Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-30778102-20170312032515/@comment-26322120-20170316044403

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¨ 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 in Utumno around the time orcs first appeared, and we know that Sarauman at least thought orcs came from elves.