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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 8326614" data-attributes="member: 21169">I enjoyed the essay – it was interesting and informative. But it doesn't properly confront this issue, from Roger Echo-Hawk's blog post <a href="https://tolkienland.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/tolkiens-squinteyed-orc-men/" target="_blank">Tolkien's Squinteyed Orc-men</a>:When Tolkien's orcs / goblins made their debut in his earliest writings as monstrous soldiery of evil, they were not squint-eyed; there was no mention of interbreeding between orcs and humans. But between 1939 and 1942 Tolkien spliced new elements into his orcs / goblins. He now made a decision to reshape these fantasy monsters. He decided he would colorize them with distinct details drawn from the traditions of British racial typology.He addresses problems with previous scholarship in another post, <a href="https://tolkienland.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/jrr-tolkien-and-race/" target="_blank"> JRR Tolkien and Race</a>. The most important explanation, in my opinion, is in his book Tolkien in Pawneeland 2e (2016):Tolkien's squint-eyed southerner [Bill Ferny's friend] was only briefly mentioned when he first appeared in 1939. That is probably when Tolkien first envisioned this new class of creatures, but it wasn't until this writing in 1942 that he turned his hand to sketching in more details of his half-orcs, and the portrayal is clearly drawn from traditional racial Asian typology. (pg 269) At some point after writing the early drafts – perhaps after about mid-1942 – Tolkien edited his description of the "huge orc-chieftain" to make him more racial: "His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red…" (pg 262) In January 1942 Tolkien's interest in the Asian theater of World War Two became explicitly evident in notes he scribbled on the back of an examination sheet… Tolkien's doodled references to the Asian theater of World War Two came as he sat down once again to insert orcs into his tale, composing notes on the material that became "The Departure of Boromir"… Not long after this, Tolkien prepared "The Uruk-hai"… we encounter Orcs with "hideous faces"… a band of "long-armed crook-legged Orcs" from Mordor, "… swart, slant-eyed Orcs" from Isengard… These orcs refer to Rohirrim as "Whiteskins"… Tolkien had race on his mind; these horrible orcs make use of race… They don't just believe in race; they embody race. And now we see a full flowering of racialized orcs in all their Mongol-type degraded repulsive glory. (pgs 265-267) Discussing his orcs as "folk made bad" in a letter written in 1944, Tolkien opined that "it must be admitted that there are human creatures that seem irredeemable short of a special miracle, and that there are probably abnormally many of such creatures in Deutschland and Nippon…" (pg 269)</blockquote>

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