hello, i always read your metas on Tolkien and the Silmarillion with pleasure because you make a lot of very interesting arguments! I remember you talking about a recuperative reading of Tolkien from a feminist/queer viewpoint, so i am here to ask: do you think that's possible to do a recuperative reading of the Orcs' role in the legendarium? I know that there are aplenty of essays on the question of orcs, thats why i asked. I know that Rings of Power tried to give the orcs some sympathy but the show constantly wastes its potential ...
Well. The answer to this is a very qualified yes I think it's possible, first of all, and second of all, Charles W Mills did it far more eloquently and thoughtfully than I could ever manage it in The Wretched Of Middle Earth: An Orkish Manifesto - an essay that is really well worth the time for understanding the many racial ideologies at play in Tolkien's work, ranging from 19th century racial hygiene concerns, colonial imaginaries to the racial (and religious) imaginaries that propelled the crusades, and how they all add up in his construction of the Orcs & "evil" men (i.e. the Haradrim, Rhun etc). There is really nothing I can add to his analysis, except wish that he'd read the Silmarillion, because the Silmarillion makes explicit the racial hierarchy on which the Valinor Elves are placed, which is only inferred in LOTR & The Hobbit.
HOWEVER. I will say, if you do that recuperative reading, a) the central premises of The Silmarillion, Lord of The Rings & The Hobbit will begin to fall apart and b) you are no longer in "recuperative" territory, but straight up deconstructing and interrogating/reading against the text, because the text allows you no or very little room in which to problematise the figure of the Orc. I feel like I am swinging a bat at a hornet's nest here, but Charles W Mill's makes this point so eloquently, its worth reproducing :
My point is rather that Hitler’s racial fantasies were not idiosyncratic, but grew out of a central tradition within European thought, and that Tolkien’s book is itself fully within that tradition. And, appropriately, ends with its own final solution.
For the genocide of the orcs is, of course, part of the climactic victory over Sauron and Mordor. Yet if it were to be suggested to the average reader of the book that it ends with a great crime, the claim would probably meet with complete bewilderment. The killing of the orcs generates no moral concern (either for the Allies or the vast majority of readers and critics) because, of course, the orcs have been successfully depersonized by Tolkien, rendered as ontological zeros. The pen here prepares the way for the sword. Indeed, a case could be made that LTR should be required reading for courses in the literature of genocide, for precisely because of the celebrated “reality” of Middle-Earth, it becomes possible to watch, in synoptic overview, the construction of an epistemology that makes mass murder possible.
And this is the exact problem that Rings of Power runs into in its narrative. If there is to be a story, the Orcs must be subsumed back into pure evil. They cannot be complicated and we cannot interrogate their origins and we certainly cannot interrogate their servitude under Sauron - we must assume they bear equal responsibility as aggressors in the war as Sauron. We cannot deconstruct the relationship between Elves and Orcs, or we would have to infer that the Elves' rejection of the possibility of coexistence - or at least the refusal to negotiate a possible coexistence and peace - betrays a genocidal impulse baked into that society. We cannot read them as the result of the torture and Marring of Elves or Men, because then that would raise all kinds of deeply thorny questions about the impossibility of healing and suggest that there is a point at which redemption becomes impossible for the enslaved, because they have been rendered ontologically evil and that ontological evil has been deemed hereditary (and one would have to compare it against both Morgoth & Sauron, who are offered chances to repent and squander them, while the Orcs are offered none). We therefore must render them evil, so we can have that final awful shot of the Elves declaring avengers style just and eternal war to obliterate "evil", without unpacking what exactly that evil is - where did it come from, how was it made, is evil its only state of existence or can it be healed?
If we were to deconstruct the question of the Orcs in the text, we would have to completely flip the Legendarium on its head and interrogate why exactly we believe the Elves are good - especially if the text itself has the Orcs grumbling about their enslavement to Sauron or Saruman. There is no just war. There is no estel and there is certainly no goodness in the Tolkienic sense - only endless self-preservatory justifications of terrible evil.
It could be an interesting story to tell. I think maybe the one that straddles the difficult line between holding the premises of Tolkien's storyworld true (the war of the ring is an unjust war waged against the Elves, Men & Dwarves; the Orcs are enslaved by Sauron; Sauron and Morgoth have consistently chosen evil over good even while offered other choices; the Elves perceive Orcs as ontologically evil; the Valar are essentially good), while deconstructing the figure of the Orc (i.e. the orc is not ontologically evil + Orc origin from tortured elves) is elves, once by Scedasticity. Its probably the closest you could get to poking at the figure of the Orc and asking if there aren't alternate means of dealing with them, while being a recuperative reading of the text (i.e. everyone is a victim of Morgoth and Sauron's consistently evil choices & the Marring that results produces this racialised class of non-people in the Orc). There are also some other interesting fanworks in the Orcs are People collection on SWG.
But like, I guess for me the question is, can you do a recuperative reading of Tolkien's racialised hierarchies? The reason why recuperative feminist and queer readings of the text works is that there's enough gap in the text that people can insert themselves in there and suggest feminist readings of the fate of characters like Eowyn or Galadriel or Luthien; or do queer readings of the peredhel. The problem of an antiracist reading of Tolkien's text is that the whole of his world is constructed around some very ugly racial hierarchies and assumptions, that even if you are able to do the kindest possible reading of the canon in relation to the Orcs, you would have to assume that the Elves think that unlimited genocide on Orcs is a reasonable response to the belief that someone is ontologically evil, even when you know that someone has been enslaved by Morgoth and Sauron. Which is wild! It just is wild!
And fwiw... I do think its worth deconstructing/interrogating the racial hierarchies of Middle Earth and in some sense I think The Silmarillion and HoME are useful for that, because the narratives do also interrogate the absolute nature of racial hierarchy presented in LOTR. In these texts, the Noldor are flat out wrong in their Noldor First elf!ethnonationlist political project... but on the other hand, the Vanyar, the highest of Elves, are described as fair, beautiful, wise, perfect, holy because of their proximity to the Valar - and in racial terms are essentially ur-Aryans. If you interrogate this, you would have to interrogate the construction of the Vanyar as perfect; you would have to interrogate whether or not the Elves should have left Middle Earth under the aegis of the Valar - something that Tolkien himself describes as having been a mistake in some places, because of how it disrupts the natural evolution of the relationship between Elves & Men as peers, and indeed the Valar as stewards of the world, not just kings/queens. Is this racial hierarchy that exists the result of everyone having done a little bit wrong at the beginning of the world? Is it "natural"? Is it "eternal"? Can it be changed, or is the only possibility an endless state of entropy & decay till the end of the world?
Anyway, IDK if any of this makes sense and I've rambled on for long enough but TL;DR: doing an antiracist reading of Tolkien requires a straight up deconstruction and interrogation of some of the fundamental premises of the text (the Valar do not make mistakes; the Elves are "good" and have never had a "fall"; Orcs are immutably and ontologically evil), not merely a recuperative one, and the Orcs are one of the most troubling groups around which to do this reading, because once you do, the reason for basically every war in the canon starts to fall apart rapidly.
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