Tolkien's take on Orcs...raised by Elves?!

[huinárë]

I was revisiting The Children of Húrin, and a phrase in the last chapter, describing Morwen, brought to mind the last few posts in this discussion:

“…a light still gleamed in [her eyes] hard to endure: the elven-light that long ago had earned her name, Edhelwen, proudest of mortal women in the days of old.”

Unless I’ve overlooked something somewhere along the line, Morwen does not have a drop of Elven blood in her. To me, this reinforces Thoughtfulelf’s notion that the ‘light’ is simply stronger in eyes that have beheld the trees, but that doesn’t mean others (even non-elves evidently?) can’t have some form of it. Of course, ‘elven-light’ could simply be a rhetorical device as used above, but it seems like something Tolkien was trying to emphasize about this mortal woman.

[oshun]

I got a huge kick out of playing with the light in the eyes of the Noldor as being literally true in my novel A New Day, and other places in that same personal canon of mine. I love the Silm quotations and I love fooling around with the elvish word "lachen" or flame-eyed as a pejorative term that the Sindar used to describe those annoying, know-it-all Noldor, with whom I am so enamored.

Actually, I think most of those descriptions are meant to be poetic and not taken literally. (Do you really think that flowers sprang up under the feet of the Noldor led by Fingolfin--sounds like propaganda/poetry to me.)

I think one could just as easily argue that the raised-in-Aman Noldor were brighter-eyed and taller than the Sindar who never left Middle-earth, because their mothers had a better diet during their gestation in Valinor. I do, however, love all of this stuff as poetic conceit; especially the whole bright eyes thing. You can't beat the description of the first battle of the Noldor freshly returned to Middle-earth against Morgoth's minions:

The Noldor, outnumbered and taken at unawares, were yet swiftly victorious; for the light of Aman was not yet dimmed in their eyes, and they were strong and swift, and deadly in anger, and their swords were long and terrible. --The Silmarillion

It always seems a lot like they won because they were well-armed and had a highly developed sense of entitlement, arrogance, and confidence, fresh from Aman, used to thinking of themselves as cleverer than everyone else and unbeatable--not the gorgeous scary eyes per se. Morgoth pulls back his minions, realizing they were ill-prepared and goes about putting together better trained and stronger forces before he tries to take on the Noldor again.

I think the path to perdition as a fanfic writer is to try to determine hidebound literal meanings for all kinds of poetic license and epic story-telling forms used by Tolkien. Knowing what he wrote is my method and then trying for consistency within my own reinterpretation or, barring that, being so entertaining that no one gives a damn.

Imagine if one's own means of determining how the world around one works were based only upon histories of science written thousands of years ago for different religious and political purposes. Tolkien's histories are like that; a series of pieced together histories theoretically composed by a series of unreliable narrators. Who is talking here? Biblo? Some Elven or Mannish historian or bard? Each with their own politics, prejudices and ethnic, cultural or economic axes to grind. Then, was the version one is discussing written by twenty-five-year-old Tolkien, or middled-aged or elderly Tolkien?

On the orc material: the earliest version I have come across is that in The Book of Lost Tales, Vol. II (approx. 1917) where they are said to have been made out of the slime of the earth. Later there's the idea they could have been Avari captured by Morgoth and corrupted--so many other versions follow, including interbred mixtures of beasts, elves and Men. I dislike the corrupted elves story for purely personal reasons--creeps me out! Dawn Felagund, on the other hand, goes to town with that one in her novel Another Man's Cage, having Rumil of Tirion (a totally extra-canon element--no basis in the texts!) being half-corrupted and then escaping horribly deformed. She makes it work for her dramatically.

As is my usual way, too many words for me to try to say that I don't know where Marta got the idea about the orcs. I don't think the source troubled her much either; I assume she was more concerned with the storytelling element, which is just fine with me. I agreed with Randy that it sounds like fanon--perhaps original fanon, since I have not seen a source. *If she had a source she probably would have footnoted it. She does love her footnotes.

[oshun]

I do not know if this is useful or even of interest any longer, but I stumbled on an interesting to me quotation about Tolkien's opinion on Orcs today, while working on a character biography:

One of the major themes treated in "Myths Transformed" is the origin and nature of the Orcs (or, as Tolkien decided at a late date to spell it, Orks). How were they created? Are they irredeemably evil? Many bull-session hours have been spent by Tolkienists musing over this problem, and the author was no more successful than his readers at achieving a satisfactory answer. Christopher Tolkien writes of his father's "final view" that Orcs were bred from Men (X, 421 [Morgoth’s Ring]), but as he notes this was not made unchangeable, which makes it not his father's final view but only his last. The difficulty of achieving simple answers is part of what makes Tolkien's sub-creation so intriguing. –Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on the History of Middle-Earth
By: Verlyn Flieger; Carl E. Hostetter

--I adore the comment: “which makes it not his father's final view but only his last.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it canatics.

I know it still does not answer the original question.
;D

[thelauderdale]

I haven't logged in here for a long time, but I realized I had better come back with my findings, such as they are. I found a review for an older unfinished story on FFN called "An Orc of Nargothrond":

Well, considering that Tolkien wrote that Orcish children who are raised by the Elves from the very young age grow up to be regular ordinary Elves, just they cannot resist attacking the Orcs whenever they see them (even when it's stupid, against the orders, etc.)... it will be interesting what you make of this baby.

www.fanfiction.net/s/4383122/1/An-Orc-of-Nargothrond

Since this matched so closely with the concept I mentioned at the start of this thread, I messaged the reviewer, said that I remembered something similar from Tolkien's writing but could not figure out where I saw it, and wondered if she could enlighten me. She said that she had been unable to find it in Tolkien's writing herself and had since discounted it as apocryphal or fanon. On further searching, she later came back to me and told me that she had tracked down the story where she had originally read it: a Russian language story by an author named Eilian. The story is here:

eressea.ru/library/library/eilian/orchonok.shtml

Raw from GoogleTranslate, the note at the end says:

"As for those orchat which got the elves immediately after birth, some of them grew very real elves. From conventional elves they differed only irrepressible hatred for orcs, and none of them could not contain himself at the sight of the Orcs and not to fight."

Letters of JRR Tolkien

Both Hellga and I have searched our copies of the Letters and not found this, so unless Eilian got it from somewhere else, it appears to be her own invention, inserted to support her story of an Orc who was raised as an Elf and discovered his true nature in later life. Misleading, as it claims to be in Tolkien's words, but a clever conceit.

I myself don't speak Russian, so unless I saw this idea being floated somewhere else, I must assume that I absorbed it when I read Hellga's review back in 2008.

Fanon is a fascinating animal, and it is interesting to see how other people can come by other roads to a similar premise. I mentioned Marta's story which posits that Orcs are born as Elves in each generation, and that they are tormented and changed in each generation to remake them as Orcs. This is also a conceit used by Nimbus Llewelyn in his "Wizard in the Shadows" verse:

"[...] the child of the average snaga usually looks like an elf instead one of their kind when newborn. The snaga...rectify this over a period of weeks. This mostly serves to crush their gentler emotions and any resemblance to the elves, other than in the ears."

Snippets from the Shadows, "Bastard Sons of Rohan," www.fanfiction.net/s/8115216/5/Snippets-from-the-Shadows

Yeah. Well, anyway, for the record.