Well, I had a strange idea related to Bolg’s memories of the past carefree days of childhood, and I shared it with you. I think Azog is most likely a strict and cold daddy. However, given that Bolg followed in his footsteps already in adulthood, Azog clearly looked after his son and directed him in the right direction.
The LOTR and RoP community is having a moment to recharge from this turbulent times, and all the angst our beloved characters go through.
The #CozyCuddles week invited creators to give our characters nice things, and I tried a one-off fluff story.
Thank you, @rivendellwatch for curating.
This is Adar adjacent but he gets name-checked a lot. As an Uruk soldier returns to his wife after the battle of Tirharad and the explosion of Orodruin.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/65573494
This is my first time writing fluff.
But if you want to read more about Adar swinging a sword, you can checkout Sealord Father, the work I am writing with @heckate-hexx
i cannot believe no one, at least no post i ever saw when S2 of rings of power came out, mentioned glûg’s slight moment of empathy for either galadriel or elrond, or both of them. i feel like this should have gotten way more attention than it did
in S2 ep7, elrond decides to fight against adar after their discussion, where galadriel is trapped, saying, “ask me on the field; when the neck with a blade against it is yours.”
adar responds with, “very well. i will meet you there. with her head on a pike.”
elrond then says, “if that is to be the way of things, i should like to bid her farewell.”
glûg, this entire time, has had galadriel at knifepoint and has been looking more and more increasingly uncomfortable.
adar hesitates at elrond’s request, and upon hesitating, glûg out of the blue says, and i quote, “he’s unarmed.”
adar then allows elrond to go and talk to galadriel, and glûg steps away
i feel like this was quite a big moment of empathy/emotion shown by the uruks that went unnoticed. glûg had some sort of family, a shown mate and child, so it wouldn’t be terribly surprising he could’ve sensed galadriel and elrond had *something* going on and felt bad for them, thinking of his own experience, prompting that response
i have tried to find this scene everywhere i could think of, mentions of it, but so far have found nothing which is so surprising to me. if anyone knows of any past posts referencing this, please let me know !!!
It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.
If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.
Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.
I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.
There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.
This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.
Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.
Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.
And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.
And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."
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