suffering they might've wrought upon others as they desperately ran from their inevitable doom.
To quote or paraphrase Goblin Slayer: "Is there a chance there are some good, kind goblins? Maybe.... but if it were up to me, I think it best these goblins never come crawling out of their stinking holes." Before he brains and slaughters 5 goblin babies. Aragorn *may* have attempted some sort of peace with some remnants if the Orcs made an attempt. But I doubt seriously many orcs tried. And many orcs in the wake of the Sauron apocalypse probably murdered their own families for many of the same reasons humans do in the wake of such an idea.
A few years after _Return of the King_ was published, Tolkien wrote that it was a "teaching of the Wise" that, if Orcs surrender and ask for mercy, they _must_ be granted it. And Aragorn is the type that would heed the teachings of the Wise. "But even before this wickedness of Morgoth was suspected the Wise in the Elder Days taught always that the Orcs were not 'made' by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded." Granted, that was in the context of the War of the Jewels, but I see no reason it would cease to be morally true in the War of the Ring. Elsewhere in the same writings (Myths Transformed, naturally, I think) Tolkien says it was extremely rare for Orcs to allow themselves to be taken alive because... Morgoth taught them that Elves would eat them, and be even worse to Orcs than Orcs would be to a captured Elf. Who knows what Sauron's anti-surrender propaganda was.
@@coreyander286 yeah, tolkien seems like someone who is fundamentally too gentle-minded to countenance like, war crimes committed by his heroes, like the whole _thing_ with the mercy shown to gollum seems like it implies that he wouldn't believe in prophylactic murders or whatever. i always got the impression that his schema for the various races was built around there being some kind of gestalt motivating spirit behind them, and that the orcs just lost theirs at the end of the third age, which is kind of what happened to all the non human races. which i still don't LOVE, but is somewhat more poetic and fantastical than imagining like orc residential schools and shit
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere (maybe in the Hobbit, like Goblintown) that the likeness of orcs in Tolkien's version of the world continued to persist through to modern day, inventing things like machine guns. This implies to me that orcs were essentially assimilated into the human populous.
"It is not unlikely that they [orcs] 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, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far." The Scouring of the Shire in RotK seems to be a nod in this direction this too
Aragorn lived in a society that frequently hunted, skinned, and butchered their own meat. Killing off all the orcs would not seem as horrendous to them as does to us.
First off, The New Shadow was so preliminary that nothing can be taken as read from it. Having the main character be a son of Beregond 220 years after the War of the Ring shows the story was far from fully baked. For Elessar, waging a campaign of complete extermination would have been both very resource intensive and out of character. I think he would have neutralized any active orc threats to his kingdoms and allies but that doesn't necessarily mean total death; instead orc populations removing themselves from his lands might have been sufficient. We don't know what orc females and children were like so it's impossible to say how amenable they would have been to that option.
"[Orc c]aptives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded." This was from Myths Transformed, written after _Return of the King_ was published, and referring to teachings during the War of the Jewels. But, even if a "retcon", that is something Tolkien didn't have "in his head" during the writing of _Lord of the Rings,_ you would expect that the teachings of the Wise in the First Age would be remembered by the Wise in the end of the Third Age, and at least _inform_ Aragorn's policy in the start of the Fourth.
Maybe Book-Aragon was more pracmatic and wise as a ruler in an old fashioned way? It's difficult to imagine Aragorn committing genocide when looking at Viggo Mortensen's kind eyes.
As In Deep Geek covered in another video, Gandalf and Aragorn did kind of torture Gollum to get information out of him. And maybe when he wrote _Lord of the Rings,_ it didn't occur to Tolkien that that was a problem for the "theology" of the world. But in Myths Transformed, he wrote that in the War of the Jewels, the Wise had taught that Orcs must not be tormented if captured alive. "Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded." The Westlands at the beginning of the Fourth Age may not have been as "pragmatic in an old-fashioned way" as we'd imagine. At least not when a man tutored by Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel ("the Wise") is King. They might actually have had a sort of Geneva Conventions of Orc Rights...
Unless I'm mistaken, Tolkein said the Orcs were not redeemable by any power in Middle Earth. Implying that would be a task for the Ainur. Elves had their Rules of Engagement: kill any Orc you can, but do not be cruel. No torture, not even for vital information.
I’m pretty sure Tolkien changed is mind a few times over the decades of writing. He would flip-flop between “Orcs are pure, irredeemable evil” and “Orcs aren’t inherently evil, just extremely susceptible to evil influence”
As many as he and Eomer could with their armies. It is made clear that many campaigns were made to "defeat the remnants of the orcs" though in modern understanding we would call it a genocide.
I tend to agree with you. I suspect Aragorn would have had a policy of swift, merciful executions. When you consider what their past experience was when orcs bred and multiplied---any they found would be put to the sword. They didn't have anything else to go on but past experience. Many orcs may have withered away, but any the men of the west found I'm almost certain would have been killed outright.
The Russian Apocrypha-fanfic "The Last Ringbearer", IMHO, is the best subversion of the story of the war of the rings. In its epilogue, Aragorn becomes someone like the English king John and founds the Middle-Earth Magna Carta, and a descendant of the Witch-king of Angmar becomes the CEO of "Angmar Aerospace" corporation many, many centuries in the future. This is my headcanon. :)
My sister wrote a fan fiction short story sequel in which a hobbit adopted an orphaned orc baby and raised him in hobbit culture. He faced discrimination but grew to be wise, good, and heroic.
Sorry, I can't remember. My only copy is lost in a stack of papers and books. It's unpublished. My sister wrote it just for fun. The orc's name was Falco.
I think it’s reasonable to believe that a portion of the orc population surviving, no longer being under that constant evil influence which made them, could over time (generations) become less savage, possibly even fairer in appearance, to the point of no longer being known to have come from those same orcs as people know from stories of old. Also considering the existence of hobbits for such a long time, with most of the surrounding world being oblivious to them. It is not unthinkable that other humanoids (such as orcs) could also live a secret existence in some remote corner of the world.
I suppose the only Orcs that had a chance of surviving long into the 4th Age were those living in the Misty Mountains north of Moria, similar to the ones led by the Great Goblin in The Hobbit. Their more isolated position meant lack of influence from Sauron and Saruman, they had their own strong leaders and communities, so could have kept together. They're also far from Gondor so there's no reason anyone from there would have met one, so is in keeping with what little Tolkien wrote about after Aragorn's death. Though would the Elves and Dwarves have allowed them to continue living there? Probably not. But they had a better chance than most of holding out.
Nope the rs are part of the man's Christian name literally the second R is from confirmation name. The other R is the middle name he was given at birth.
I imagine Aragorn probably only cared about clearing out orcs that actively posed a problem to his kingdom, such as fighting against local humans. Other orcs make more sense as either being killed or ignored depending on which person or group found them and was in charge of deciding on it. Some would hate orcs and just kill all of them on sight, others might just avoid them.
No, Tolkien wasn't adamant on orcs being "redeemable". In his later years he struggled a bit on the issue and wrote notes about it, but leaving them being practically irredeemable, thus their creation being the foulest deed of Morgoth/Sauron. I have no issues with your conclusion, but it is such a typically stupid question to begin with and what you can expect from GRRM.
Tolkien also mentioned that existence of half orc, half humans, some of them probably survived and if they had any offspring, probably with full humans, just diluted themselves out of existence, effectively.
I doubt any of the characters like Galadriel or Aragorn would condone killing non-combatant orcs. "I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood" - Faramir. I think rather that the combatants were slain or driven off, the women and children fled to those dark holes far from hope, and the orcs eventually slew each other or died when they came out of their hidey holes to try and raid and plunder. Maybe a few repented and were redeemed. That would have been an interesting idea for a sequel and answer to the "orc babies" question.
A better question is does it matter? The story is over in the ultimate Evil is defeated. Thinking and asking questions like this directly leads to things like the Star Wars sequel trilogy. If he didn't feel like riding a Redemption story for Orcs in the story was necessary then leave it as it is
Sauron was defeated, yes. But Sauron was not the Ultimate Evil. That would be Morgoth, who was expelled from Arda following the War of Wrath that ended the First Age of the Sun. Any human societies that Sauron had persuaded to worship Morgoth would probably have continued to do so. The evil they could perpetrate upon Dunedain, Elves or Dwarves would be much diminished, of course. But there's no reason to suppose that their societies would change drastically as a result of a far distant war.
The only Orc lair that we know of that overlapped with inhabited territory was Moria, and that the Orcs invaded from less hospitable caves in other mountains. What is there to say that they did not remain in those wild places?
While orcs are capable of thought, can have families and might be redeemable. We only know them under control of dark lords or evil kings like the goblin king. Without those, are orcs always killing 'machines', or can they be changed? Until we know that orcs are irredeemable, and baby orcs try to kill other beings directly from birth, we must assume they can be good. And then killing them all it's killing conscious beings, plain genocide. You might want to read Unseen Academicals or Snuff, from Terry Pratchett. Fantasy books which adress this topic.
I'm not sure I totally agree with this take. I'm thinking of Faramir's statement to Frodo in "The Two Towers," when Frodo asks him if he (Faramir) was trying to snare him (Frodo) with a falsehood, and Faramir answers, "I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood." If Faramir has qualms about deceiving an orc, I think it's fair to assume he'd have qualms about killing an unarmed, noncombatant orc as well. And if he would, it's probably also fair to assume Aragorn would. I don't doubt any orc found in arms after Sauron's fall was cut down quickly, but if there were any who were not still trying to fight, but only escape, perhaps with their women and children, I think it's possible they would have been allowed to do so. Though, shunned and repulsed as they would have been by all others in Middle-Earth and forced to live on the very outer margins, perhaps a quick and violent death would have been preferable.
The Aragorn from the extended version films who committed a war crime by lopping off the Mouth of Sauron's head most certainly did kill all the baby orcs.
The big question is the orcs at Mount Gunderbad in the northern Misty Mountains. Those orcs had long been independent from any dark lord. I suspect that they survived for some time. Some, the more Elfish, diminish into spirits of fear and darkness. Others, the more Manish, merge into the human population, much like how everyone outside sub-Sahara Africa has Neanderthal ancestors. Some orcs might even be given the choice of the other Half-Elven, enter into the West or become mortal to escape the bounds Arda.
Hey Robert, Great video as usual, I was wondering if you were familiar with the ArdaCraft server; they are a group dedicated to recreating Middle-earth as faithfully to the lore as possible in Minecraft, and some of their builds could be good as the backgrounds that you use to illustrate your points. Obviously there's only so much Tolkien related art out there, especially for less prominent locations such as Dunland or Aldburg, so having something more relevant to show off might be useful. Obviously just a suggestion, but one I believe is worth thinking about.
While Tolkien famously was a veteran of WWI, the topic of the fate of the orcs after Sauron fell seems eerily analogous to the ethnic cleansing of the Germans from Eastern Europe by the Allies after WWII. It's obviously a hideous thing the victorious "good guys" don't want to dwell on, but it's equally obviously a thing that was believed necessary for righteous peace and so happened.
Id like to see a vid proposing an alternative plan for Saruman to follow, starting with his failure to capture the ring with the Uruk-Hai scouts. I firmly believe he could have continued to play both sides of the chessboard for a short while, allying with the wise and using his forces against Sauron, potentially allowing him another shot at gaining the ring.
Unlikely that "the baby orcs" were killed. Orcs were Elves corrupted by dark magic. Not a race, but a zombie version of a race, closer to the old tradition of Voodoo zombies than the hollywood George Romero zombie. In Voodoo tradition, a zombie could be cured by removing the dark magic that cursed it, so with Sauron/Morgoth's corrupt magic removed, it's likely that orcs either reverted back to elves or at least became less monstrous and foul. Aragorn showed honor and mercy to the Haradrim and the Wild Men of Dunland if they surrendered, there's no reason he wouldn't do so with orcs if, free of evil magic, they showed a willingness for peace.
They were twisted originally in the beginning. But not in each generation. Orcs were being born Orcs for hundreds of generations by the War of the Ring
Not been here for a while,voice as mesmerising as always. All best for the season. Very dark mornings and nights in west Yorkshire at min, gives us time for reflection.
One is a canonical body of Western literature that has shaped an entire genre. The other is a voluminous but hollow, never to be completed set of works meant to be a cynical mockery of that genre. When Europeans are a historical footnote barely studied in the madrassas of the New Caliphate, LotR will still exist as an example of the height of English literature.
@@MrKoobuhMust be hard having such a smooth brain that you have to inject your weird politics into a comment section that has nothing to do with it. Bet you're really fun at parties.
@@idledisctractions7429 No one injected politics. Koobuh has accurately described the inevitable and not far off future of the Europe. It's a fact that the WEF approved politicians and policies have facilitated mass immigration of new peasants to replace the native Europeans.
What weird politics he phrased it pretentiously but all he said is that lord of the rings is one of the most important books in modern literature and that asoiaf are unfinished and destined to be forgotten@@idledisctractions7429
There is one thing that might have been a possibility, that thing being dependent on the idea that orcs were a corruption of elves by Morgoth and were never able to revert back to their true nature due to the later influence of Sauron and Saruman. Once both Sauron and Saruman were no more it may be the original plan of Illuvatar was able to begin to heal the orcs and allow them to begin to breed back to their elvish nature. When we judge orcs by the standards of our science that would not seem likely. Yet this was not our world, but a world where Illuvatar exercised supernatural dominion and could choose to heal that which was originally corrupted by Morgoth if he so chose.
I like that you reinforced that GRRM does genuinely love the work of JRR Tolkein, people often present it like "GRRM hates Tolkein because of X!" for clickbait when actually devoting the time to think about and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of a work is an exercise in passion for that work, not hatred.
I think you made the right guess, and following your points, the babies would be dead automatically once their parents had fought each others, or the parents might take the children's lives in the dark when there is no food or hope or anything
It's not really a rebuttal, Robert ultimately agrees that while a lot of the remaining orcs killed each other killed themselves or fled a lot were also killed afterwards by the forces of good and that Tolkien deliberately kept it ambiguous because he knew it wasn't right.
My theory is that orcs are copies of Dwarves, not corrupt elves. And so they lack any characteristic their creator left out of them. And since they were all created or nurtured by demi-gods bent of total world domination, take that away, and they destroy themselves. The last remnants probably took many years to die out.
Whether they were given any kind of clemency, I think redeemable orcs entails the possibility that they could indeed choose to be outlaws, just as humans did in the same time and place.
I always thought there were no baby orcs. Orcs were created thousands of years prior by melchor when he corrupted elves and other immortal beings, or at least that's what I remember. Usually such corrupted beings are sterile. I figured there was some dark ritual theat some orc shaman (or perhaps sauron himself)which turned captured humans and elves and dwarves into more orcs and they "reproduced" that way.
The two series could not be more different. Also George's initials are actually his initials the second r coming from his confirmation name and the first being his government recognized and parental ly bestowed middle name.
That's just the problem. They aren't natural, they were never given the chance to be in their natural state. Too often they were under the power of more malignant entities than themselves.
I agree with what was said at 8:10 We cant view their decisions through our modern lens. The way they dealt with their enemies was suitable for the accepted logic of their time. Personally for myself, it doesn’t make Aragorn a bad or questionable king if he acted in the best interests of his people.
**other people** Ehr meh gherd poor urcz **Me** My armor is contempt, my shield is disgust, my sword is hatred! In the emperor's name leave none alive!
Probably the fates were 'various' - and the Shagrat and Gorbag exchange may imply that 'going off to form a community somewhere' might be a known activity. (The Orcish equivalent of Robin Hood and co?) And - what if the Blue Wizards made contact with such groups and attempted to do something with them?
As I recall Aragorn came in one day he was very upset and he told Arwen," I killed them all not just the men but the women and the children I slaughtered them all like animals."
And then George Lucas directed Arwen to just smooth things over.
“I HATE THEM” 😂
@@MikaelKKarlsson Then she handed him some blue milk I believe.
@@HUFFLE-PUFF They are like sand they are rough and course and they get every where.
Hahaha. He also said something about sand.
Seeing as Orcs are possibly corrupted elves, it is possible that the orcs that did survive and hid away may have eventually suffered a similar fate to the elves that refused to leave Middle-Earth - they dwindled and faded becoming spirits, not of dell and cave, but of fear and darkness, haunting the lightless places far from hope
That sounds very plausible
I wondered about that too. And also, would it have been possible for them to go to Mandos and be judged?
@@haga2519if that were the case being slain might actually have been preferable to being left to fade
ĴUST BCAUSE ARAGON
WAS SUPPOSED TO B A
GOOD WISE KING IT
DOSEN'T NECESSARILY
MEAN HE WAS ALSO A
JUST KING(JUSTICE)
@@gabinathan5499Why are you yelling at us?
"And Sam wandered through the mountains of Mordor until the end of his earthly life, killing little baby orcs in their little baby orc cradles." -J.R.R. Tolkien, propably
You know that this is exactly what George Martin would do if he had written The Lord of the Rings. He'd spend several chapters exploring how Sam kills the little baby orcs in their cradles and how it makes him feel. And we'd still end up liking Sam even though he's a genocidal murderer.
@@JacktheRah also a graphic sex scene where sam takes advantage of smeagol
@@JacktheRahnah, that would probably be supposed to be in The Winds of Winter.
What
based gardener
Middle Earth became a lot easier to wrap my head around when I realised to treat it like an alternate history. Tolkien tells us things you may only expect to learn from historical record. Religious ideas, fables and historical accounts. Like his description of orc women just being basically "I mean, logically they must be there, but they didn't do anything noteworthy so it doesn't come up."
We're often used to canon just being explicitly stated by creators.
One might suppose, mightn't one, that orc women were little distinguished from orc men (like, perhaps, Dwarf females are hardly distinguished from Dwarf males). And so, it might be that plenty of the orc armies were populated by males and females alike. Can anyone say that Shagrat or Snag were male or female? I haven't checked pronouns, but it seems like female orcs and male orcs could easily be seen to make equivalent conscripts to the dark armies.
@@procrastinator9 I like this idea!
Treat it like mythology.
@@procrastinator9 I think they were probably treated like cattle by the male orcs which would savagely rape them when they weren't out fighting. and the brood would probably fight and kill and possibly eat each other and possibly the mother to survive. The adults orcs probably killed and ate a few too that they deemed were weak. The mother orcs and baby orcs just weren't able to look after themselves after. Females may have been massively overfed or dismembered so they couldn't even move.
@@procrastinator9 considering the qoute from Tolkien himself at 6:28 in the video it can be infered that even Orc Women didnt fight in the armies. I know its a popular idea to insert women into combat roles in fantasy now but it wasnt when the lore of Middle Earth was written and its far more realistic to view female Orcs not participating in the majority of fighting just as it was for human women.
Tolkien's statement that "Orc are capable of redemption" was made AFTER he had written his major works including the Trilogy. It was upon reexamining the Shagrat and Gorbag dialogues that he admitted that he had created beings capable of friendship, self-awareness, and genuine free will. Tolkien seems to have regretted his many lines dismissing them as vermin rather than as a corrupted creation of Iluvatar. So I think if Tolkien had written a larger narrative during the years in which he wrote the LOTR appendices, that Aragorn would have "cleansed" the Orc race when he encountered them, but if we had a historical summary in the proposed "New Shadow" sequel I think a few lines of Orcs being given some mercy based upon a promise of reformed behavior could have been included.
This is my take on it as well. Remember their grumbling and seeming rebellious talk in Mordor? It showed even though Sauron had great influence over them, some still thought for themselves.
It was the Shagrat and Gorbag dialogues--and what followed afterward--that actually proved the Orcs really weren't redeemable. Yes, they chat and grumble about their superiors, and in general behave more or less like a couple of old soldiers running into pals.
But unlike two soldiers running into pals...Shagrat and Gorbag and their followers *immediately* turn on each other the second a conflict arises. The Orcs in the stronghold of Cirith Ungol quite happily slaughtered each other before Sam arrived. Gorbag knifed Shagrat, and Shagrat then throttled him. Quite simply, the Orcs probably killed each other off quite quickly without a greater power to keep them from murdering each other.
@@PhilowenAster That is because the Minas Ungol orcs (who appear to be the same as the Minas Morgul ones, since the Ungol ones have a moon, which represents Minas Ithil), were rebels: since Shagrat (the Ungol leader), was happy because of the promise of loot in the war, rebellion does not seem logical. This implies that whilst orcs would rebel because they hate Sauron, rebels were backed by the West. This would indicate after the northern fortresses were destroyed, the Morgul orcs were allowed to have a reservation whereas ordinary ones were enslaved.
Terry Pratchett addressed this. In Discworld the Orcs blended in and we’re assimilated into city life. One even became a great football player.
This is the answer.
It would explain the U.S.Election result
@@alexvaradereyYou are so orcist.
@@alexvaraderey it sure explains the voting patterns of the election. Who are focused in the cities and who voted for whom most?
@@alexvaraderey @loveconqueror
Sure, because for Tolkien and Pratchett both, everything revolved specifically around *US* elections or voting patterns.
Galadriel killed them all single-handedly and then swam to catch up the last ship to the West.
She never skips leg days.
“Little baby orcs in their little orc cradles?” Thank you for reminding me of Martin’s way with words
Ugh....
The school orc children in their orc schools, the orc pensioners in their orc care homes.. The ice cream sales orcs on their ice cream wargs, the orc librarians, the orc influencers... The list is endless, poor old orcs!
Ice cream wargs. Stat-block time...
Martin was joking when he said that. Rather obvious to most people who watched it, but...
Or lack thereof. If he had a true way with words he would have finished Ice and Fire.
My head canon: Aragorn didn't need to, without a fallen Valar / Maiar to 'empower' them as they were corrupted by Morgoth to be, they would fade to either die or just lose corporeality. The corruption of the orcs was the most evil thing Morgoth did, even more than his 'Ring' because the life Eru created to live in the Ring scarred Earth was adapted to survive in it while the Elves were called to Valinor... but the orcs? They were doomed to extinction since they couldn't exist without some angelic being to grant them power.
Orcs and other evil creatures in that setting were twisted and perverted creations, filled with the malice and wickedness of the power that ruled them. They lived artificially cruel and horrifying existences, which could not have emerged naturally and without a supernatural force filling them with a sense of purpose and driving their actions toward that end. Their societies were not naturally stable, and as observed in the books dissolved without the unifying influence of Sauron's will. Goblin/human hybrids already canonically existed, so disappearing like neanderthals or denisovans into the human genetic background isn't out of the question. Those few that did not self-end, did not get ended by others of their own kind, or were not hunted down by the free races, would have retired to dark places and gradually changed to something that could eventually have been absorbed into human populations. Not so unlikely as you might think, all natural systems and animals trend toward the golden mean. Under 'normal' selection pressures, orcs and goblins would lose a lot of their mutated appearance and hyperviolent social tendencies, simply because they are strongly selected against.
Orcs were a slave race for like 9,000 or so years under Morgoth then Sauron unless I remember wrong somehow. It's not surprising their 'society' would fall apart suddenly without a master, even without any magical excuses. They simply wouldn't know how to manage themselves.
They don't die out brother. When their dark lord gets defeated, they hide in mountains and dark places and multiply. Orcs of Gundabad and Orcs of Moria are two examples. They did not answer to Sauron, they were independant and had their own hierarchy.
@cenktuneygok8986 But prior to the LOTR trilogy, there were always Morgoth and/or his direct lieutenants stalking Middle Earth. After... none could / would claim that mantle, even Saruman wanted nothing to do with orcs / uruks after his humiliation at Isengard but rather gathered his human agents to go after the hobbits.
The orcs I think need some fallen angel to take up the mantle of Morgoth's Ring and thus give them purpose and power.
Sauron is only a maiar so I can’t imagine his power would be enough to sustain the orcs between the fall of morgoth and the forging of the rings.
My headcannon would be that they fell into disarray without a central ruler. Quickly leading to civil war which ends up with small factions with loads of infighting leaving the population to dwindle. It would be a nice contrast to how the elves are making their exit from middle earth.
Though the beauty of the lord of the rings ledgendarium are these open ends we all get to imagine ourselves.
Video idea.. How far exactly would Frodo have gotten without Sam..
Ditto..
Further than you might think. Probably all the way to Cirith Ungol if they get extraordinarily lucky.
Gollum would have caught up to him in Emin Mùil. Que Taming of Smeagol and guided all the way to Mordor. No way he's getting the Shelob though.
Not very far indeed
Not without help. Some One would have found Frodo...and , just maybe...🎉Have a blessed New Year! ☺🤗
Not far. The ring along with Gollum’s influence and without Sam to keep everything in check Frodo would fall pretty quickly.
I see three plausible explanations for the utter disappearance of Orcs by the time you reach the Seventh Age (when we live):
- they died out naturally, deprived of a co-ordinating will, through infighting and lack of child-rearing.
- they were genocided by the victorious armies of the West
- with no Maiar encouraging their corruption, they became more civilised, ultimately merging and inter-breeding with the elves and humans they were created in twisted mimicry of (or bred from), and ceasing to exist as a separate race.
Plot twist: orcs are actually the only creatures that survived until the 7th age! We’re all actually orcs, we’ve just deluded ourselves into thinking we’re decent human beings… hey, it would explain a lot!
They were mostly killed in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Ring. After that I doubt much effort was expended on finding them except when they presented themselves as a problem. Then they just withered away.
@@nownotlater
I like it! Or we're a little bit of all of them, thus our inner conflicts. Tolkien plus Freud LOL😂
“Interbreeding with elves and humans”
Sure if we know anyone who’s into that
The most plausible explanation is that they never existed as such, nor did elves or dwarves or anything else. They were all just men whose portrayals were mythologised.
The Hobbit contains a passage about the goblins potentially being behind those weapons that kill large numbers of people at once, as they delighted in such things. So perhaps not the big orcs, but the goblins lived on for some time, as bugbears for people to fear, but never numerous.
That implies they were behind the creation of explosive weapons and ballistas, the latter of which can be presumed to be Sauron's and Numenor's engines of war. If they created explosive weapons, that could imply they were around in 5000 BCE, when Hindutva thinks explosives came to India. In the 19th century, people still believed in goblins and the orco (the Franco-Italian ogre or orc), and such belief would only have come to an end with the destruction of rural culture in the Second World War. I think soldiers still believe in gremlins.
Martin is no man to talk about what may or may not happen after the events of a great fantasy epic
seriously. He can't finish his own stuff. He's busy with side projects no one asked for.
He asks this question for an important reason. I won’t say what it is. But it’s pretty evil.
By that standard, we should not talk at all since almost none of us wrote a book of that magnitude in the first place, no? Or do you think I can persuade you into an idea that a person can be critical without having the ability to perfectly reproduce the object of their critique?
@@ObscurusAnimus These guys clap for falling acrobats and fumbling magicians, because they aren't nearly as good 😂
@@ObscurusAnimus I mean, Martin is an author whom the more deeply you look at his works, the worse they become. The irony of him critiquing Tolkein about realism when his novels consist of repeatedly having tens of thousands of people die randomly, armies appearing out of thin air, and more without there being any noticeable affect or long term consequences is quite humorous. Between that and him basing his world off of renaissance propaganda made to slander the medieval ages, it isn't surprising he is too lazy to finish his series once achieved his main goal of money.
I always wondered - what became of Mount Doom after the war and the destruction of the ring? I often hear about what happened to Mordor, it's lands distributed and the whatnot, but what of the mountainous volcano itself? How long after Sauron's defeat did it stop erupting? Was this it's last eruption, or did the people of middle earth live in fear of it erupting again? Was it forever looked at with fear?
I think in the movie, after the One Ring is destroyed, and Sauron falls, Mount Doom basically blows itself up, like Mount Saint Helens did. Or Mount Vesuvius. Both of those volcanos are still active today, but are basically shadows of their former selves. Erupting only in fits and burps, and not in calamitous explosions, like they used to. So Mount Doom probably stayed active, but only occasionally, and only as more of an annoyance than as an actual hazard to all life.
@@jacob4920 Mount Doom was only a hazard to anyone in the surrounding area: it was NOT like "The Rings of Power," in which a major eruption can affect almost all the way to Nurn. Vesuvius did NOT blow itself up, and has had major eruptions over the centuries: there have been no repeats of Pompeii or Herculaneum or Stabiae because no one has built so close since then, until the industrialization of Naples.
Aragorn probably wouldn't have bothered hunting down orcs if there were no signs of them threatening Gondor or it's allies.
As for the Orcs themselves, they were capable of comradery in small groups, they probably split into tight knit clans and became more insular until they fizzled out. If Middle Earth were a permanent fantasy world, like World of War craft, then over thousands of year, outside of the influence of a dark lord, they may have "mellowed out."
Exactly this. Aragorn was consumed with rebuilding humanity, particularly Gondor, in Middle Earth. There was no need for him to hunt down the Orcs unless the Orcs rose up as a threat once again. Without Sauron, this was not possible.
Its allies
In 2nd age there were powerful orc kingdoms in the east. And they had little interested in serving Sauron. It took ol' Mairon several centuries to force them to serve him.
So its not impossible they could have existed independently after 3rd age as some sort of polity.
Pretty sure the only time you’d find a baby orc in a crib is if it crawled in to eat the baby that was already there.
In "The Peoples of Middle-Earth" it said orc babies were born in earth, and weak babies such as female ones were chopped up and fed to the babies to improve the variety of the crop. Most human women orcs had sex with died in childbirth, but those degraded and of low manners enough could survive. Interestingly, being born in mud sounds like a mud bath combined with a water birth, and I would think a combination of cannibalism and infanticide is found amongst stratified headhunters (since stratification equals female infanticide). Having orc-habits sounds like adopting orc culture: orcs were called "most repulsive and degraded versions of the (to Europeans) least-lovely Mongol-types," and indigenous Americans had a relative lack of pain in childbirth due to the Mongolian spot and due to having a head intermediate that of a Asianid and Europid head.
@ Yikes. But it is totally believable that orcs would cull their offspring to focus on the ones they consider superior.
@@rikhuravidansker YIKES. But I’m not at all supposed that orcs would have a brutal approach to their children. They kill each other all the time.
@@WillFredward7167 To be fair, most children in history died before their first birthday: I would think most died at birth or afterwards. Bolg would have been born in mud but being a Boldog (more precisely being the son of Azog), he would be a Maiar more powerful than the Istari (since he would not have the restrictions of the Valar and not be disguised as a mortal per se, since Boldogs are implied to be greater than Black Uruks), and thus being born would have been easy.
Rich and middle-class orcs would also be okay, and as I have implied above orc-women (so in Tolkien's eyes ancestors of Turanian, Turco-Mongol, and Jomon women), and human women of orc-habits (in Tolkien's eyes indigenous Americans), would have a relative lack of pain. Stratified hunter-gatherers (i.e. New Guinean Highlanders of Bougainville), were not suffering, so orcs wouldn't be (when not in direct contact with Morgoth or Sauron of course).
I never thought about baby orcs before. Thank you, Robert.
This subject comes up with exhausting frequency, actually. Other similar channels have covered it. It's a constant question in online forums related to tabletop roleplaying, and at any game table where alignment to good or evil or a cause, is a factor.
@@jeremysmetana8583 I think the main reason this comes up is ever since Rings of Power showed an Orc family with a kid there's been a lot of people arguing and debating if that is lore accurate. In fact I could be going crazy but I'm pretty sure InDeepGeek covered this before, I think this part of his continuing series of redoing some of his older videos
I'll bet baby orcs look a lot like pugs.
@@xxDEAGORxx He covered it before in "Azog the Defiler - Explained", when adressing that Bolg is Azog's son
Edit: Apparently also did a video specifically about that topic 2 months ago, which I got recommended just now
I may be remembering wrong but I don't think Orcs actually really... give birth? Aren't they made artificially, pretty much fully formed? I may just be thinking of the orc-pit scene from the FOTR movie.
I expect it was more a cleansing of opportunity. Aragorn probably didn't go out purposely hunting the orc remnants, but dealt with them if they popped up somewhere causing trouble. Without the warriors, the orc caregivers and offspring probably didn't last long.
Great Kings don't usually go "cleaning campaigns". They delegate that to people like their sons.
@@RonJohn63that is some Denethor like hot air right there
@@specialnewb9821 Great Kings (aka Emperors) have better things to do than act like genocidal janitors.
One of Caesar's most notable feats is ridding the world of Gauls o@@RonJohn63
A few orcs survived, biding their time until they could become politicians and CEOs.
Luigi would be mindful of that
And drug lords, nad idiologues.
Today we call them republicans.
To be fair, politicians do things to get votes - they want to please the public. So, if an orc is a politician, what does that make the voters?
We know one became a infamous movie producer in Hollywood.
I found this channel some while ago, when a video came up in my feed, something about "LOTR from Sauron's POV." I thought it was going to be something comedic, and figured I could use a good laugh, so I watched. That ONE video was enough for me to not only not mind standing corrected, but to subscribe, and I've pretty much immersed myself in all the lore that this channel provides. Keep up the awesome work!
Pretty much the same with me, a random recommend a couple of weeks ago led to me devouring all his content. I guess the RUclips algorithm occasionally works.
Tolkien in the Unfinished Tales pretty much said that after the final fall of Sauron The Orcs generally went back to doing what they always did when Melkor or Sauron were out of sight and out of mind; they stayed within their own communities in the caves and mountains and pretty much minded their own business. Some even set up their own above ground communities and farmed and traded with Men and Dwarves.
I presume you meant that they continued on with engaging in raids like they did after Morgoth fell, and presumably continued to trade "with wicked dwarves" like they did in "The Hobbit" and wicked men. When I read "The Return of the King," I assumed "the slaves of Nurn" were human, but since "slave" is used to refer to Sauron's servants, I think they also included orcs, trolls, and such.
It seem that one of two things happened to the orcs "off-page" after The Lord of the Rings:
1. The elves, dwarfs, and humans killed off most of them.
2. They just slowly died off, on their own. They didn't have a home, or place to live. They were always fighting and arguing with each other. Then the #1 thing is they didn't have any leadership after the death of Sauron.
Yep exactly. They never really exhibit any level of "civilization" that would allow them to thrive without some powerful entity driving them. They were created to serve power. Take the power away and their entire purpose is lost and they descend into total chaos and endless fight for supremacy. Time does the rest, no need for any "genocide".
More or less how I figure it went too. I dont think logistically, every orc could be found, let alone killed, which is where #2 factors in, like you mentioned.
@@SubparUser Tolkien implied orcs were the ancestors of the Altaic peoples.
I bet he tried his best.. I'm sure a few pockets escaped to the mountains.
Based Aragorn.
Only to be hunted down by dwarves.
The hills have eyes.
@@kmalm4776 Lovecraft was on to something 👀
Would have been awesome if they had, really don't get the hand wringing.
Please Robert, make a video comparing todays geographics with the LOTR-universe (that is the same world). Purely speculative, but super interesting!
He didn't have to. Without a single Unifying presence like Morgoth or Sauron Orcs degenerate into constant infighting. And they just slink underground or to the inhospitable corners of the map.
In addition they are corrupted Elves. When the One Ring was destroyed they started to diminish just at a much much faster rate.
Except he and Eomer did, with the armies help of course. It's canon and plainly written in the text that campaigns of extermination were led in the years after Saurons fall against the orcs. A widespread...genocide took place.
@@uriustosh I'm assuming you're referring to the Appendices:
"For though Sauron had passed, the hatreds and evils that he bred had not died, and the King of the West had many enemies to subdue before the White Tree could grow in peace. And whenever King Elessar went with war King Eomer went with him; and beyond the Sea of Rhun and on the far fields of the South the thunder of the cavalry of the Mark was heard, and the White Horse upon Green flew in many winds until Eomer grew old."
It could be referring to orcs, but it's hard to imagine them forming working armies once they're no longer controlled by a Dark Lord. It's more likely those wars were against the Men who had been loyal to Sauron. I imagine that in the power vacuum following the fall of Barad Dur, every would-be warlord made a grab for what they could.
@@katherinegraham3803 The eastern orcs, the Gundabad orcs, the Baldogs, the Misty Mountains orcs, the Grey Mountains orcs, the Iron Hills orcs, the White Mountains orcs, the Withered Heath orcs, the Eriador orcs, the Forodwaith orcs, and the orcs who would live in Dunland with the Dunlendings, do not need Sauron: in "The Nature of Middle-Earth" it is revealed Utumno and Angband still exist, which means their orc populations would have recovered. The Haradrim and the Easterlings sued for peace, among other peoples, which means Aragorn, Eomer, and Aragorn's sons, would have fought men but also orcs, Wargs, and trolls: I would think also dragons and eastern Elves who were corrupted by Morgoth.
My guess is that they dug deep to escape the light and eventually were forgotten to time.
We dig in...and so we dig out. Sometimes, its needed.❤❤❤❤❤
I like that. Joining the nameless things at the roots of the world seems fitting
@@dannycolorado5875... you're an Orc?
What really stands out to me about all this is that Tolkien was smart enough and moral enough to recognize the ethical problems in the orcs and tried to mitigate it here and there but later writers copying him largely didn't instead embracing the idea of a disposable race of evil creatures for the main characters to slaughter.
From what you describe it's easy to imagine they dipped below the threshold for survival without need of infanticide. Magic not withstanding that is, in which case something ponderous might lurk with no desire for conquest that was never theirs to begin with! Would we even recognize them so long after? It's still fun to think of such things existing.
The quote "most repulsive and degraded versions of the (to Europeans) least-lovely Mongol-types" implies they are the same as Altaic people: Uruk-hai is derived from the Mongol tribe called the Uriankai, "They make no beautiful things, but many clever ones" which is what a Victorian would view the siege weapons of Genghis Khan, they like gunpowder, there is a Japanese theory that the Jomon (not the proto-Jomon), were the Xiongnu, Turkic peoples would be considered ugly to both Europeans and Mongols due to looking very different from both, and Turco-Mongols attacked Europe.
@rikhuravidansker I was thinking more of divergent individuals rather than the identity of a people. Seeking not to be defined by outside forces. If Golem was once like a Hobbit then such divergent people might change in ways deliberately unseen.
@@Gotblade Since a clear description of Gollum is not given, this implies he looks like "a weary old hobbit... a starved old pitiable thing": the reason he is not recognized as such is because hobbits look human. Gollum being "a starved frog" who looks like a Nameless Thing suggests that he is a bug-eyed pigeon-chested gimp with a chest as broad as a barrel, with skin being pale and swarthy patches.
@rikhuravidansker Peter Jackson's depiction of him before the ring was reasonable surely. I'm suggesting the inverse for creatures distancing themselves from magic that distorted their form and now is waning in influence.
@@Gotblade There are many humans who are bug-eyed, pigeon-chested, with barrel-broad chests, or with patchy pale and swarthy skin. Gollum is a member of the gentry (since Tolkien said "everyone in his small community was related of course," although Tolkien no doubt meant that the gentry were related, we can assume Gollum's grandmother was a Lady of the Manor, the lowest rank, and thus would live alongside inbred peasants), and thus would be inbred, and Gollum's appearance and behaviour is that of a crazy hermit or mountain man.
The Orcs got yeeted (as the kids say). A few probably did survive in the remotest places but we can be sure they got the full Young Turk treatment.
It will never not be hilarious that GRRM criticized Tolkien for leaving parts of his world unexplored.
GRRM has done exactly that. It's part of the reason why he hasn't finished the main story. GRRM has published side works from the ASOIAF universe that are longer than everything Tolkien published about Middle Earth, LotR included...
@@bipolarminddroppings Longer, but not better.
@@bipolarminddroppings The difference is Tolkien finished the main narrative along with inventing languages and whatnot. I get the point you’re trying to make, but Peter Jackson successfully adapted LOTR because he had the whole story. Meanwhile George is complaining about show runners in blog posts. You tell me which is a more successful universe.
GRRM can’t even finish his own damn story. He’s in no position to criticise.
@@Matt-xc6sp showrunners who complained about not having a finished series as a blueprint but who truncated Feast heavily and just mangled Dance cutting out most of its major plot lines. That show was travesty as an adaptation by season five and lapsed into something like self parody in its final season.
My many, many readings of the Hobbit & Lord of the Rings always led me to believe that the mentions of the increases in the population of Orcs meant that something must be causing it. What if Orcs are too selfish to sustain population without being pushed into it. When Sauron & the nine die, so will their population die out. After all there is no mention of additional food sources or the Elves backing off their war against the Orcs.
Orcs enjoy horrible things, so they would enjoy everything Christians hate: i.e. orcs would like sex.
2:00 there must have been millions of orcs, supplying an over 100k men(orcs) army in those times took several times that at home
I guess if I were to hammer out a headcanon - it would be that after the destruction of the Ring, Mt Doom became a normal volcano rather than itself being another focal point of Sauron’s evil. That being the case it stopped casting Mordor into perpetual ashen twilight, and what was Mordor became a fertile land (volcanoes do that) that experienced day and night like everywhere else. That latter point means orcs had to abandon the surface and humans moved in and settled. There would of course be surface raids by orcs but humans can fight those off without necessarily venturing underground to kill orc women and children, and eventually any orcish tie to that territory fades away.
In the long run I would of course hope that, as evil is fundamentally about choice in Tolkien’s world, orcs found peace in their freedom from control by dark Ainur, and in future ages formed common peaceful coexistence with the dwarves as both vanished from human history far beneath the surface world.
Mount Doom is implied to just be an ordinary volcano: Sauron would have used it to give the Ring a high melting point.
@ if Mt Doom was an ordinary volcano, Mordor would be one of the most fertile places in Middle Earth and not a blasted wasteland cast in eternal twilight by its smoke. It may have originally been an ordinary volcano but it was clearly altered by the evil of Sauron and the ring’s forging. Remember the center of the ring’s pull getting stronger was Mt Doom, not Barad-dur.
@@glamourweaver Tolkien said regarding the well-known failed 1960s movie production that parts of the American Southwest and West look just like Mordor, meaning that Gorgoroth looks like the Sonoran and Mojave deserts, the badlands, Death Valley, the Sand Hills, the former Dust Bowl, and Texas west of the Pecos: it does not look LITERALLY like Hell, and it looks better than the Sahara (when not raining of course). Indeed, it is said Bag End when it is filled with garbage looks worse than Mordor, meaning the only thing wrong with Mordor is the fact it is home to the Enemy.
The Afar Depression also inspired Mordor, as did the rocky tors and bleak moors of England and Scotland. Mordor was created by Morgoth, not Sauron, and the Ring was attracted to where it was made, no doubt because the materials were there. (Silmari, of which the Silmarils were made? I would think silmari could be crystalized rare earth elements, and thus radioactive, growing around titanium.) The smoke is caused by Sauron, and seems to be the dark fogs you see on the moors and tors, as well as the snowfall you see from Snowdonia, Ben MacDui, and the English Highlands, and the rain on the Flannan Islands: it would also seem to be the smoke from the Slag-Hills and vents of Song Chinese-style industry (no doubt including the northern fortresses like the city of Minas Morgul).
Just like how the 3 Elven rings sustained Elves, Sauron’s will sustained Orcs. With that removed the Orcs simply failed as a race. Without the 3 rings the Elves would have failed too had they not sailed West.
If murderous, treacherous, monsterous ghouls kill themselves absent the candid direction of a Dark Lord to marshall them to the purpose of genocide, then it is, in fact, a matter of pest control to eliminate them.
"Used to be a bunch of assholes that lived in this part of the building here. But we systematically removed them like you would any kind of termite or roach."
-James Keenan Maynard.
Ants don't commit suicide when the queen dies, even if they wander off without the queen to care for: orcs are therefore not animals per se.
Aragorn: It's over orclings I have the playground!!
Personally I killed all the baby goblins when played BG3 myself
Anakin would be proud!
Good man
Can't let them alert the guards! The guards that are already dead.
BG3?
@@rikhuravidansker Baldur's Gate 3
I think Aragorn personally would have killed raiding orcs when they posed a threat to Gondor and ordered his men to do the same, but I doubt he killed them all. My personal thought is he saw what happened to the orcs as Sauron was destroyed and realized that they were essentially defeated once and for all. Why kill an enemy so broken when you can let them destroy themselves?
often because cornered/defeated combatants choose to go down fighting, in a blaze of glory rather than silent slip quietly into that good night
I just think the orks went into tribe mode and just killed each other and lived in groups surviving in mountains
The orcs that survived, first the war for the Ring and then the orc civil war(s), adapted to their new "home". Their miserable living conditions meant that only the strongest and best fit for life underground would thrive. Orcs as we know them would eventually die out and a new species would emerge.
They already survived similar periods in their history at least three times (fall of Utumno, fall of Angband, first fall of Sauron in the War of the Last Alliance), so there is no reason to suggest they wouldn't survive this time as well.
And then they eventually became Morlocks and had their revenge hundreds of thousands of years later. "Lads, looks like Eloi are on the menu!"
A good example of what could happened to them is when Sam sees gollum kind of turning back in to a very old Hobbit, because even if he failed at the end he was in the path to redemption.
So my guess is the once that are evil die, mostly killing each other because without a master orcs just can stand one another (look what happened in Cirith Ungol and those where under the influence of Sauron)
The few that redime themselves probably turned back in to elves or something in between. Maybe they are the ancestors of the pucks and the bogarts and all those creature that are not evil but like to cause trouble, like the eleves that stood in middle earth turned in to faeries.
I think we have to consider that having Orc's reproduce in the normal way isn't the same as them having a family life. When Shagrat and Gorbag discuss setting up on their own, females and children play no part in it. I suspect that orc s*x was casual and that there was no ongoing commitment from the male, that orc childhoods were brutal and short. That there were no cradles and that when orc society collapsed, female orcs, whose function was to reproduce soldiers could no longer survive. They and their children would not need to be hunted, they would die out anyway.
Azog and Bolg are a counter-example though.
Running households is necessary for society's survival, so orc women would have thrived alongside the men: also, Goblin-town is implied to have many different buildings, meaning orcs must have a diverse economy.
I do believe that Aragorn would've genocided the orcs. Few people alive knew what the Orcs once were and even fewer would even begin to entertain the idea that they could be redeemed. But I don't believe Aragorn would've killed them out of vengeance or even as a preemptive action to snuff out any potential future threat, I believe Aragorn would have done it as a sort of mercy killing. It is blindingly obvious that these orcs enslaved by Sauron became hopelessly lost after the disappearance of their magical dictator, the only fate that would befall these creatures is an agonizingly slow death. Killing the Orcs would not only end their suffering, but prevent any undue suffering they might've wrought upon others as they desperately ran from their inevitable doom.
To quote or paraphrase Goblin Slayer:
"Is there a chance there are some good, kind goblins? Maybe.... but if it were up to me, I think it best these goblins never come crawling out of their stinking holes."
Before he brains and slaughters 5 goblin babies.
Aragorn *may* have attempted some sort of peace with some remnants if the Orcs made an attempt.
But I doubt seriously many orcs tried. And many orcs in the wake of the Sauron apocalypse probably murdered their own families for many of the same reasons humans do in the wake of such an idea.
well that sounds fucked up
"The only good goblin is a dead goblin, now LETS MAKE THESE GOBLINS GOOD!!!"
Yup Goblin Slayer is where my mind went too.
A few years after _Return of the King_ was published, Tolkien wrote that it was a "teaching of the Wise" that, if Orcs surrender and ask for mercy, they _must_ be granted it. And Aragorn is the type that would heed the teachings of the Wise.
"But even before this wickedness of Morgoth was suspected the Wise in the Elder Days taught always that the Orcs were not 'made' by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded."
Granted, that was in the context of the War of the Jewels, but I see no reason it would cease to be morally true in the War of the Ring.
Elsewhere in the same writings (Myths Transformed, naturally, I think) Tolkien says it was extremely rare for Orcs to allow themselves to be taken alive because... Morgoth taught them that Elves would eat them, and be even worse to Orcs than Orcs would be to a captured Elf. Who knows what Sauron's anti-surrender propaganda was.
@@als3022 so...goblin slayer is overtly the kind of full on eliminationist ethnic cleansing shit people accuse tolkein of being covertly?
@@coreyander286 yeah, tolkien seems like someone who is fundamentally too gentle-minded to countenance like, war crimes committed by his heroes, like the whole _thing_ with the mercy shown to gollum seems like it implies that he wouldn't believe in prophylactic murders or whatever.
i always got the impression that his schema for the various races was built around there being some kind of gestalt motivating spirit behind them, and that the orcs just lost theirs at the end of the third age, which is kind of what happened to all the non human races. which i still don't LOVE, but is somewhat more poetic and fantastical than imagining like orc residential schools and shit
Truly great work, thank you for continuing to provide great content
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere (maybe in the Hobbit, like Goblintown) that the likeness of orcs in Tolkien's version of the world continued to persist through to modern day, inventing things like machine guns. This implies to me that orcs were essentially assimilated into the human populous.
"It is not unlikely that they [orcs] 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, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far."
The Scouring of the Shire in RotK seems to be a nod in this direction this too
Orcs are not a species, only an insulting word thrown at the industrious by hippies.
Aragorn lived in a society that frequently hunted, skinned, and butchered their own meat. Killing off all the orcs would not seem as horrendous to them as does to us.
Because we live in a nanny state society
Thanks for these vids
They're great : )
Keep up the good work
I hope you'll be making these for many years to come
First off, The New Shadow was so preliminary that nothing can be taken as read from it. Having the main character be a son of Beregond 220 years after the War of the Ring shows the story was far from fully baked.
For Elessar, waging a campaign of complete extermination would have been both very resource intensive and out of character. I think he would have neutralized any active orc threats to his kingdoms and allies but that doesn't necessarily mean total death; instead orc populations removing themselves from his lands might have been sufficient. We don't know what orc females and children were like so it's impossible to say how amenable they would have been to that option.
If they were in the White Mountains he probably would have exterminated those.
"[Orc c]aptives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded."
This was from Myths Transformed, written after _Return of the King_ was published, and referring to teachings during the War of the Jewels. But, even if a "retcon", that is something Tolkien didn't have "in his head" during the writing of _Lord of the Rings,_ you would expect that the teachings of the Wise in the First Age would be remembered by the Wise in the end of the Third Age, and at least _inform_ Aragorn's policy in the start of the Fourth.
"War does not determine who is right-only who is left."
- Bertrand Russell
I always assumed the few surviving Orcs eventually fled east or south away from the more well-organized and resurgence human kingdoms, like Gondor.
Maybe Book-Aragon was more pracmatic and wise as a ruler in an old fashioned way? It's difficult to imagine Aragorn committing genocide when looking at Viggo Mortensen's kind eyes.
You forget he did play Satan in the movie "The Prophecy" (Christopher Walken was in it as well)
@@ToBorNotToBRad True that. Possibly my favourite onscreen take on the character.
He was wonderfully cold in "Eastern Promises" too.
As In Deep Geek covered in another video, Gandalf and Aragorn did kind of torture Gollum to get information out of him. And maybe when he wrote _Lord of the Rings,_ it didn't occur to Tolkien that that was a problem for the "theology" of the world. But in Myths Transformed, he wrote that in the War of the Jewels, the Wise had taught that Orcs must not be tormented if captured alive.
"Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded."
The Westlands at the beginning of the Fourth Age may not have been as "pragmatic in an old-fashioned way" as we'd imagine. At least not when a man tutored by Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel ("the Wise") is King. They might actually have had a sort of Geneva Conventions of Orc Rights...
Unless I'm mistaken, Tolkein said the Orcs were not redeemable by any power in Middle Earth. Implying that would be a task for the Ainur. Elves had their Rules of Engagement: kill any Orc you can, but do not be cruel. No torture, not even for vital information.
I’m pretty sure Tolkien changed is mind a few times over the decades of writing. He would flip-flop between “Orcs are pure, irredeemable evil” and “Orcs aren’t inherently evil, just extremely susceptible to evil influence”
As many as he and Eomer could with their armies. It is made clear that many campaigns were made to "defeat the remnants of the orcs" though in modern understanding we would call it a genocide.
I tend to agree with you. I suspect Aragorn would have had a policy of swift, merciful executions. When you consider what their past experience was when orcs bred and multiplied---any they found would be put to the sword. They didn't have anything else to go on but past experience. Many orcs may have withered away, but any the men of the west found I'm almost certain would have been killed outright.
The Russian Apocrypha-fanfic "The Last Ringbearer", IMHO, is the best subversion of the story of the war of the rings. In its epilogue, Aragorn becomes someone like the English king John and founds the Middle-Earth Magna Carta, and a descendant of the Witch-king of Angmar becomes the CEO of "Angmar Aerospace" corporation many, many centuries in the future.
This is my headcanon. :)
My sister wrote a fan fiction short story sequel in which a hobbit adopted an orphaned orc baby and raised him in hobbit culture. He faced discrimination but grew to be wise, good, and heroic.
What was it called? I’d like to read it
Sorry, I can't remember. My only copy is lost in a stack of papers and books. It's unpublished. My sister wrote it just for fun. The orc's name was Falco.
I think it’s reasonable to believe that a portion of the orc population surviving, no longer being under that constant evil influence which made them, could over time (generations) become less savage, possibly even fairer in appearance, to the point of no longer being known to have come from those same orcs as people know from stories of old.
Also considering the existence of hobbits for such a long time, with most of the surrounding world being oblivious to them. It is not unthinkable that other humanoids (such as orcs) could also live a secret existence in some remote corner of the world.
Life as an orc is constant suffering and cruelty. Death is a mercy
I suppose the only Orcs that had a chance of surviving long into the 4th Age were those living in the Misty Mountains north of Moria, similar to the ones led by the Great Goblin in The Hobbit. Their more isolated position meant lack of influence from Sauron and Saruman, they had their own strong leaders and communities, so could have kept together. They're also far from Gondor so there's no reason anyone from there would have met one, so is in keeping with what little Tolkien wrote about after Aragorn's death.
Though would the Elves and Dwarves have allowed them to continue living there? Probably not. But they had a better chance than most of holding out.
Did George change his name to have two Rs in the middle to mimic tolkien?
Nope the rs are part of the man's Christian name literally the second R is from confirmation name. The other R is the middle name he was given at birth.
Great video as always
I imagine Aragorn probably only cared about clearing out orcs that actively posed a problem to his kingdom, such as fighting against local humans. Other orcs make more sense as either being killed or ignored depending on which person or group found them and was in charge of deciding on it. Some would hate orcs and just kill all of them on sight, others might just avoid them.
No, Tolkien wasn't adamant on orcs being "redeemable". In his later years he struggled a bit on the issue and wrote notes about it, but leaving them being practically irredeemable, thus their creation being the foulest deed of Morgoth/Sauron. I have no issues with your conclusion, but it is such a typically stupid question to begin with and what you can expect from GRRM.
Tolkien also mentioned that existence of half orc, half humans, some of them probably survived and if they had any offspring, probably with full humans, just diluted themselves out of existence, effectively.
Did Aragorn completely destroy an evil force bred for the purpose of performing evil deeds?
I sure hope so 👍
I doubt any of the characters like Galadriel or Aragorn would condone killing non-combatant orcs. "I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood" - Faramir.
I think rather that the combatants were slain or driven off, the women and children fled to those dark holes far from hope, and the orcs eventually slew each other or died when they came out of their hidey holes to try and raid and plunder.
Maybe a few repented and were redeemed. That would have been an interesting idea for a sequel and answer to the "orc babies" question.
A better question is does it matter? The story is over in the ultimate Evil is defeated. Thinking and asking questions like this directly leads to things like the Star Wars sequel trilogy. If he didn't feel like riding a Redemption story for Orcs in the story was necessary then leave it as it is
Sauron was defeated, yes. But Sauron was not the Ultimate Evil. That would be Morgoth, who was expelled from Arda following the War of Wrath that ended the First Age of the Sun.
Any human societies that Sauron had persuaded to worship Morgoth would probably have continued to do so. The evil they could perpetrate upon Dunedain, Elves or Dwarves would be much diminished, of course. But there's no reason to suppose that their societies would change drastically as a result of a far distant war.
The only Orc lair that we know of that overlapped with inhabited territory was Moria, and that the Orcs invaded from less hospitable caves in other mountains. What is there to say that they did not remain in those wild places?
What’s wrong with that if he did?
While orcs are capable of thought, can have families and might be redeemable. We only know them under control of dark lords or evil kings like the goblin king. Without those, are orcs always killing 'machines', or can they be changed?
Until we know that orcs are irredeemable, and baby orcs try to kill other beings directly from birth, we must assume they can be good. And then killing them all it's killing conscious beings, plain genocide.
You might want to read Unseen Academicals or Snuff, from Terry Pratchett. Fantasy books which adress this topic.
I'm not sure I totally agree with this take. I'm thinking of Faramir's statement to Frodo in "The Two Towers," when Frodo asks him if he (Faramir) was trying to snare him (Frodo) with a falsehood, and Faramir answers, "I would not snare even an orc with a falsehood." If Faramir has qualms about deceiving an orc, I think it's fair to assume he'd have qualms about killing an unarmed, noncombatant orc as well. And if he would, it's probably also fair to assume Aragorn would.
I don't doubt any orc found in arms after Sauron's fall was cut down quickly, but if there were any who were not still trying to fight, but only escape, perhaps with their women and children, I think it's possible they would have been allowed to do so. Though, shunned and repulsed as they would have been by all others in Middle-Earth and forced to live on the very outer margins, perhaps a quick and violent death would have been preferable.
The Aragorn from the extended version films who committed a war crime by lopping off the Mouth of Sauron's head most certainly did kill all the baby orcs.
"This. Is. GONDOR!"
"I guess that concludes negotiations."
it's only a war crime if you lose the war.😁
good.
@@chaoticdeertick7213it really isn't.
The big question is the orcs at Mount Gunderbad in the northern Misty Mountains. Those orcs had long been independent from any dark lord. I suspect that they survived for some time. Some, the more Elfish, diminish into spirits of fear and darkness. Others, the more Manish, merge into the human population, much like how everyone outside sub-Sahara Africa has Neanderthal ancestors. Some orcs might even be given the choice of the other Half-Elven, enter into the West or become mortal to escape the bounds Arda.
I think Aragorn followed the Anakin Skywalker philosophy on younglings.
😂
My first D&D character was a half-orc half-dwarf, so this hits close to home.
I sure do hope so.
Hey Robert,
Great video as usual, I was wondering if you were familiar with the ArdaCraft server; they are a group dedicated to recreating Middle-earth as faithfully to the lore as possible in Minecraft, and some of their builds could be good as the backgrounds that you use to illustrate your points. Obviously there's only so much Tolkien related art out there, especially for less prominent locations such as Dunland or Aldburg, so having something more relevant to show off might be useful. Obviously just a suggestion, but one I believe is worth thinking about.
While Tolkien famously was a veteran of WWI, the topic of the fate of the orcs after Sauron fell seems eerily analogous to the ethnic cleansing of the Germans from Eastern Europe by the Allies after WWII. It's obviously a hideous thing the victorious "good guys" don't want to dwell on, but it's equally obviously a thing that was believed necessary for righteous peace and so happened.
Id like to see a vid proposing an alternative plan for Saruman to follow, starting with his failure to capture the ring with the Uruk-Hai scouts. I firmly believe he could have continued to play both sides of the chessboard for a short while, allying with the wise and using his forces against Sauron, potentially allowing him another shot at gaining the ring.
Unlikely that "the baby orcs" were killed. Orcs were Elves corrupted by dark magic. Not a race, but a zombie version of a race, closer to the old tradition of Voodoo zombies than the hollywood George Romero zombie. In Voodoo tradition, a zombie could be cured by removing the dark magic that cursed it, so with Sauron/Morgoth's corrupt magic removed, it's likely that orcs either reverted back to elves or at least became less monstrous and foul. Aragorn showed honor and mercy to the Haradrim and the Wild Men of Dunland if they surrendered, there's no reason he wouldn't do so with orcs if, free of evil magic, they showed a willingness for peace.
They were twisted originally in the beginning. But not in each generation. Orcs were being born Orcs for hundreds of generations by the War of the Ring
I love this theory, thank you 🧡
Not been here for a while,voice as mesmerising as always. All best for the season. Very dark mornings and nights in west Yorkshire at min, gives us time for reflection.
I have no doubt that in 100 years Tolkien will still be read and Martin's unfinished books will be forgotten.
One is a canonical body of Western literature that has shaped an entire genre. The other is a voluminous but hollow, never to be completed set of works meant to be a cynical mockery of that genre.
When Europeans are a historical footnote barely studied in the madrassas of the New Caliphate, LotR will still exist as an example of the height of English literature.
@@MrKoobuhMust be hard having such a smooth brain that you have to inject your weird politics into a comment section that has nothing to do with it. Bet you're really fun at parties.
@@idledisctractions7429 No one injected politics. Koobuh has accurately described the inevitable and not far off future of the Europe. It's a fact that the WEF approved politicians and policies have facilitated mass immigration of new peasants to replace the native Europeans.
What weird politics he phrased it pretentiously but all he said is that lord of the rings is one of the most important books in modern literature and that asoiaf are unfinished and destined to be forgotten@@idledisctractions7429
There is one thing that might have been a possibility, that thing being dependent on the idea that orcs were a corruption of elves by Morgoth and were never able to revert back to their true nature due to the later influence of Sauron and Saruman. Once both Sauron and Saruman were no more it may be the original plan of Illuvatar was able to begin to heal the orcs and allow them to begin to breed back to their elvish nature.
When we judge orcs by the standards of our science that would not seem likely. Yet this was not our world, but a world where Illuvatar exercised supernatural dominion and could choose to heal that which was originally corrupted by Morgoth if he so chose.
I like that you reinforced that GRRM does genuinely love the work of JRR Tolkein, people often present it like "GRRM hates Tolkein because of X!" for clickbait when actually devoting the time to think about and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of a work is an exercise in passion for that work, not hatred.
I think you made the right guess, and following your points, the babies would be dead automatically once their parents had fought each others, or the parents might take the children's lives in the dark when there is no food or hope or anything
Possibly the most polite and tactful rebuttal to Martin's aspersions on this matter.
It's not really a rebuttal, Robert ultimately agrees that while a lot of the remaining orcs killed each other killed themselves or fled a lot were also killed afterwards by the forces of good and that Tolkien deliberately kept it ambiguous because he knew it wasn't right.
@@21526 Oh I agree that it's not a direct rebuttal; hence the specificity of language used in my own reply.
@@21526why is it not right to genocide a race on masse that exists only to destroy and make the lives of other people worse?
My theory is that orcs are copies of Dwarves, not corrupt elves. And so they lack any characteristic their creator left out of them. And since they were all created or nurtured by demi-gods bent of total world domination, take that away, and they destroy themselves. The last remnants probably took many years to die out.
No, they've fled to Russia.
Weird,that's not how you write "Israel" 🤔
both comments hilarious 🤣
A lot have turned up in the US and helped elect Trump - true fact lol
@@JRBDWDNah orcs are the ones being bombed by them
Nah the big noses indicate otherwise...👃👃
When I hear "orc-remnants" I picture orcs that remained organized, which chances are couldn't have been ignored either way.
Whether they were given any kind of clemency, I think redeemable orcs entails the possibility that they could indeed choose to be outlaws, just as humans did in the same time and place.
I'm reminded of a scene from a Goblin Slayer, and the answer is he better have.
I always thought there were no baby orcs. Orcs were created thousands of years prior by melchor when he corrupted elves and other immortal beings, or at least that's what I remember. Usually such corrupted beings are sterile. I figured there was some dark ritual theat some orc shaman (or perhaps sauron himself)which turned captured humans and elves and dwarves into more orcs and they "reproduced" that way.
1:16 It is still pest control.
Yay! Another video!
We know JRR Martin is a huge fan of Tolkien. He stole his initials and his whole story
Jeorge
"his whole story" right I forgot that the Lannisters are orcs
The two series could not be more different. Also George's initials are actually his initials the second r coming from his confirmation name and the first being his government recognized and parental ly bestowed middle name.
The natural family unit for the orc is the warband.
That's just the problem. They aren't natural, they were never given the chance to be in their natural state. Too often they were under the power of more malignant entities than themselves.
"It's called lawful good, not lawful nice." Gary Gygax.
I agree with what was said at 8:10
We cant view their decisions through our modern lens. The way they dealt with their enemies was suitable for the accepted logic of their time. Personally for myself, it doesn’t make Aragorn a bad or questionable king if he acted in the best interests of his people.
**other people**
Ehr meh gherd poor urcz
**Me**
My armor is contempt, my shield is disgust, my sword is hatred! In the emperor's name leave none alive!
Video idea: Was it actually "a little late for trimming the verge"? Gandalf vs. Samwise evening gardening techniques
This is a pretty good one! I really appreciate your dedication to the Lord
Probably the fates were 'various' - and the Shagrat and Gorbag exchange may imply that 'going off to form a community somewhere' might be a known activity. (The Orcish equivalent of Robin Hood and co?) And - what if the Blue Wizards made contact with such groups and attempted to do something with them?