Female orcs?

[Liläth]

I am sorry if this is a stupid question but do female orcs exist? I have read a lot of articles that say they do not or that they do (Surely). So personally, before I roleplay a character that doesn't make sense or exist in the world, I would like the opinion of those on here.

If they do not, what would be the closest to it or what unusual creature do you guys like roleplaying? Reading about? Writing? Ogres, goblins, skin-changer etc..
Not sure if this is the right area to post this. I was just interested in the lore behind them.

[Moriel]

I'll start by saying I have absolutely no lore to back this up. From my perspective as an RP'er, there's plenty we don't know about Orcs, and holes in the legendarium in general. If you have an idea for a character that may or may not be perfectly canon, but it piques your interest and you want to play it, go for it! I've made plenty of leaps into the speculative over the years with characters and reconciled myself to the fact that some people might not agree with my choices.

Examples:
-half elf, half Númenorean (Moriel) who by some truly wild backstory can turn into a wolf. It's a thing, I don't use it much anymore, but hey I like it
-wolf skin-changer (Saoirse, distant ancestor of Moriel's)
-a pair of orc brothers (Swiltang & Yarltang) who are the sons of a Boldog and an elf, as part of an orcish breeding experiment. Old, smart, lots of fun if you like Orcs
-A boldog (Ziltang, father of Swil and Yarl)
-A corsair (Zôrzimril/Amarthel Delgaran) of black Númenorean, Haradrim, Noldor, and Boldog descent (Ziltang is her great x3 grandfather via a half-sibling of Swil and Yarl that was a failed experiment, sue me I had a lot of fun with this one and we all know there was some twisted stuff going on with the creation of Orcs)
-An Avar (Sombelenë) who went dark (heh) and became personal secretary to the Witch-King

[Dimcairien Luiniel]

Aren’t orcs (or at least some variants of them) elves who have gone evil? If so, logic would hold that some of them need to be female. That can further allow for orcs to procreate.

Like Moriel said, if you have a character in mind, go for it. I doubt very many of us care about every RP character needing to fit somewhere into canon.

[Silky Gooseness]

Yes, there are!

Orcs “had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilùvatar” - is started somewhere in the Silmarillion. This implies males and females. Moreover, we have Orc families and clans (Azog and Bolg, the orcs of LotR speaking different languages when they were from different tribes). Tolkien mentions it in a letter too although I cannot recall which one.

Anyway there were certainly female orcs but we are not given much detail about them - so feel free to role play them as you like! There have been plenty of female orc role plays in Plaza’s history.

[Moriel]

Sil the MVP with an actual quote I was too lazy to go find. Thanks Sil.

[geordie]

Tolkien says there must have been female orcs, in a letter to a Mrs Munby -

http://greenbooks.theonering.net/guest/ ... 41305.html

quote: 'There must have been orc-women. But in stories that seldom if ever see the Orcs except as soldiers of armies in the service of the evil lords we naturally would not learn much about their lives. Not much was known'.

[Saranna]

Hi geordie!

[Troelsfo]

<waves enthusiastically>

Nothing much to add regarding the topic itself ... the simple answer is “yes” and the main arguments have been listed already

The quotation @Sil gives is from chapter 3 (‘Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor’) of the Quenta Silmarillion and runs in full:

For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar; and naught that had life of its own, nor the semblance of life, could ever Melkor make since his rebellion in the Ainulindalë before the Beginning: so say the wise.

The letter @geordie mentions is quite famous for that passage, but I have only seen a low resolution image of the first page on-line. There is more information at the Tolkien Gateway page.


Now, while this solution was the one that Christopher Tolkien chose to include in The Silmarillion, it was, of course, not the only one contemplated and discussed by his father. There are some highly interesting thoughts and philosophical discussions in part five of Morgoth's Ring (vol. 10 of The History of Middle-earth). Here, in a part called ‘Myths Transformed’ we have Tolkien discussing with himself what the nature and origin of the Orcs should be. Some of the ideas he consider are

• Orcs are corrupted Men
• Orcs are corrupted Elves
• Orcs are made from a mix of corrupted Men and Elves
• Orcs are nothing but automata without soul (fëa) or free will
• Orcs are animals (i.e. without fëar) that have been ‘elevated’ to a semblance of intelligence and free will by through breeding with Maiar that had taken this monstrous form

... and then there are probably some that I have forgotten.

In all – or at least most – of these cases, however, the Orcs would still have sexual breeding.

The latter, however, was not the case until well into the writing of The Lord of the Rings. not long before sitting down to begin writing what would become The Lord of the Rings in late 1937, Tolkien had stopped working on a rewrite (one among many) of his Silmarillion mythology. In this version, as in all the previous versions, it is clear that Orcs had been created by Morgoth:

There countless became the hosts of his beasts and demons; and he brought into being the race of the Orcs, and they grew and multiplied in the bowels of the earth. These Orcs Morgoth made in envy and mockery of the Elves, and they were made of stone, but their hearts of hatred. Glamhoth, the hosts of hate, the Gnomes have called them. Goblins they may be called, but in ancient days they were strong and fell.

Tolkien, Christopher. The Lost Road and Other Writings (The History of Middle-earth, Book 5) (Kindle Locations 5027-5030). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. p. 233.

In the very first prose story of the legendarium, ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, this aspect was even clearer: “for all that race were bred by Melko of the subterranean heats and slime. Their hearts were of granite and their bodies deformed; foul their faces which smiled not, but their laugh that of the clash of metal, and to nothing were they more fain than to aid in the basest of the purposes of Melko.” The Book of Lost Tales 2 p. 159.

[Liläth]

So many responses XD Thank you very much for answering my question, as silly a question as it was. I am trying to dive deeper into lore then what I did when I was 16. Always something interesting to find out. Thank you again for taking the time to reply.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Just bumping this one.

[The Good Hunter]

I think one of the greatest disservices Jackson's films (as those films are nearly as prevalent in the mind of fans as the books) did to the orcs was assume that they all came out of vats of goo. There is language in the films to imply the existence of female orcs ("crossing orcs with goblin-men", "breeding an army", etc.) but visually they all seem to go out of their way to deny the existence of female orcs.

There have to have been female orcs because the idea of a stew pot cloning tubs is stupid at best. I would also assume that orcs have a highly stratified and patriarchal society which would mean we'd never get to see a female orc in any context given to us within the books.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

There have to have been female orcs because the idea of a stew pot cloning tubs is stupid at best.

[The Good Hunter]

With regards to orcs and their complex, fluid nature I don't think we can simply categorize them as "monsters" certain we can say many (if not most) of them were monstrous but I think it's an important distinction going forward.

As far as reproduction goes, I would say by the time they were plentiful enough, copulation seems the easiest route. Once there was a sizeable population, whatever nasty sh(it) Morgoth and Sauron got up to likely wasn't economical feasible. Certainly necromancy or something like it went into the creation, maybe something akin to genetic engineering in sci-fi works, but again, once there were enough of them and they were a new "species" the drive to mate and all that likely took over.

That's my pet theory anyway, without much lore to back it up.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Frost: I think it is a good theory you have. That reference in the movie made me think too, there would be female orcs. More natural too and gives feeling of an 'independent' species that survives after the dark era is gone. I used it for Utchuk's character.

[Troelsfo]

I think one of the greatest disservices Jackson's films (as those films are nearly as prevalent in the mind of fans as the books) did to the orcs was assume that they all came out of vats of goo.

Much as I, in the usual course of events, enjoy to engage in a bit of judicious (and so richly deserved) Jackson-bashing, in this particular case, I shall make an exception and stand up to defend him ...

In my earlier post, I said,

In the very first prose story of the legendarium, ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, this aspect was even clearer: “for all that race were bred by Melko of the subterranean heats and slime. Their hearts were of granite and their bodies deformed; foul their faces which smiled not, but their laugh that of the clash of metal, and to nothing were they more fain than to aid in the basest of the purposes of Melko.” The Book of Lost Tales 2 p. 159.

It is, indeed, very curious that Mr. Jackson and his cohorts should, surely by inadvertent accident, chance upon a picture that would, to this extent, reference the earliest versions of these foul creatures, and which was still in the main lines (if not in excruciating detail … see below[†]) – the version, indeed, which is actually most compatible with the most part of The Lord of the Rings and which can even still be detected in some places in the published Silmarillion, though Christopher Tolkien did a very excellent and commendable job in trying to align that book with the ‘Orcs are corrupted Elves’ position. A position, mind, that was neither Tolkien's first nor his last, and which presents a number of (mainly ethical) problems (which Tolkien himself was working with as can be seen in Morgoth's Ring.

So, all in all, I have to stand up for Jackson and Walsh and their merry band of desecrators and abominationists on this count: in my considered view, their version of the breeding of Orcs is actually more faithful to the concepts that Tolkien held when writing the most of The Lord of the Rings – I do not think that his views even began to change until he reached the Stairs of Cirith Ungol.


[†] In the version of the Quenta Silmarillion that immediately preceded the writing of The Lord of the Rings the slimes were gone, but the Orcs were still brought into being by Morgoth, now in mockery of the Elves (as Treebeard indeed tells Pippin and Merry in The Lord of the Rings, book III, chapter 4).

There countless became the hosts of his beasts and demons; and he brought into being the race of the Orcs, and they grew and multiplied in the bowels of the earth. These Orcs Morgoth made in envy and mockery of the Elves, and they were made of stone, but their hearts of hatred. Glamhoth, the hosts of hate, the Gnomes have called them. Goblins they may be called, but in ancient days they were strong and fell.

Tolkien, Christopher. The Lost Road and Other Writings (The History of Middle-earth, Book 5) (Kindle Locations 5027-5030). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. p. 233.

There is language in the films to imply the existence of female orcs ("crossing orcs with goblin-men", "breeding an army", etc.) but visually they all seem to go out of their way to deny the existence of female orcs.

In a world of wizards and angelic beings, surely we can allow other ways of blending the races of Orcs and Men (to use Treebeard's phrasing). I am not sufficiently familiar with the language used in the films to say what Jackson & Cohorts made of Treebeard's vague terms, but I would definitely not be surprised to learn that they were … shall we just say, less careful than Tolkien in choosing words that would not too strongly avoid something different from what they had shown on screen …

There have to have been female orcs because the idea of a stew pot cloning tubs is stupid at best. I would also assume that orcs have a highly stratified and patriarchal society which would mean we'd never get to see a female orc in any context given to us within the books.

Well … I am, of course, sorry to see that you find Tolkien's idea stupid but I actually think it was a mistake of Tolkien to go away from this idea – it is, in so many ways, a concept that is better aligned with the overall philosophy and ethics of his legendarium, and only mistaken (in my opinion) concerns for his personal faith brought him to move away from that instinctive concept.