Tonguez said:
Tolkien explains that in the MiddleEarth setting Orc is the Hobbit word for Hob-goblin ergo anyone wanting LOTR Orcs should look at the DnD Hobgoblin for stats rather than the DnD Orc (which is not the same thing)
Uruk-Hai etc are magically breed Hob-goblins (ie Orc) based hybrids (and in DnD could use a template)
Urgh. So many replies I could make to this thread, and the general spread of disinformation about Tolkien's Orcs. Sorry, Tonguez, I'll pick on yours. Orc is a word that is based on elvish and transfered into common (and Orkish) in various forms -
orch was the Sindarin form (shown as a plural in FotR -
yrch), uruk was the Black Speech, urko was the cognate from Quenya, etc. Goblin, on the other hand, was a more colloquial word, mainly used by the hobbits, for the same creature. Goblin was used extensively in The Hobbit, but it's use was much more limited in Lord of the Rings. Hobgoblin was only used once in the hobbit, and exactly what it means in relation to goblin is unclear, although based on the etymology of the word, it's quite likel that hob- did
not mean bigger and stronger, but rather smaller. The word goblin--when used in LotR--was usually referring to the wilder frontier orcs; the Misty Mountain variety. The passage in the hobbit where it refers to orcs, goblins and hobgoblins probably refers to some of these breeds, but there's no telling which breed is supposed to be which term in context.
There are no cases of orcs breeding with trolls that I'm aware of and creating anything. Olog-hai were a race of trolls that were "bred" by Sauron and were tolerant of the sun; it's suggested vaguely that they may have been bred with orcs or foul men or something, but it's never said, and even so the Olog-hai were never considered orcs in any case--in fact, the same passage that describes them categorically dismissed the possibility.
There were various types of orc, and their origin is a bit mysterious (don't trust anyone who says clear-cut that orcs are corrupted elves--that betrays only a surface knowledge of Tolkien's writings.) I don't know that any of these types were "magically" bred; nothing I've read hints to that effect.
There is a passage in the Silmarillion where it is
speculated that the orcs were corrupted Elves, and the way the Silmarillion is structured, it's hard to see otherwise. Keep in mind, though, that the Silmarillion was an early attempt by Christopher Tolkien (along with Guy Gavriel Kay) to take literally decades of notes by his father and turn them into a book. Because his father's ideas evolved over that time from something fairly whimsical and pagan mythology-like (early Lost Tales versions) to more serious and sorta Catholic compatible, there were tons of inconsistencies in them, and Christopher and Guy kinda bridged the gaps themselves, and dipped into writings as old as 1917 and as late as (at least) the very late '60s. Christopher later regretted the way the Silmarillion was done, considered it a mistake, and presented his father's notes much more completely in a 12-volume set, complete with annotations done by himself. The Wikipedia entry for the Silmarillion sums it up quite well.
Due to Christopher's extensive explanations of how he compiled the published work, much of The Silmarillion has been debated by the hardcore fans. Christopher's task is generally accepted as very difficult given the state of his father's texts at the time of his death: some critical texts were no longer in the Tolkien family's possession, and Christopher's task compelled him to rush through much of the material. Christopher reveals in later volumes of The History of Middle-earth many divergent ideas which do not agree with the published version. Christopher Tolkien has suggested that, had he taken more time and had access to all the texts, he might have produced a substantially different work. But he was impelled by considerable pressure and demand from his father's readers and publishers to produce something publishable as quickly as possible. One must remember this version is more a product of the son than the father.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Christopher Tolkien published most of his father's Middle-Earth-related writings as the 12-volume History of Middle-earth series.
In addition to the source material and earlier drafts of several portions of The Lord of the Rings, these books greatly expand on the original material published in The Silmarillion, and in many cases diverge from it. Part of the reason for this is that Christopher Tolkien heavily edited the Silmarillion to ready it for publication, in places incorrectly because he was unaware of the existence of much material which would come to light only after publication. These later books also reveal which parts of The Silmarillion Tolkien developed more than others.
One of the things that is divergent quite a bit from the Silmarillion is a very late, fragmentary, and inconclusive essay which appears in
Morgoth's Ring; one of the last of the
History of Middle-earth series. In many ways, it reads as if Tolkien were thinking "aloud" as he wrote, but he doesn't appear to seriously consider a corrupted elves origin for orcs. In fact, it appears quite strongly that he was settling on the idea that orcs are in fact corrupted
humans, not elves.
As for cross-breeding orcs back with humans to create Saruman's Uruk-hai, that, it seems, was a secret already long-known to Sauron, and probably the genesis of the original "black Uruks from Mordor" in the first place. Keep in mind that the orcs went through often long periods of non-intervention by the various Dark Lords where they returned to kind of a native state. In addition to that, they were clearly very variable, quick breeders, and adaptable to begin with, so they could quickly lose some of the traits for which they were bred if left on their own; the Misty Mountain orcs are a good example of such "native" orcs. They had been rounded up by the Witch-king of Angmar, and no doubt played an important role in his kingdom, but by the time of the Hobbit, even that was a distant memory.
Orcs--to be faithful to Tolkien, which isn't neccessarily desireable for D&D--really do need to have a CON bonus. Many in this thread have apparently forgotten that the force that ran Merry and Pippin captive for all that time were not exclusively Saruman's Uruk-hai; there were three "breeds" or orcs represented; Mordor orcs, Saruman orcs, and Misty Mountains orcs.
