Orkish

The name of this speech is not its own. Like most of the linguistic labels in the Red Book tradition, it is formed from the name of the speakers with an English adjectival ending attached, so that the tongue is identified by who used it rather than by anything its users called it; the k of the adjective simply preserves the hard consonant that the c of the noun would lose before such an ending. Nothing is recorded of a term the Orcs themselves applied to their manner of speaking, and the appendix on languages gives a reason why one would hardly be expected: there was no single tongue to be named, only a scatter of debased jargons differing from company to company. The one made language associated with Mordor does carry a proper designation, the Black Speech, and that title points to its origin and its maker rather than to the mouths it was placed in.

The name behind the label is likewise an outsiders' word. Appendix F explains that Orc was the form used by other peoples for this folk in the later ages, corresponding to Sindarin orch, and the same appendix notes that in most of the narrative the word is given instead as goblin, with hobgoblin reserved for the larger sorts — the usage familiar from the earlier tale of Bilbo's journey under the Misty Mountains. A further note warns the reader off a false connection with the English orc used of certain sea-beasts. Within the speech of Mordor itself other terms marked the kinds of Orc, uruk for the greater soldiery and snaga for the lesser sort held in service, but neither was a name for a language.

Tolkien accounted for his choice of the word directly in correspondence: he took orc from Old English, where it denotes a demon or evil spirit, and said plainly that he adopted it for the sound rather than for any inherited meaning, the shape of the word suiting the creatures he wanted it for. The derived name of the speech therefore rests on a borrowing chosen by ear, applied by others, and never claimed by its speakers.

The jargons belonged to the Orcs and, so far as the appendix on languages reports, to no one else. No other people is said to have taken them up, and none had cause to: they served the immediate business of order, threat and insult, and carried nothing that would repay learning. There was also little to learn in any settled sense, since each host and each stronghold worked its borrowings into a shape of its own, so that what one company spoke was of small use to the next. Nothing suggests a learned register within them — no lore preserved, no written use described, no body of speakers who handled them with more care than the rest. They were the ordinary daily speech of those who used them, and nothing above that.

Because the jargons failed at any distance, the Orcs of the Third Age fell back on the Common Speech when breeds had to deal with one another, handling it as roughly as they handled everything else they borrowed. The narrative shows this plainly at the point where the companies out of Mordor, Isengard and Moria meet on the eastern skirts of Rohan with the two captive hobbits between them: the argument over authority, route and prisoners runs in the common tongue, since it is the only ground the three parties share, and Uglúk and Grishnákh press their claims in it. The same expedient appears again among the soldiery on the roads of Mordor later in the tale.

Nothing about this speech was kept hidden; its obscurity was the accident of its being broken into pieces, not a guarded condition. Secrecy and dread attach instead to the made tongue of Mordor, which Sauron intended for all who served him and failed to impose, so that after his first overthrow it survived only with the Ringwraiths, while his soldiery used a worn-down form of it from which single words spread widely among Orcs elsewhere. That distinction is felt in the one scene where the made language is spoken aloud in the West: when Gandalf pronounces the ring-verse in it before the Council at Rivendell, the effect on the hearers is immediate, and no Orc-jargon is recorded as troubling anyone in that way.

No date attaches to the first Orkish speech, and the older material offers only the circumstances in which it must have begun. The Silmarillion places the making of the Orcs in the long darkness before the Sun, when Melkor took Elves at the waters of the awakening and by slow cruelty brought their kind down into a mockery of what they had been, and it adds that they multiplied thereafter and served him in hatred. A folk made in that manner had no starting point of its own to speak from, which is the condition the appendix on languages describes rather than explains: whatever the Orcs used they had taken from elsewhere and roughened to their own purposes. Through the wars of Beleriand they were the common soldiery of Angband, and when the Great Battle at the end of the First Age broke that power most of them perished with it, though not all; those that survived went into hiding, and whatever they had of speech went with them into the dark places of the world.

The Second Age gave them a new master and, for a time, the prospect of a single tongue imposed from above. Sauron raised his fortress in Mordor about the thousandth year of that age and came to open dominion after the forging of the One Ring some six centuries later, and it was in these Dark Years that he devised the Black Speech, intended for every servant of his and not merely for Orcs. The appendix on languages states plainly that the design failed of its purpose, so the borrowed jargons remained what the Orcs actually spoke throughout the age. When the Last Alliance broke Sauron in the year 3441 and the age ended, the made tongue passed almost entirely out of use, kept only by the Ringwraiths, while the scattered speech of his former soldiery survived precisely because it had never depended on him. Nothing had been established that could be undone.

The Third Age spread the Orcs further than any earlier period, and the fragmentation of their speech spread with them. The Tale of Years records a new and stronger breed coming out of Mordor in 2475 to ruin Osgiliath, and about 2480 the making of secret holds through the Misty Mountains to close the passes into Eriador, at the same season that Moria — emptied of Dwarves since the Balrog rose there in 1980 and the last of Durin's folk fled the year after — was peopled with creatures of Sauron's sending. The long war between Dwarves and Orcs from 2793 to its end at Azanulbizar in 2799 turned on holds strung the whole length of those mountains. Each such settlement worked its own borrowings, so that distance and time told against any common form, and the Common Speech had to serve when breeds met. That the borrowing itself never stopped is visible in a word for a man of Gondor which the Orcs had worn down out of Westron, itself holding a Quenya element beneath.

The record closes with the War of the Ring rather than with any account of decline. When the Ring went into the fire in March of 3019 and the tower fell, the hosts drawn up before the Black Gate lost the will that had ordered them and broke apart, some fleeing, some standing without purpose, and the great concentrations of Orcs in the West ended there. What happened afterwards to their manner of speaking is not followed. This is a limit of the source rather than a statement about the tongue: the appendix on languages is written as a translator's note to a Third Age compilation kept by hobbits, and it describes the jargons as they stood in the years of that war, in a work whose interest in them ends when the story does. The last thing said of Orkish is therefore what was true of it throughout: many broken forms, no centre, and nothing preserved by its speakers that would have outlasted them.

What the sources supply under this head is verdict rather than description. Appendix F sets out no sound-system, no grammar and no scheme of word-formation for the Orc-jargons; it states only what they were made of and what they were good for, which is borrowed matter twisted to the borrowers' taste, adequate to command, threat and foul language and to very little besides. The translator's note at the close of the same appendix goes further and judges the manner rather than the material: the real talk, it says, was fouler and more debased than what has been set down, monotonous in its hatred and contempt, and worn too far from anything good to keep even the ordinary vigour of words, so that it could sound forceful only to an ear that mistakes squalor for strength. That verdict is the fullest characterisation the whole corpus offers, and it is aesthetic and moral throughout. Where a reader might look for phonology, the appendix supplies distaste.

Very little of the actual substance reaches the page, and the frame of the book explains why: Orc talk is rendered into the Common Speech along with everything else, so what comes through is tone and temper — harsh voices, snarling and squabbling — rather than the sounds themselves. One stretch of untranslated Orc-speech is printed, during the quarrel between the companies on the marches of Rohan, and the appendix takes care to assign it not to any tribal jargon but to the coarsened form of the made tongue used by the soldiery of Barad-dûr. The same appendix traces the widely current word for fire, ghâsh, to that made tongue as well. The small stock of forms shared across Orc-kind is therefore imported rather than inherited, which is exactly what a speech with no centre of its own would be expected to show.

Only one habit of word-making can be watched at work, the clipping and hardening of what was taken, seen in the Gondorian term noticed elsewhere in this article, where a Westron word lost its ending and its length together. The recorded names of Orc captains and common soldiers, from the marches of Rohan to the garrison of the tower above Cirith Ungol, share a narrow texture of short forms, heavy consonants and abrupt endings, though the appendix nowhere states which tongue any single name belongs to, and no inflection, syntax or sound-pattern is described for any of them. The impression of a common style is thus a reader's, drawn from a handful of proper names; the compilers claim nothing of the kind.

Only one system of letters is anywhere associated with the Orcs, and the notice of it stands not in the appendix on languages but in the one on alphabets. There the older and simpler form of the Cirth, the runic characters first shaped in Beleriand, is said to have spread eastward and become known to many peoples — Men and Dwarves among them, and Orcs as well — each of whom altered the signs to suit their own purposes and according to whatever skill they had or lacked. That last clause is the whole of the assessment, and it is the same judgement passed on their speech: something taken over ready-made, then handled roughly. Nothing is said of what the Orcs wrote with these runes, whether they set down their own jargons or the Common Speech, and no Orc inscription, record or book is described anywhere in the narrative. The elaborated runic tradition of the same period, the long series worked out by the Dwarves of Moria for their own tongue and for others, is given in full detail by contrast, so the silence about Orc use is not an accident of the appendix's scope.

The Fëanorian letters are never assigned to the Orcs at all. Where those letters do touch the affairs of Mordor it is at the highest level and by Sauron's own doing: the fiery writing revealed on the Ring is cut in the Elvish characters, in an old mode, though the words are of the made tongue, and Gandalf makes precisely that distinction when he reads it in Bag End. That shows the reach of the maker into Elvish craft; it says nothing of literacy among those who served him. What the narrative actually shows on Orc equipment is emblem rather than text — the white hand borne on the shields of the companies out of Isengard, and the single rune wrought on their helms, both of them badges of a master and not writing in any Orc speech. Taken together the record gives a borrowed alphabet used at second hand, an Elvish one reserved to a devised language above them, and no written matter of their own preserved by anyone. For a tongue the sources treat as having no centre, that is a consistent standing: nothing was committed to letters that would have carried it beyond the mouths that used it.

Set the appendices aside and what the narrative itself preserves of Orc speech is a thin scatter of words embedded in dialogue that is otherwise given in the Common Speech. Nearly all of it stands in a single chapter, the march of the three companies across the plains of Rohan with the captive hobbits: there Uglúk names his own troops the Uruk-hai, the Dark Tower is called Lugbúrz by Isengarders and Mordor Orcs alike, and snaga is thrown at the smaller northern Orcs of the company as a term of contempt for those who take orders. The captains and soldiers of that march supply the rest — Uglúk himself, Grishnákh out of Mordor, Lugdush among the Isengarders, Mauhúr who comes up with a second party. The one run of untranslated speech printed anywhere in the book is muttered in the course of that quarrel, and no rendering of it is offered to the reader.

The second cluster is the garrison of the tower above Cirith Ungol, where Shagrat's account of the killing names his dead — Radbug, Lagduf, Muzgash — and where snaga does duty once more, functioning almost as a form of address for the last soldier still answering him. What stands out is how little accompanies these names. The long exchange between Shagrat and Gorbag that Sam overhears at the pass, the fullest stretch of Orc conversation in the whole story, carries no Orc word whatever, and the pair who fall out on the road below Durthang later argue in the same borrowed tongue. Proper names, in other words, bear almost the entire weight of what is shown.

Two items reach the page from outside any Orc's mouth. The nickname Saruman's ruffians use for him in the Shire is explained in a footnote as coming from an Orkish word for an old man, which makes it the only Orkish element in the book put to work among Men; and the appendix, not any scene, supplies the Orcs' worn-down term for a man of Gondor. The earlier tale of the dragon and the mountain offers nothing further: the goblins beneath the passes talk, threaten and sing entirely in English, and their language leaves a mark only in the names Golfimbul, Azog and Bolg. The whole recorded stock is therefore names, two or three class-words, one place-name and one curse without a gloss.

Tolkien's habit was to make a language before he made the people who spoke it, and the foreword he added to the second edition of the book states the priority openly: the work was linguistic in its first impulse, and everything else grew to accommodate that. Orkish is the case in which the habit was deliberately withheld. Nothing was built for it — no word-list, no sound-changes, no descent from a parent form — and what the appendix on languages offers is a set of statements about a speech rather than a speech, so that the absence in the workshop and the absence in the story are the same fact seen from two sides. Where the professional equipment does show through is the Gondorian term for a Númenórean man noticed elsewhere in this article, a borrowing that passes down through three of his own tongues and is clipped shorter at each remove: a loan-word history in miniature, the philologist's daily business run downhill instead of up. A shift of conception is visible across the two published narratives as well. In the earlier tale the goblins beneath the Misty Mountains talk and sing in ordinary English and no separate speech is at issue; by the later book a linguistic condition had been supplied for them, and the appendix squares the two by declaring the older word a rendering of the newer.

In his letters Tolkien put the order of work plainly: the invented languages were the foundation, and the tales were made largely to give them a world to stand in. Measured against that statement, the Orc-jargons mark where the method stops. He invented a linguistic situation in full detail — borrowed matter, endless local variation, a fallback to the Common Speech between groups — while leaving the languages themselves unmade, because the point he wanted about the speakers needed no vocabulary to carry it. No real-world tongue is named anywhere as a model for them; the single acknowledged borrowing in this quarter, discussed earlier in this article, was the Old English word for the creatures, taken for its sound and not for its sense, and it attaches to the name rather than to anything the bearers said.