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.