Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7743592" data-attributes="member: 4937">To a large extent, Tolkien agreed.  One of the reasons he never finished the Silmarillion is that he decided he has overly humanized the characters of the orcs in The Lord of the Rings and he got obsessed at reworking the mythology in order to make it clearer that orcs were simply puppets of evil masters.  However, the reworked material wasn't as good as the stuff he'd spent a lifetime creating and started veering off into allegory - something he really hated.None of that likely would have been a problem except that people started taking his stories super-seriously and this wigged him out a bit.Consider the case of the Tolkien Trolls.  They are portrayed a bunch of cockney speaking bandits, but in point of fact are revealed to be stones that have been given an evil will and semblance of life - reverting back to the stone they were made from when facing the light of day.   Not a lot of problems here, but the orcs with their personalities and apparent goals independent of those of their masters ended up being a bit too much like evil minded people, and the problem with that is that if they really were people then there was some chance, however remote, that they were redeemable.  The attempts at redeeming Gollum, corrupted and wicked thing that he is, after all occupy a significant portion of the book and all the characters that are deemed Wise agree that mercy toward Gollum was wise and necessary.   Why isn't the same treatment reasonable for orcs if they are but corrupted people?   But this was for Tolkien less of a problem for how his mortal characters ought to behave, then a problem for how his immortal characters behaved.  It raised less problems of morality for him, than problems of theology.</blockquote>

Verification