#urzul

The Story of the Red Witch

Chapter Eight: Thinning the Herd (6/11)

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Orcs! Absolutely fascinating, don't you think? Well, I do. Once you start thinking about it, the way Tolkien treats them in his writing, you inevitably start wondering what their society really is like.

As Tolkien is writing very much from a winner perspective, it's not surprising that the enemies will be depicted as in-humane and despicable, in particular if you consider the time and social strata he came from.

One fine example is how the Rohirrim and Dunlendings are depicted. The Rohirrim are written as great heroes, romanticised in the same way as the Vikings have been. Well, they are Vikings on horses really, and for some reason the English has had a great admiration for my plundering ancestors the past 200 years, so a group showing up in Tolkien’s writing such as the Rohirrim is quite logical. The Dunlendings on the other hand are written as murderous savages, betraying the Men of Middle Earth by seeking alliances with the enemy. Bad, bad Dunlendings.

Little is mentioned in LotR that Gondor brought the Rohirrim in from the north to drive the Dunlendings off the plains and into the mountains. The Dunlendings definitely have plenty of reasons to not be very friendly with neither Gondor nor Rohan. When you start scrutinising the material, the similarities with how many indigenous groups have been treated by an organised intruder are difficult to ignore. The Dunlendings didn't have a central government, which meant that a war waged against them wouldn't look like a structured and relatively orderly affair with clashes between armies, but an annihilation campaign; attacking their settlements, murdering, plundering and burning.

When the Rohirrim has their settlements burned in the LotR trilogy, that is nothing more than what they themselves once did to the Dunlendings.

But the Orcs. Always portrayed as vile beasts. Tolkien, who was notoriously bad at explaining how things really worked, the government and economy, naturally didn't bother about the Orcs' world either.

The first decision I made as I started to write this was to treat them as mammals and not like some fungus. Cute idea but clearly not what Tolkien was imagining. They are mammals. Doesn't sound very exciting? Well, consider this: they are compatible with the Humans and Elves in Middle Earth. With being a mammal all sorts of things follow, emotions, instincts – and it's certainly not a group with only one gender either. Now, the lack of women, and heaven forbid anything else, is a saga in Tolkien's writing and, I dare say, not something to really take seriously. Tolkien apparently lived in a very male world, unable to really see any other than men as part of it.

We also only meet the soldiers. That doesn't mean there aren't others, and there needs to be, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to exist and have the technical level they have. But as always, the enemy is best portrayed in propaganda as faceless, evil and bereft of anything that we, the Good People could identify with. The bad people are always someone else. Not us.

Now, I don't believe the Orcish world is a heaven created in Middle Earth, but something quite a lot more nuanced start forming once you start challenging the views presented by the author. In my writing I have been inspired by the Gallic tribes Rome fought with such determination, but a society which has taken the step towards early industrialisation, urged on by representatives for Sauron, who in the propaganda is promising a better future, as all politicians do.

Bolg never appealed to me as a character and he's even less so in the films. Azog on the other hand was not that bad, though I don't think it was right to let him survive Azanulbizar. The whole point of a blood feud between two families is lost when you let Azog live. Bolg was reduced to a side character being brought out when they needed a specific Orc to maim and/or kill. Well, he's pretty much that here too, though you won't see much of it. Instead I decided to write a character which I would find much more interesting – a sister. Urzul was born.

But fear not, Bolg will have a place here. Spoiler hint under the cut.