Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-27912807-20170428183448/@comment-26005323-20190312100345

Branching off from the discussion that had occurred on the Discord server:

In the last years of JRRT’s life, he actually changed his mind on the origins of the Orcs. You see, there are several problems that come with the Orc = Elves backstory: why didn’t they have immortality? And what would happen if they go to the Halls of Mandos? Do they remain as Orcs for eternity or return to their normal Elven state? Similarly, Men = Orcs also have some problems: How would they be present in Dagor-nuin-Giliath if they were first awoken when the Sun first rose? In the last years of his life, JRRT changed his mind: MR/378 suggest that Men actually awoke during the Great Journey. The first "Orcs" that Elves saw at Cuiviénen were weak Maiar. This is not actually a contradiction, because Tolkien explicitly states that originally that Urco (Quenya for Orc) originally just meant "Bogey, Apparition", or anything that scared the Elves along the way on the march. There are actually no timeline issues here. JRRT did also suggest at some point that there may have been some Orcs that were originally some Avari mixed in with the stock of men, but he wasn't really conclusive about this. https://eldamo.org/content/words/word-558893647.html

CJRT chose to use the "Orcs are corrupted Elves" in the Silmarillion because he thought that it fit the best with the timeline, but he has since said that he would have put in the "Orcs are corrupted Men" had he thought about it for longer. More information could be found in Morgoth’s Ring: Myths Transformed, or this website: http://www.thetolkienforum.com/index.php?threads/origin-of-orcs.20374/

My intention is not to uproot the current lore of the Mod, but rather to weave different parts of the Legendarium together. Having tormented elves in Utumno would surely be possible, as Morgoth did capture elves when they lived near the shores of Cuiviénen, but I believe having Tormented Men in Mordor and Isengard would make sense. It could be used to indicate somewhat the degradation brought by the amount of torment that poor man had suffered. "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own." Thus they would degrade like: Tormented Men > Uruk > Orc > Goblin. This, however, is only my little theory.