Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-30778102-20170312032515/@comment-26149161-20170316112932

Catfishperson wrote:

High King Ithilion wrote: Elves was the original thought, but in the end he decided they were either educated beasts, the weakest of the Umaiar, or, most likely, men.

Ithilion, Discussions Moderator (Auta i lome) 02:08, March 16, 2017 (UTC) Tolkien never decided that orcs were men. He said he thought they might have been, big difference there, and since he never made stated they were men, it is left to the reader to interpret and theorize.

They are several problems with orcs being men in my mind, not the least that orcs were around tens of thousands of years before the first men came to Middle Earth, as Aiglos pointed out. Could they have been ¨something else¨ such as Maiar or beasts at first, before being ¨reinvented¨ from men? That´s looking for basis to support a conclusion, rather than looking for a conclusion to draw from basis.

We know that Melkor was doing something with elves in Utumno around the time orcs first appeared, and we know that Sarauman at least thought orcs came from elves. He said that men were the likliest explanation, so that's the way I'm going to go. It is a common rule that whatever he wrote later is the truth, so that would point to Umaiar and Beasts, then later Men.

Also, i don't recall Melkor being stated as doing anything (though the published Silmarillion does mention orcs being tortured Elves, it is out of date with Tolkien's letters here). Nor does Saruman think it, for that is a movie invention.

Ithilion, Discussions Moderator (Auta i lome) 11:29, March 16, 2017 (UTC)