I don’t know very many lore details about lotr – never finished return of the king because iirc too many paragraphs about frodo rock climbing – but from time to time I find myself looking for fanfic that humanizes Tolkien’s orcs. Like… fic of lotr Tolkien orc ocs. I’ve never looked up lotr fic about anything else. There’s just something about the idea of an Utterly Evil Monster Race that gets me instantly defensive x 3000
I hate the Evil Monster Race trope, too.
As a lifelong Tolkien fan (books were my mom’s favourites, and my grandma’s before her), I always reconciled the orcs best with the theory that they were elves who had basically been brutalized beyond belief by Morgoth (Sauron’s predecessor) and then by Sauron.
It makes them kind of like darkspawn, in fact. They’re driven towards violence by the malevolent influence of a god or demi-god, which is why their lives are pretty horrible – it’s not that they’re fundamentally lesser, it’s that they have ‘BLOOD RIP KILL DESTROY’ playing on a constant loop in their heads, and that makes it incredibly difficult for them to establish stable communities (on top of them being vitriolically despised and killed-on-sight by every other race in Middle Earth). The fact that, when left without an Evil Overlord to actively command them, orcs can do things like tame wargs and somehow produce food even in hospital places like Mordor, speaks to a remarkable amount of resilience.
And going with the elf theory also means that they’re potentially immortal – or, if they’ve been mixed with humans, that at least some of them are. Makes one wonder if there are any orcs out there whose memory stretches even further back than that of the elves – or at least, the elves still living in Middle Earth.
But, more importantly, why I like this concept is that there’s an implication that once Sauron is defeated, that there’s really no one with the knowledge to exploit Morgoth’s hold over the orcs left in Middle Earth anymore. They’re basically free. Of course, they’re also contending with the destruction of their homeland, the death of a massive amount of their number, and they’re still the most hated demographic in all of Middle Earth. But there’s a chance that they could withdraw to some place and… heal, mostly.
Every single orc is traumatized. They’ve all spent their lives – whether those are very long lives or not – being subjected to violence and brainwashing and abuse and mutilation. Recovering from that would not be pretty, especially not with limited resources and survival still posing a challenge. But given that Tolkien was largely just concerned with orcs in terms of whether or not they were posing a threat, there’s a lot of leeway even for people trying to stick to his epilogues to step in and speculate on what might have happened after that point.
And personally I like to think that the orcs were able to secure viable regions of territory in several areas, and that they mostly survived by hiding their presence and letting the humans think ‘well, no orcs are running out to attack us here – so there probably aren’t any’ and move along. They focused on surviving and building, mostly, and likely went the dwarven route and figured the best way to hide was to keep their settlements largely underground. Maybe in some places the orcs managed to keep hold of old dwarven strongholds that were otherwise abandoned/forgotten, but in others they probably started to build their own, devising their own techniques but also borrowing from things they’d observed in goblin cities, or places like Moria.
At first they probably acted like they usually did when a Dark Lord had fallen, like they were just waiting for the next one to pop up. But as time passed and it became apparent that things were really different, I would wager they’d begin to experience something of a cultural revolution. Once they were no longer struggling to survive, they’d finally have energy to devote to themselves, rather than to the machinations of some conceited Valar or Maiar. No more living in filth and squalor. No more bloodthirst constantly banging around the backs of their skulls. Their biggest problem would probably be habitual behaviour and unhealthy coping mechanisms, and those are nothing to sneeze at, but it would give an opening for better standards of living to develop, and with more physical comfort and less recurring trauma, the overall stress of living would theoretically go down. The orcish people would finally be able to develop their own culture to serve their own interests. They would have more opportunity to create art, to cultivate traditions, to hone crafts and to establish stronger social ties.
They wouldn’t go back to being elves. They probably wouldn’t want to, either. But they could redefine what being an orc meant, and part of that would probably be something of a return to the ways in which the elves lived a long, long time ago.
I can definitely see them, even generations down the line, not wanting a single solitary thing to do with Gondor or the neighbouring nations, though. Not only because they’d probably not think kindly on the other peoples of Middle Earth, but also because it would seem like a terrible risk. Send an envoy to Gondor? To Rohan? You might as well just cut the poor bastard’s head off yourself, and save them a trip.
Harad would probably be a better choice for eventually developing trade relations, the Haradrim having been at least allied with orcish forces in the past. So the orcs ‘vanish’ from ‘Middle Earth’, or at least the segment of Middle Earth which Tolkien’s histories are largely concerned with, but it’s not, ultimately, an unhappy ending for them, either. The most badly done-by people in Arda’s history finally have their chains broken, and go on to develop their own society, write their own histories, and become one of the pivotal peoples of the lands beyond the boundaries of Tolkien’s maps.
We just don’t hear about it because it has diddly fuck-all to do with Aragorn or the Shire.
One of the ballsiest things Tolkien ever did was write 473k words about some hobbits called frodo, sam, merry, and pippin and then write in the appendices that their names are actually maura, ban, kali, and razal.
This just in: Eowyn and Eomer’s names actually start with the letter “L.” [source for other nerds]
What you’ve got to understand is that everything Tolkien wrote was him pretending to merely translate ancient documents. He was writing as if the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were actually been written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam (or Bilba, Maura, and Ban) and he was just some random contemporary academic translating it all into English for us.
There are many languages in his books, but generally speaking, everything written in English in the books is a translation of the language “Westron.” Therefore any names that come from Westron, he translated. Names coming from other languages, like Sindarin, he left as they were. Why? IDK. Maybe because the stories are from a hobbit perspective and hobbits speak Westron, so he wanted the Westron parts to sound familiar and the other languages/names to remain foreign?
“But Mirkwoodest!” you cry, “The word ‘hobbit’ isn’t an English word! And the names Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck” all sounds super weird and not like English at all!”
Psych! They are in English! (Or Old English, German, or Norse.) Once again you underestimate what a nerd Tolkien was. Let me break it down:
In Westron, hobbits are actually called “kuduk,” which means “hole-dweller,” so for an English translation, Tolkien called them “hobbits” which is a modernization of the Old English word “holbytla” which comes from “Hol” (hole) and “Bytla”(builder).
“Maura” is a Westron name which means “Wise.” Weirdly enough, “Frodo” is an actual Proto-Germanic name that actual people used to have and it means the same thing.
“Razanur” means “Traveler” or “Stranger” which is also the meaning of the word “Peregrin(e)” This one is a twofer because “Razar” means “a small red apple” and in English so does “Pippin.”
“Kalimac” apparently is a meaningless name in Westron, but the shortened form “Kali” means “happy,” so Jirt decided his nickname would be “Merry” and chose the really obscure ancient Celtic name “Meriodoc” to match.
Jirt chose to leave “Bilba” almost exactly the same in English, but he changed the ending to an “O” because in Westron names ending in “a” are masculine.
I’m not going to go on and talk about the last names but those all have special meanings too (except Tûk, which is too iconic to change more than the spelling of, apparently).
The Rohirrim were also Westron speakers first and foremost, so their names are also “translations” into Old English and Proto-Germanic words, i.e. “Eowyn” is a combination of “Eoh” (horse) and “Wynn” (joy/bliss).
“Rohirrim/Rohan” are Sindarin words, but in the books, they call themselves the “Éothéod” which is an Old English/Norse combo that means “horse people.” Tolkien tells us in the “Peoples of Middle Earth” that the actual Westron for “Éothéod” is Lohtûr, which means that Eowyn and Eomer’s names, which come from the same root word, must also start with the letter L.
The names of all the elves, dwarves, Dunedain, and men from Gondor are not English translations, since they come from root words other than Westron.
The takeaway from this is that when a guy whose first real job was researching the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter “W” writes a book, you can expect this kind of tomfoolery.
Notes: Sorry I said “Razal” instead of “Razar” in my original post I’m a fraud.
Stuff like this is EXACTLY why I feel like there’s so much room for more diverse, inclusive reinterpretation of Tolkien’s work. Because if you look at the way Tolkien’s contemporaries translated real writings from real historical cultures, there’s a lot of assumption of whiteness, maleness, and heteronormativity that isn’t actually in the text. Going with the concept that Tolkien was translating the mythohistory of an existing culture, it makes sense that a white Catholic Oxford don born in the Edwardian era would take for granted that all beautiful highborn people are white, all male relationships are platonic, all marriages are heterosexual, most people in conventionally male roles are men, and everyone is cisgender. So it’s totally in keeping with Tolkien’s premise, I think, to approach his Middle-earth writings like, “Okay, what could be the real story here as opposed to how a white English dude born in 1903 would have translated it?”
There’s a bit in Fellowship where Bilbo mentions (in like friendly slightly cantankerous old man fashion) getting Aragorn to help him with something and this brings two things to mind:
The absolutely delightful image of little old man Bilbo bossing the Rightful Heir to the Reunited Kingdom around, getting him to get stuff from high shelves for him and such
The plausibility that Bilbo met little 11 year old Estel the first or second time he came to Rivendell and on that subject WHERE are the fanworks
Little 11 year old Estel insisting he be the one to show Bilbo around Imladris because there’s FINALLY someone shorter than him around and he wants to bask in the experience
oh shit yeah and I thought the elves would find it tough to take the High King of Reunited Gondor and Arnor seriously since they’ve known him since he was a brat kid but so had Bilbo
I don’t think Bilbo ever went to Minas Tirith after the war but I wish he had so that the assembled gentry of Gondor could witness the King of the Reunited Kingdom being ordered to fetch that book of poetry down from the highest shelf, there’s a good lad
Aragorn opening a state dinner with a blessing in Elvish, Bilbo interrupting to correct his pronunciation,
And the correction is dead wrong, Aragorn grew up speaking Sindarin and Bilbo learned it well into middle age, but what’s Aragorn gonna do?? Object??? Bilbo has too much stubborn old man energy
he talks to Aragorn in the same voice he uses with Hobbit children, despite Aragorn being 87 years old
Arwen is complicit in ALL of this in fact she is an active enabler
Bilbo, testily: you’re getting the vowels all wrong!
Arwen, nodding seriously: he’s right you know
ELROND: yes, can confirm
FARAMIR: (wearily, without much spirit) stop BULLYING him
Legolas alternated between losing it in the background and making comments like “oh yes Aragorn, your dialect is atrocious”which is the worst for Aragorn because “you are from Mirkwood!”
Am I the only person who thought this was really fucking funny
A lot of the really funny moments in Lord of the Rings come from Tolkien playing with language like this, where we have relatively formal, archaic, “high” language responded to with informal, modern, “low” language.
another hilarious example:
my absolute favorite example of tolkien switching registers in this way is
Concept: Sam finds out elves can die of sadness, gets very concerned, starts doing his best to make sure Mr Legolas is happy all the time just in case
This causes a terrible dilemma when Legolas expresses that he’d prefer not to be addressed as Mr Legolas and Sam doesn’t want to risk upsetting him but also that goes against everything he knows.
In unrelated news, Boromir is the only member of the fellowship of the ring that would have Valid Driver’s License in a Modern AU.
Sam has a Driver’s License but they drive on the other side of the road in Hobbiton so his isn’t valid in the rest of Middle Earth.
Frodo and Merry are Gays That Can Do Math, and therefore can’t Drive.
Pippin HAD a license but got it revoked due to Aggravated Shenanigans.
Gandalf CAN drive but is an insane paranoid hippie that hates both petrolum-based transportation and government paperwork. He does have a pilot’s license though. Don’t ask him to justify it unless you want a four-hour lecture on civil rights that sounds like it’s quoting law from another dimension.
Aragon can drive, quite well, but it never occured to him that he might need a license to do so on public roads. He doesn’t know about taxes either.
Gimli travels frequently but as a diplomet and royal, never was the one in the driver’s seat.
Legolas can’t be trusted to operate a blender, much less a motor vehicle. He will attempt to do so anyway.
I don’t know if you might’ve meant “taxis” in keeping with the driving theme but I am thoroughly and absolutely LOSING MY SHIT at the concept of Aragorn doesn’t know about taxes, Aragorn you’re gonna be king, Aragorn you’re supposed to know how to do these things, Aragorn this is THE MOST BASIC OF BASIC STATESMANSHIP.
And THE THING IS, I’m not certain it doesn’t also work canonically. Because like we can infer that Aragorn got most of his How To Be A King For Dummies lessons from the elves, and, well, do elves… have… taxes? It seems unlikely. (Do elves even have currency? There’s probably an answer to that one and I just don’t know it.) Somehow I can’t quite picture Galadriel going around Lothlorien like okay suckers pay up you’ve gotta pay a property tax on that tree you know.
So then he gets to Gondor and gets crowned and a few months later someone comes by and is like “how much are we taxing the peasants this year” and Aragorn panics and is just like “f…five? ……. too high? Too low?”
And I mean, who can blame the guy, he’s basically been wandering the wilderness for the majority of his life, it’s not like he’s ever really had personal property besides an improbable number of weapons, so he’s probably never, you know, paid taxes
Aragorn, son of Arathorn, Elessar, Isildur’s heir and rightful king of Gondor, is a tax dodger
You. You get this.
Like this is a Modern AU where Aragon becomes Mayor of a medium-sized mountain town*, but tbh this still holds in canonverse too imho. the first like. 3 years of Aragon Having A Real Job For The First Time That Happens To Coincidentally Be A Political Position, is him listening to people making suggestions about “So what are we taxing the pesants?” and “What’s this years Budget?” and him Turning to Arwen, one of like 4 people in all of Middle-earth with any damn sense, and saying
“Hey Babe? What’s a Budget?”
*In this AU The Riders of Rohan are a Biker Gang and Edoras is a really nice mom-and-pop convience store/bar/mechanic/tourist trap that’s been run by “King” Teddy’s family for as long as anyone can remember.
**I think i might have come up with a “Great Westen American Roadtrip LotR AU”
Help.
***The Hobbits are Canadians. I know canadians drive on the same side of the road but the Idea of Sam having an invalid lisence is hysterical.
****They found the ring in the idyllic Waterton-Galcier International peace Park/The Shire, over the border where nobody thought to look for it, and end up on a quest to take it to the hellish land of raging Monsters and unlivable condiiotns known as Mount Doom/ Phoenix Arizona.
The Prancing Pony is the Pie Place in St. Mary, Montan- IT’STWO IN THE GODDMAN MORING I KNOW AO3 GOT NOMINATED FOR A HUGO BUT I DO NOT NEED TO BE WRITING THIS RIGHT NOW.
i totally am, later, but like. when the sun is out.
Elves basically invented feudalism in Middle Earth, but like. They’re so crazy long-lived it’d be easy for an elf to amass material wealth by just not being an utter dumbass, and plus they have magic so. Do the elf-kings actually NEED anything from their vassals other than the assurance that they’ll show up with a weapon when it’s time for the next attack on Literal Satan and his Black Castle of Evil?? Do elves need to levy taxes?
And even if they do, I bet Galadriel had to go through the exact same process Aragorn did in the post above, because SHE was born in the Undying Lands where life is beautiful all the time and the trees are somehow constantly both in flower AND bearing fruit at the same time, and nobody does any labor unless they like it.
And then just to make things even worse Galadriel learned rulership from Melian, who is a Literal Angel like Gandalf and ALSO pulled all kinds of magical bullshit on her elven husband’s kingdom. What I’m saying here is the first hundred years or so of Galadriel trying to rule on her own were A Very Rocky Time for Everybody.
Which is why she made sure her daughter and grandchildren got a firm grounding in stewardship and economic theory, so they’d never have to go through that embarrassment. And lucky she did too, or Gondor’s post-war recovery would’ve been completely FUCKED.
#aragorn: hey babe what’s a budget #arwen (already dragging him off to the bedroom): god estel you’re so fucking stupid
DRAKE YOUR TAGS
well it’s 3 AM and I made coffee, and i think this Great Western Road trip AU has legs , so I did a bad overlay and discovered the Hobbits are NOT Canadians:
THEY’RE CALIFORNIANS. I like this map becuase it puts the trip in some really fun places if you fudge the route a bit:
The Shire is near Mendicino, CA
Tom Bombadil probably lives in Jackson State Forest which is a old-growth redwoods kind of place.
Bree is now Yuba City, CA
Weathertop is Smartsville, a “Historic” ghost town that seems like a place that would harbour Nazgul
Rivendell is about in Lake Tahoe, maybe Trukee.
I CAN HEAR YOU, PERSNICKETY TOLKIEN CARTOGRAPHY PEOPLE. WE’RE FUDgING THE ROUTE. WHAT? YOU WANT RIVENDELL IN FUCKING *squints at map* FALLON, NV?? IT’S WAY TO PICTURESQUE TO BE THAT FAR OUT OF THE SIERRA NEVADAS.
moving right along
Moria can literally be an abandoned uranium mine. it’s terrific.
Lothlorien is probably the
Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, on account of that’s the one place in Nevada that I can verify has trees.
…I think othornac is in Bakersfield, CA, which puts Fangorn in Sequoia National Park. Appropriate.
Also Rohan is mostly in the Death Valley Area. Kickass. Helms deep can be an abandonded nuclear missle silo, it’s awesome.
This does make most of Gondor the Los Angeles Basin tho. Minas Tirith is now the bustling metropolis of… Palm Springs. Hm. eh, Gondor’s kind of a shit country as is. DOES put the cave fulla ghosts in the middle of LA tho, so that’s fun.
Shelob lives in the Kofa Nat’l Wildlife refuge, which is IRL famous for it’s tarantulas.
Mt. Doom is still, of course. Phoenix, AZ.
goddamit i’m actually going to have to write this thing now.
Have been to both Fallon, NV, and Lake Tahoe, I agree that Tahoe is a MUCH more Rivendelly kind of place. Actually I went to high school in that part of Nevada (well, the first two years anyway) and it fucking sucked. That part of the southwest is, indeed, Nazgul Country.
Hey, does this mean the Easterlings Sauron imported for the final battle are, in fact, Mormons? 😀
I want to thank the Arizonians for coming out and telling me about Sunset Crater, an actual active volcano in the right part of AZ to be Mount Doom. This means that Phoenix is actually Barad-dûr.
God bless the people in the notes trying to figure out if Canon!Aragorn would actually know anything about taxes, how or even IF taxes happen in Middle-earth, and what schooling Elrond could have foisted upon Estel during intermittent and extremely distracted visits to Arwen.
Apparently drivers lisences are intenrationally Valid no matter what side of the road you learned to drive on which given my family’s expirience driving in Ireland, seems like a terrible Idea.
I’m playing it extremely fast and lose with travel times, distances, what governments may or may not exist, what year it even is and when the apocalypse occured.
JRRT built so much world he built fantasy for the next fucking century and a half so I don’t have to. Thank you, Jonald.
There was at least one Apocalypse in this AU becuase the original Series is post-apocalyptic: fallen kingdoms, fading magic, long-forgotten statuary etc. but the details of which apocalypse and how it went down have been lost to time and the collapse of widespread governance. Maybe it was a nuclear event, maybe the Wyoming Supervolcano, Maybe the Second American Civil War, maybe all 3 at the same time. Who knows? Not the Fellowship, which can barely collectively remember to not leave Frodo at the gas station.
Aragorn is a Transguy and tried out like, a zillion names before settling on Aragorn, which is why everyone he meets calls him something different
Barkeep, gesturing to the mysterious dude in the corner wearing sunglasses at night and indoors: Nobody really knows who he is, but I’ve heard him called… Strider. Pippin: what, like Homestuck?
Boromir has a VW bus that’s older than his crap father and has what he thinks are cool modifications to make it intoa camper van, but in reality he ripped out the seats and adhered coleman products to the walls with duct tape
Aragorn: “You fell!“
Gandalf: "Through fire. And water.”
Gandalf: “From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak, I fought him, the Balrog of Morgoth.”
Gimil: “For the LAST TIME-” Legolas: “Dude, don’t interrupt!” Gandalf: “Until at last, I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountainside. Darkness took me. And I strayed out of thought and time.
Stars wheeled overhead, and every day was as long as the life age of the earth.” Everyone: “Oooooh!” Gandalf: “But it was not the end. I felt light in me again. I’ve been sent back until my task is done.”
Aragorn: “Not to be a buzzkill, but I think you got high and went to a laundromat.” Gandalf: “Well. I did that too. Wonderous things they do with Bleach these days, took 30 years of grime right out!”
Boromir re-appears at the coronation wearing a sombrero and explaining that “Yeah, OK, I got shot a lot and blacked out but I got Better! Also really lost for a while.”
So (according to the concept art book) as the Fellowship travels deeper into Middle Earth, the places they pass through become inspired by progressively older periods of history. The farther along you are in the story, the more ancient the design influences
We begin in The Shire: which feels so familiar because, with its tea-kettles and cozy fireplaces, it’s inspired by the relatively recent era of rural England in the 1800s
But when we leave Hobbiton, we also leave that familiar 1800s-England aesthetic behind and start going farther back in time.
Bree is based on late 1600s English architecture
Rohan is even farther back, based on old anglo-saxon era architecture (400s-700s? ce)
Gondor is way back, and no longer the familiar English or Anglo-Saxon: its design comes from classical Greek and Roman architecture
And far far FAR back is Mordor. It’s a land of tents and huts: prehistoric, primitive, primeval. Cavemen times
And the heart of Mordor is a barren lifeless hellscape of volcanic rock…like a relic from the ages when the world was still being formed, and life didn’t yet exist
And then they finally reach Mount Doom, which one artist described as
“where the ring was made, which represents, in a sense, the moment of creation itself”
