Have you read "The Two Towers?" I actually find the conflict between the various orcs in the band taking the hobbits to Saruman reflective of Tolkein giving his orcs quite a bit of culture and personality.
Likewise the orc grunts and their leaders in the pages of "The Return of the King" reflected quite well a military culture full of infighting, personal ambition, and a bit of cannibalistic opportunism. Warhammer orks, especially 40k, are very much derivative of the orcs found in "The Return of the King," though Tolkien's orcs were smarter and more cunning imo.
For the 2 towers comment, try this go re-read that part and ignore the parts where it says orc or urukhai, you wouldn't be able to tell if their orc or just some group of humans. At that point it will be like if their cultists, savages, cannibals or something.
If by culture you mean, "We come into this world fully grown and ready for battle, get some armore slapped on us, grabbing our weapons on the way to the battle field, and on our down time we try not to starve (occasional cannibalism), and we obey the Master". Yes I over simplified it, but that is all I got from Tolkiens writings.
Comparing Lotr and WH40k orks is like comparing a kinds drawing of an ork with a full blown fully illustrated game rule book for orks.
Yes we can say the orks are a derivative of the Tolkien orcs, but in that case we might as well start going back further in time, going back to Beowulf, old English texts and Nordic Mythology.
As I see it the WH40k ork is more of a D&D derevite, big, mean and green with 2 lower jaw teeth protruding and looking more bestial (Yea yea yea, the founders of D&D based most of the things off of Lotr).
On the smarter and more cunning. Really? Really? Medieval orcs are smarter then Space orks (just to point out they have a cast (or is is class?) system where there are doctors, surgeons, robotics experts and well so on).
More cunning? Don't think so their the same irrational killing machines, frontal assaults are still the best, and win by numbers with both types of orks, maybe and ambush or 2 just to mix things up.
As I said It can't be really compared, Tolkien didn't bother to write about his orc or detail them in such a fashion as the Workshop guy did with their orks. While Tolkien wrote them as enemies just like in D&D. The workshop guys wrote them as playable race, and spiced them up gave them depth, flavor, history they gave and uninteresting idea of Hero-fodder grunts from Tolkiens writing and D&D and gave them character.
Hmm, I guess that is my reasoning behind my previous post, about not wasting time with reading about the Tolkien orcs.
And no, I don't like the Lotr books, their slow, the movies did it justice by cutting out all the unnecessary stuff. To qoute the immortal Kurt Vonnegut: "Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action". On that note IMO the books were 2/3rds too long. But that is just me.
Umf, now that's a rant.... well I guess that is what happens when I get to talk about my favorite fantasy race.
PS: I tried to place the c-s and k-s on the end of the correct ork or orc i was talking about.
