Orc

'Orc' is not itself a word of Middle-earth but Tolkien's chosen English rendering, drawn from an Old English term for a devilish or infernal spirit, which he applied in his note on translation to stand for the Sindarin 'orch' (plural 'yrch') and its Quenya cognate. He explained there that he preferred this designation to the more familiar 'goblin,' the word loosely used to render the same creatures in his earlier tale of Bilbo's journey, because 'Orc' better preserved the harsh, guttural association proper to the beings themselves and to the way Men of Rohan and Gondor spoke of them. The same note records the derived adjective 'orc-minded,' applied to boastful, contemptuous talk empty of real courage, showing how the name had already come to signify a manner of speech and temperament, not merely a race.

Within the narrative itself, the Orcs and their masters used further terms drawn from the debased tongue devised for Sauron's service. 'Uruk' denoted the taller, more disciplined soldiery bred for open war, and its collective form 'Uruk-hai' was used proudly by Saruman's and Sauron's elite troops to set themselves above lesser kin. 'Snaga,' closer in sense to drudge or slave, was flung as an insult by larger Orcs at smaller ones kept for menial labour, exposing a rigid hierarchy of breeds that the invaders' own speech made explicit even to outsiders who overheard it. Among Men, too, a distinction was sometimes drawn between ordinary rabble and a larger, more formidable kind referred to as Hobgoblins.

Of their descent, the only sustained account passed down concerns the earliest ages of Melkor's power, when Elves who fell into his hands before the fall of his northern stronghold of Utumno were dragged into the pits beneath it and, through long torment, twisted into a mocking, debased likeness of the Firstborn. Even the Eldar who preserved this history conceded that it rested on report rather than certain witness, since none who saw the shaping of the first Orcs lived to tell of it plainly; the account nonetheless endured as the accepted explanation for why the Orcs became the bitterest and most enduring foes of Elvenkind.

Once established in the pits of Angband, the Orcs multiplied swiftly under Melkor's dominion and became the chief instrument of his wars against the Noldor and Sindar after the exiles' return to Middle-earth. They fought in the ambush beneath the stars known as Dagor-nuin-Giliath, poured out in great host during the Dagor Bragollach when the siege of Angband was broken, and formed the overwhelming numbers that carried the field at the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. They served again in the sack of Nargothrond and in the final ruin of Gondolin, the last hidden Elven refuge in Beleriand. Only at the close of the First Age, when the Valar sent forth the Host of the West in the War of Wrath, were Morgoth's Orc-armies broken in their turn, slaughtered or scattered as Beleriand itself was riven and sank beneath the sea, so that the race entered the Second Age reduced to scattered remnants.

In the Second and early Third Ages the surviving Orcs withdrew into remote strongholds, above all the Misty Mountains and the Ered Mithrin, breeding again in darkness and re-emerging in strength wherever Sauron's power rose to gather and direct them. Among the Misty Mountains their resurgence had lasting consequence: when Dwarves delving too deep and greedily in Khazad-dûm roused the hidden Balrog, the mines and halls of Moria were abandoned, and Orcs afterward occupied the ruin for centuries, multiplying in its deeps under the shadow of the demon and later under Sauron's renewed influence. Centuries afterward, when Balin son of Fundin led a company of Dwarves back to resettle Moria, that colony was overrun and destroyed by the Orcs dwelling there, a disaster only discovered by chance when the Company of the Ring passed through the mountain in the Third Age's final years.

The Orcs of the Misty Mountains provoked open war with the Dwarves after the Orc chieftain Azog slew King Thrór at the gate of Moria; in the vengeance that followed, the Dwarves hunted Orc-holds throughout the range and broke their strength at the Battle of Azanulbizar before the East-gate, though Azog's stronghold itself held and the deeper halls of Moria remained unclaimed. Orc settlements nonetheless persisted through the mountains' passes and under the Misty Mountains' northern reaches, harrying travellers and maintaining a standing hostility toward Dwarves and Men that endured into the following century, when Bilbo Baggins and Thorin's company were seized and brought before the Great Goblin beneath the mountains before escaping into the wilds beyond.

Azog's son Bolg later rallied the scattered Orc-holds of the northern mountains into a single host, joined by Wargs, to seize Erebor's treasure after the death of the dragon Smaug had drawn Dwarves, Elves, and Men to contest the mountain themselves. The resulting Battle of Five Armies before the Lonely Mountain broke this confederation decisively, with Bolg and the greater part of his host destroyed, and for a generation afterward the goblin power of that region did not recover its former strength.

As Sauron openly reclaimed Mordor and rebuilt Barad-dûr, and as the wizard Saruman fell under his sway at Isengard, both lords set about breeding and drilling new Orc-armies for the coming war, Saruman's Uruk-hai notably bred to withstand sunlight and to range far beyond the limits that had always confined lesser Orcs. In the War of the Ring these combined forces struck on multiple fronts at once: Saruman's Uruks stormed Rohan and were shattered at the Hornburg, while Sauron's armies out of Minas Morgul and Mordor took Osgiliath, besieged Minas Tirith, and were broken upon the Pelennor Fields, before the last great muster of Orcs was destroyed or dispersed before the Black Gate as the One Ring perished in the fires of Orodruin.

With Sauron's overthrow, the Orc-hosts that had depended on his will collapsed into leaderless confusion; many perished in the ruin of Barad-dûr or fled into the wild, while in the north a simultaneous assault on Erebor and Dale was likewise thrown back with the death of its Orc commander. In the following years, the remaining Orc-holds of the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood were hunted down and cleared, notably through the efforts of the restored realms of Gondor, Rohan, and the Elves of Lothlórien and Mirkwood, so that by the early Fourth Age the Orcs no longer stood as an organized power in Middle-earth, surviving only as isolated remnants in remote and unguarded places.

Orcs shrank from open daylight, which by report clouded their sight and sapped their strength, so that ordinary bands kept to tunnels, caverns, and windowless halls, emerging chiefly by night or under cloud and driving their marches hardest after dusk. This aversion, already evident when the goblins beneath the Misty Mountains were routed by sudden light during Bilbo's capture, left a company caught unshielded at noon vulnerable even to a smaller or weaker foe—a frailty their overlords labored to breed away in their more formidable soldiery, as noted elsewhere in this account. Left to themselves, orcs preferred to hollow out and occupy caves and old workings rather than build afresh, a habit that let them overrun and inhabit halls delved by other hands long after those halls' first makers were gone.

Orc society ran on fear rather than loyalty: bands were held in order by captains and drivers who ruled with whip and threat, and companies of different breeding or allegiance eyed one another with open suspicion, ready to quarrel, rob, or come to blows over plunder and captives whenever no strong hand bound them together. Rumor among the orcs themselves held that hunger or spite might drive some troops to eat the flesh of Men or of their own dead, a charge lesser bands flung at rivals as readily as any other insult. Yet they proved capable and inventive with iron and stone, skilled as miners and tunnellers and as smiths of crude but serviceable arms—curved blades, black-shafted arrows, heavy gear—while showing little regard for growing things, cutting or burning trees and crops as much from malice as from need.

No single tongue was truly their own: by report, Orcs, lacking any speech held in common, seized on fragments of the languages of Elves, Men, and Dwarves they encountered and twisted them into harsh, ever-shifting jargons peculiar to each troop or stronghold, so that bands from different regions often could not understand one another without falling back on the Westron used by their enemies; Sauron's attempt to impose a single Black Speech across Mordor's armies never fully displaced these local dialects. They made nothing of beauty, only clumsy mockeries of finer work, and showed little of what other peoples called courage: driven to battle chiefly by fear of their captains, orcs fought hard while watched and commanded, but broke, fled, or turned on one another the moment that compulsion lifted, and gave their dead no rite beyond leaving them where they fell.

Orc society recognized no genealogies comparable to those kept among Elves, Men, or Dwarves; what passed for kindred among them was allegiance and breeding-stock rather than descent, and the only distinctions drawn explicitly in the record are of troop and badge. When Merry and Pippin were carried off from the Anduin, their captors comprised three such bodies thrown together under a single errand: Uglúk's black-uniformed Isengarders marked with Saruman's white hand, Grishnákh's soldiery sent from Barad-dûr bearing the Red Eye, and a smaller band of trackers out of the northern mountains serving neither lord by fixed loyalty. The three troops mistrusted and openly disparaged one another over rank, rations, and the disposal of their captives, and it was this rivalry, not any common purpose, that Aragorn's pursuit was ultimately able to exploit.

A comparable division held among the garrisons of Sauron's own realm. The tower of Cirith Ungol was held by a company under the captain Shagrat, while the neighbouring stronghold of Minas Morgul answered to Gorbag; though both served the same master and coordinated in guarding the pass, their captains regarded each other's commands with active suspicion, disputing orders and trading accusations of treachery even as they cooperated. When Frodo was taken half-dead into the tower, the two houses' quarrel over his mail-shirt and other spoils erupted into open slaughter between them, leaving the tower emptied of orcs before Sam arrived to free his master. Such episodes suggest that the loyalty binding an Orc-band ran chiefly to its immediate captain and badge rather than to any wider fellow-feeling, a structure that made cooperation between separately bred or separately commanded troops brittle even when they served one Dark Lord in common.

Within the story, Orcs function less as a rounded people than as a narrative engine that redirects the plot at its hinge-points. Their ambush near Amon Hen and seizure of Merry and Pippin breaks the Fellowship apart, scattering its members onto the separate paths that carry the tale toward Rohan, Fangorn, and eventually the road to Mordor. Earlier, Bilbo's capture by goblins beneath the Misty Mountains serves the same structural purpose in miniature, stranding him alone in the dark long enough for the chance meeting with Gollum that determines the fate of the Ring. Later, when Frodo and Sam don orc-mail and fall in with a driven column on the road to Orodruin, the disguise lets the narrative move them, unnoticed, through the one landscape otherwise closed to any free traveller, turning the enemy's own ranks into cover for the story's final approach.

The Orcs also mark a moral boundary the story otherwise refuses to draw so sharply. Where Gollum, Saruman, and even Wormtongue are each given some hesitation, some offered chance at pity or repentance that the protagonists debate and sometimes extend, no comparable moment is allowed an Orc; Tolkien himself, pressed by correspondents on the point, acknowledged the difficulty of a soldiery written as capable of cruelty and cunning yet seemingly denied any possibility of choosing otherwise. Their exclusion from mercy is not incidental but throws the mercy shown elsewhere into relief, marking pity as something the story extends only where some remnant of choice, however buried, might still be found.

Encounters with Orcs also serve to measure the other characters against them. Bilbo's escape from goblins and wargs traces his slow turn from reluctant burglar toward someone capable of quick thought and real nerve, while at the Hornburg the grim, half-comic rivalry between Legolas and Gimli over their respective tallies of slain Orcs lets two wary companions settle into something like friendship under the pressure of a siege. In each case the Orcs supply less a character to know than a fixed, hostile pressure against which the story can chart how far its more central figures have come.

The earliest surviving account of the Orcs, set down in the tales that would become The Book of Lost Tales, gives them a cruder and more corporeal origin than the later, more troubling story of tortured Elves. There Melko is said to have bred his Orc-host directly out of the subterranean heat and slime of the earth, a race of his own devising rather than a mockery worked upon captured Elvish flesh and spirit. The same early layer of the legendarium calls the invading horde that assaults the hidden city of Gondolin by the Noldorin name Glamhoth, the 'din-horde,' a term tied to their clamour and confusion in battle rather than to any claim about their descent, and one that faded from later use as the Elf-corruption account took hold.

Decades later, in the late essay called Myths Transformed gathered among his papers, Tolkien returned to the question of the Orcs' origin and found the Silmarillion account philosophically uncomfortable: if Orcs were truly Elves possessed of rational, immortal fëar, their wholesale and apparently irredeemable corruption sat awkwardly with his conviction that Eru's own children could not be so completely unmade by Melkor's will. He weighed alternatives without settling on one, including the idea that at least some Orcs were bred not from Elves but from Men taken and broken after the Elder Days, and the darker possibility that they were beasts given a mere semblance of speech and purpose by an indwelling evil spirit, lacking true rational souls altogether. Christopher Tolkien, editing these notes, left the competing drafts standing side by side rather than forcing them into a single settled account, so that the question of what an Orc essentially was remained, at his father's death, genuinely unresolved.

The earliest screen versions keep the nomenclature of the books they adapt: the Rankin/Bass television Hobbit of 1977 calls the creatures beneath the Misty Mountains goblins throughout, and compresses their role heavily, reducing the battle before the Lonely Mountain to a few largely narrated minutes. Bakshi's film of the following year, whose animation was traced in large part from filmed live-action performers, accordingly gives its Orc-hosts the bulk and gait of human actors rather than of drawn design; because the film breaks off after the battle at Helm's Deep, its Orcs are only ever Saruman's and Sauron's field armies, and the garrison quarrels of Mordor lie outside it entirely. The Rankin/Bass Return of the King of 1980 takes up the later part of the story and gives its Orcs a marching song, a musical number with no counterpart in Tolkien's text. The BBC Radio dramatisation of 1981, the most complete of the older adaptations at twenty-six parts, is correspondingly the one that preserves most of the Orc material the animated films had no room for, including the disputes among the captains of the pass.

Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2001–2003 invented Lurtz, a named Uruk-hai captain played by Lawrence Makoare, to give the Orcs who shoot Boromir a face; in the novel they remain anonymous. The same films stage the breeding of Saruman's Uruk-hai beneath Isengard as an on-screen process, where the book supplies only rumour and inference, and retain Uglúk (Nathaniel Lees) and Grishnákh (Stephen Ure) from the pursuit across Rohan. The later Hobbit trilogy of 2012–2014 makes the more consequential change by keeping Azog alive: killed at Azanulbizar in the account given in the appendices, he instead survives, played by Manu Bennett, to pursue Thorin's company as principal antagonist across all three films, with his son Bolg demoted to a subordinate role, while the Great Goblin, voiced by Barry Humphries, is expanded well past his brief part in the novel.