>>The way that orcs are dehumanized you have to wonder.
If anything, it's their portrayal in the Rings of Power that is idiotic(trying to humanize them) - they aren't human, they don't have families or friends or internal lives and psychological doubts going through their heads - they are meant to be a force("force" like in "force of nature") of evil, not a misunderstood and exploited race of intelligent beings.
For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read)
I will however agree with you that it's truly insane how we have a global survailence company that is used to spy on citizens and destroy democracies worldwide that is literally called Palantir. Like, no one working there is seeing it?
I've not seen Rings of Power and I don't plan to, but I'd just point out that the Silmarillion describes the origin of orcs as being an exploited race of intelligent beings, elves who were captured and tortured until their forms became what we know as orcs.
"... all those of the Quendi [elves] who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes."
Like the sibling comment remarks, Tolkien never fully embarked on this path.
He had a problem: as a Catholic [1], he thought every creature deserved pity and second chances (you can see this when Gandalf rebukes Frodo when he says "it's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum"). If the Orcs are really "fallen Elves", they deserve pity and maybe mercy; they are worthy of redemption. Yet Orcs in LotR are to be killed on sight; there's only one passage in all of LotR where the Hobbits reflect on the corpse of an Orc with any kind of attempt at insight.
For Orcs to be a thing to be destroyed without mercy, unworthy of redemption, they must have not be corrupted souls. Yet here Tolkien found another stumbling block: according to his Catholic-influenced vision, Evil cannot create, only corrupt and destroy. So Morgoth couldn't have created Orcs, he must have used existing souls as raw material.
Tolkien never resolved this conundrum.
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[1] someone in another comment argued quite convincingly that Catholics at times had no trouble murdering other Christians over doctrinal affairs, so let's add a qualification here: "Tolkien's Catholic-influenced morality, which was his own nonetheless".
> I've not seen Rings of Power and I don't plan to
i say this as a die hard Tolkien fan, having read (most of) HOME: i enjoyed Rings of Power quite a lot and i'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys the extended world of middle earth. the casting is great, i actually did enjoy the picking at the question of orcish morality, and because amazon was willing to throw millions at it, it looks fantastic for a tv show.
it doesn't follow canon (some weird squashing of timelines re: ringmaking, the akallabeth etc) which seems to upset a lot of geeks. however, one thing to keep in mind when interacting with extended works based on Middle Earth is that Tolkien didn't necessarily set out to codify everything perfectly (and what was there was definitely the result of his obsession and great care for the world he built). one of his stated desires in writing LOTR was to establish a modern mythology that other people could write/create within, so the fiction could take a life of its own. maybe he wouldn't always like the ways people built on his work, but that's the risk he took when he explicitly set out to invent a mythology for others to interact with.
we're still going to ignore the hobbit movie trilogy, though.
And as this wiki article posted in other comments very nicely explains, Tolkien never came to a good and final conclusion on how this all really worked, with different explanations in different works of his. The "they were just evil force that could be killed without remorse" theme is the dominant one, because it works in the context of the story and the worldbuilding that he did for it.
Fully understood and appreciated. I'm just replying to a comment stating that orcs were forces of destruction and not exploited intelligent beings with evidence to the contrary from the Silmarillion. Tolkien's dilemma is even more concrete evidence.
> we have a global survailence company that is used to spy on citizens and destroy democracies worldwide that is literally called Palantir. Like, no one working there is seeing it?
The Palantir are not evil creations in the book iirc. They were used by the great kings to see whatever they wished.
Heck, even in the book Aragorn uses the Palantir to make a critical decision turning the tide of battle.
In the book the Palantir are technically neutral devices for Seeing things, that, it turns out, are inherently prone to misuse and once used for Evil, are incredibly difficult to use in any other way.
A better metaphor (accidental or not) for surveillance technology I've never seen.
> once used for Evil, are incredibly difficult to use in any other way.
That’s not true. They were only dangerous to use as long as an insanely powerful immortal demon god had one. If you used a Palantir he would notice and draw your eye toward him. He could then make you see what he wanted you to see, unless you were strong enough to resist. He corrupted Saruman and Denethor merely by talking to them, showing them misleading things, and convincing them that he could not be defeated by any means. Kill Sauron and the Palantiri are safe to use again.
The tools are neutral. It is the users who are good or evil.
It’s the same with the Throne of Amon Hen, fwiw. It’s only dangerous to use because Sauron will notice that you’re using it.
TIL. So it's an even better analogy. Tech is not a problem unless Sauron can read our positional data and control our attention machines in our pockets.
To blame the phone in your pocket is also to miss the point. There are whole industries out there aiming to manipulate your attention. Television, news, advertising, etc, etc. They’ve been manipulating people for centuries, and don’t need phones to do it.
Edit: it just occurred to me that the book describes a kind of filter bubble, too. The Palantir stones are inherently incapable of showing false data. But they became tuned over time to show highly editorialized video clips which supported a specific (Evil) narrative. That (IIRC) included future projections of possible outcomes.
Denethor (?) tried to use a Palantir for good, but went mad after viewing its selections for years.
Denethor was allowed to see what Sauron wanted him to see and nothing more, because he lacked the ability to control the stone away from Sauron. The parallel falls apart somewhat since here his access was essentially controlled by a third party.
(you might argue it reflects certain social media outcomes ofc)
> For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read)
I found The Last Ringbearer a book good! Of course it's not in the same league as LotR, it's not engaging in vast myth- and world-building, but it's a well-written, fun book that manages to be engaging. Even knowing it was an alternative take to LotR, I wanted to know what happened!
For everyone who has not read it, it's not simply a "let's retell LotR, only from the perspective of the Orcs". It's a brand new "adventure" so to speak, which shifts the point of view but also describes new events. It starts at the end of the War of the Ring, with Mordor defeated.
I mean, I really did actually enjoy reading it. But like with a lot of Russian literature - it does have a habit of spending several pages just monologuing here and there - but it is a "fun" read.
To me it sounds more like he really wanted to give them some agency and the ability to speak, but then was unable to resolve the moral dilemma that came out of it - with different works suggesting different "solutions" to it. As the Wiki article points out, Tolkien was a devout Christian and part of his world view included beings which were wholy and irredimably evil while still able to speak and reason on some level. When you look at Christian iconography, you don't really have theologians saying "well when you have angels slaying demons, are the demons really evil or are they just misunderstood". That's your orcs. Since Tolkien really cared about world building he wanted to make it fit neatly in the myth of creation but as far as I can tell - he was never able to do it neatly.
the tolkien metal world continues: One of Nine put out a killer record on Profound Lore last year. https://oneofnine.bandcamp.com/album/dawn-of-the-iron-shadow (skip the first track if you don't care for "dungeon synth"). i'm not a big fan of keyboards in metal but the rest of the instrumentation is so good i can forgive it :)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair (1878 - 1968)
"Because Pharaoh is paying daddy, and we need the money." - Unknown laborer at the Pyramid of Djoser, c. 2660 BC, explaining to his son why he's making a giant pile of rocks in the desert.
I mean, I did leave a role because the things we were doing clashed heavily with my principles (ad-tech adjacent). I had the luxury of doing so - an opportunity arose somewhere else, I could afford to make the move, etc.
But it's also hard for me to imagine someone that today, chooses to interview and take a job at Palantir, and not know what they're up to, who Thiel is and what he stands for.
i think anyone on HN employed by arms manufactures or surveillance tech has a resume good enough to get hired pretty much anywhere that doesn't do those things.
If anything, it's their portrayal in the Rings of Power that is idiotic(trying to humanize them) - they aren't human, they don't have families or friends or internal lives and psychological doubts going through their heads - they are meant to be a force("force" like in "force of nature") of evil, not a misunderstood and exploited race of intelligent beings.
For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer
I will however agree with you that it's truly insane how we have a global survailence company that is used to spy on citizens and destroy democracies worldwide that is literally called Palantir. Like, no one working there is seeing it?