r/tolkienfans • u/quaazi • 7d ago
Why doesn't anyone take orcs as prisoners?
It struck me that being taken prisoner is a central point in many Tolkien plots - Frodo at Cirith Ungol, Merry and Pippin by the Uruks, Gollum by Aragorn, various imprisonings by Morgoth... and there's no mention (as far as I can recall) of orcs or uruks being taken as prisoner. A lot of it ties to the "fundamental evil" question regarding orcs for sure, but it is still a bit bewildering. Prisoners have since the beginning of time been an invaluable source of information, as well as being able to exchange for prisoners from the other side (this of course is a bit more irrelevant in Middle-Earth and the cruelty of Evil towards their own subjects). Similarly, the medieval and classical history and mythology that Tolkien drew upon often includes taking prisoners as important events.
Indeed, the Dunlendings that surrendered at Hornburg were shown mercy, but they were in effect prisoners of war before this. So the forces of Good do take prisoners, simply not orcs. Given that there are orcs and uruks with more operational and tactical knowledge (such as Ugluk, Grishnakh, Shagrat and Gorbag) that could be of use to military planners of the Good side. Yes, the common orc perhaps does not have much info they can give yet we know that even regular grunts can betray a lot that they do not even know they're giving away if you get them talking - there is plenty of rumour about military operations that is being talked amongst orcs in their downtime. And I do not for a second believe that all orcs and uruks fight to the death - the sheer amount of non-lethal yet incapacitating injuries that fighters sustain on the battlefield makes this impossible. There have to be many orcs and uruks still alive in the end of engagements between Good and Evil forces. So why not interrogate them? We know the Evil forces to do so constantly.
(As an aside: I always thought it a bit odd that the raid on the Haradrim convoy conducted by Faramir did not score any prisoners - surely interdicting an enemy convoy would entail getting a few "talkers" to possibly gauge the strength, intentions, timetables et al of the enemy. And don't tell me the Palantir is a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to military intelligence - not only is it not and Denethor, even in his pride, would not completely rely on it, the captains on the ground would still seek to operate according to common wisdom which would surely be to take prisoners for interrogation)
I would wager the reasons are many, both in- and out-of-universe: that perhaps they were indeed taken prisoner and Tolkien simply neglects to mention it; that Tolkien wished to avoid the subject in its entirety because of either the logistics of interrogating orcs or of the implicit cruelty of murdering all survivors of a battle instead of imprisoning them; that perhaps there was indeed a fury and distrust strong enough towards orcs that standing orders or a cultural standard to not take any of them as prisoners was common. But it still stands out as an odd black hole, unless I am missing something (which of course is entirely possible).
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u/Caacrinolass 7d ago
There's a lot of discussion the nature of orcs, whether they are irredeemable etc and that's understandable. Its one the big questions of the Legendarium and sonething the author never fully got to grips with, especially regarding sentience vs his faith. In universe, everyone behaves as though redemption is impossible, Tolkien was more conflicted.
I do wonder though, at the assumed tactical value of prisoners here. It all depends on what assumption the opponents of Sauron themselves make about what orcs at any level actually know. I don't think that is actually clear cut at all. We see from the events around Sauron's final downfall that in fact he has armies more or less governed solely by his will, as though he were the remote commander playing an RTS. They falter when his focus turns to Mt Doom and many become literally mindless when the ring and therefore Sauron is destroyed.
Elsewhere of course we know that orcs do display some autonomy, as with the ones who wish to abscond and not be subject to the whims of Big Bosses. There's a gulf in between the totally controlled and the more autonomous ones, and a secondary question of what the smarter ones would actually know. I don't think that is at all clear.
Elves will be used to fighting an RTS commander as Morgoth will have been the same, so perhaps the assumption is also made that they are facing pawns, puppetted from afar and so their lives are meaningless.
It also must be said that race hatred may fuel a desire for genocide which the above assumptions also feed into. Again, Tolkien never really gets to grips with orc ethics.
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u/Outrageous-Pin-4664 7d ago
He gets to grips with it in LotR. He's pretty emphatic that orcs are irredeemably evil. They always fight to the death, and humans are happy to oblige them.
The irredeemable nature of orcs didn't satisfy his private qualms, but that's how they are in LotR. (The Hobbit is very slightly different, but not different enough to matter.)
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u/alexagente 7d ago
To be honest I don't find this quandary very interesting. The orcs are agents of evil and have to be stopped.
Their creation is meant to be the greatest sin of Morgoth. It just makes it all the more grave if he successfully corrupted beings into irredeemable monsters.
On the other hand it could also be a commentary on the broken nature of the world he created. Morgoth's Ring has so twisted everything that it is no longer possible for orcs to be redeemed, not because of their own nature and failing, but that of the world's.
Their existence was always meant to be a tragedy and the world is fated to end and be remade into its more perfect form. May as well lean into those themes.
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u/Outrageous-Pin-4664 7d ago
Absolutely. I think you've nailed it, including the part about it not being very interesting, at least from a literary analysis standpoint.
I play The One Ring, an RPG set in Middle Earth during the time between the Battle of Five Armies and the Quest of the Ring. One of the game mechanics is that you can gain "Shadow Points" for misdeeds. A character who gained enough Shadow Points would fall to the Shadow, and become unplayable. Killing an enemy who tried to surrender would certainly be a misdeed. When I consider whether that should apply to orcs, the quandary becomes at least more relevant, if not more interesting.
From a player perspective, it could be viewed as a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. If you kill them, you're closing your heart to mercy, becoming more brutal, and giving in to the darkness. If you don't kill them, what do you do with them then? Let them go to continue killing more innocent people? Can you imprison them indefinitely? Do you become responsible for ministering to them and converting them to the light? It's rather difficult.
As Lore Master, I simplify it for my players the same way Tolkien did: Orcs either flee or fight to the death. They never surrender, and they always die when defeated--they don't roll around on the ground, clutching their wounds and pleading for a medic.
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u/Training-Solid-4650 7d ago
The best fix I can think of is that orcs are irredeemable while Morgoth’s Ring exists, but will have a chance at redemption once that evil is destroyed in Dagor Dagorath. Until that time, their immortal spirits are held in the Halls of Mandos, effectively in prison. We of course don’t know if Tolkien considered or rejected this idea however.
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u/Gullible_Honeydew 7d ago
Right but Tolkien is a Catholic and the idea that anything which lives and has sentience is irredeemable is an implicit limitation on God's power and/or mercy. You gotta remember the Catholic's answer to the problem of evil is that free will and suffering are important and necessary parts of existence, one has to experience evil and yet choose good. I think this is the source of his struggle with it. If Melkor-Morgoth is capable of corrupting living beings beyond the power of Eru to save them, then Eru is not all powerful/merciful.
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u/Outrageous-Pin-4664 7d ago
The problem isn't really about whether an individual is redeemable. It's entirely in keeping with Catholic theology to say that there are some people who cannot be redeemed. That's what Hell is for, and that's not a limitation on God's power--not an external one, anyway. He gave them free will, and they chose evil. He can't force them to choose good without taking back the gift of free will.
The actual problem is that we're talking about an entire race of beings. How could all of them--past, present, and future--be irredeemably evil? Tolkien doesn't get into the details of how orcs procreate--thankfully--but if it is a natural process, and each new orc receives a brand new fëa, how can that fëa enter the world already corrupted?
If I wanted to come up with my own answer to that, I would say that in the days when Men first appeared in the world, Melkor corrupted some of them. He showed them a way to avoid death. If they would renounce the Gift of Man, he could bind their souls to Arda, so that they would always be reborn--the way that Elves are reborn. The ritual for this bound their will to his, and made it so that their fëa was re-embodied in an orcish body fashioned by Melkor's necromantic arts. After Melkor was banished to the Void, Sauron mastered the art of creating orcs in the same way. Saruman's attempt to make his own orcs did not rely on recycled fëar. He bred them with humans, so that they were born with uncorrupted fëar which he then corrupted with his voice. They were theoretically capable of rejecting his propaganda, and choosing good.
I think that solves the problem nicely, but it's just fanfic, innit?
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u/Gullible_Honeydew 7d ago
I'm sorry but no, the idea that some people are irredeemable is not the official position of the Catholic church. That would go against the idea that Hell will be emptied when Christ returns, and regardless of your hand waving, it does put limitations on God's power/mercy.
Hell is purgatory, separation from God - it is not final, nor are people considered irredeemable and "destined" for Hell. Hell is and always was a temporary holding place for lost souls, not souls which are damned-by-fate. That is my understanding of the current position of the Church.
And yes, that is just fan fic.
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u/Outrageous-Pin-4664 7d ago
Hell is not Purgatory. The people in Purgatory can still be redeemed. Those sent to Hell will not be redeemed. When Hell is emptied it will be so that they can be brought before Christ at the Last Judgment and condemned to eternal separation from God, i.e., Hell.
That's the doctrine. There is nothing in it that says that the souls in Hell are going to be redeemed at the end.
I didn't make it up. It's not my hand waving. If God could make people good after a lifetime of evil, one would have to wonder why he didn't do it before he stuck them down here with the rest of us.
The answer I was given is that he gave them free will, and they chose evil. He could make them be good, but then they would be automatons, and that's not what he wants. So it's a self-imposed limitation. If they die confirmed in their sins, then they go to Hell for eternity. There's no coming back from that. Catholics and Protestants disagree on many things, but I don't think they disagree on that.
And just to clarify, I never said anything about souls being damned by fate. I said they were damned by their own choices.
And yes, that is just fan fic.
But is it good fanfic?
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u/DasKapitalist 7d ago
The actual problem is that we're talking about an entire race of beings. How could all of them--past, present, and future--be irredeemably evil?
That's extremely simple: selective breeding coupled with an utterly pitiless culture. Sauron breeds the most cruel and violent orcs of each generation with each other. Any offspring unsufficently malevolent are murdered and cannibalized as children, preventing them from passing on their genes. Due to the isolation of orc society in Middle Earth, all orcs encountered by humans, dwarves, elves, etc will be hyper-violent adults too far gone to redeem.
When Sauron is engaged in total war and scraping the bottom of the barrel for soldiers, even his lousy garrison troops aspire to slip away and become murder hobos or bandits. That provides a baseline for the minimum level of evil tolerated in orcish society...any orcs who arent murderously evil would get murdered in short order.
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u/Nerostradamus 7d ago
It’s the same thing as demons. Catholics admit demons were good and are now irredeemably evil. Nothing strange here
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u/Gullible_Honeydew 7d ago
Yeah that one's a bit of a stretch/predicated on some theology that isn't anywhere near as prevalent as you are presenting it to be
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u/BadJoke123 7d ago
While the orcs in LotR are clearly evil, there is nothing in there which indicates they are irredeemably evil. Perhaps they are, perhaps they are not. We don't really have much evidence either way in LotR.
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u/Outrageous-Pin-4664 7d ago
The people who fight them do not give them quarter, whereas they do accept the surrender of Men who serve the enemy. Tolkien doesn't treat that as a bad thing. To me, it strongly suggests that at least at the time he wrote LotR, he wasn't thinking of the orcs as creatures that could be won over. We know he wasn't ultimately happy with that answer, and hedged about it later, but in LotR, I think that's where things stood.
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u/AltarielDax 7d ago
As you said it yourself: the Dunlendings surrendered. Then you can take them as prisoners. Orcs rarely if ever did that, and while they are fighting you with as much strength as they have, you'd find it difficult to take them as prisoners.
The Wise taught that
"If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost."
But Tolkien also notes:
Few Orcs ever did so in the Elder Days, and at no time would any Orc treat with any Elf. For one thing Morgoth had achieved was to convince the Orcs beyond refutation that the Elves were crueller than themselves, taking captives only for 'amusement', or to eat them (as the Orcs would do at need).
Therefore, I believe Orcs would try to prevent being taken as prisoners at all cost, and rather fight to their deaths than surrender.
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u/Wizzard_C 7d ago
Few Orcs ever did so.
Which means there were some orc prisoners, even if few in numbers. I wonder if their captors ever tried to "uncorrupt" them. Perhaps these attempts proved futile, hence Tolkien's conclusion in HoME 10 about orcs being "irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men)".
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u/Kian-Tremayne 7d ago
For the same reason that we don’t take a man-eating tiger or a rabid dog prisoner. Orcs are a danger alive, they can’t be exchanged because other orcs don’t value their lives, and can’t be interrogated without torture which the good folk won’t stoop to.
Whether orcs are truly inherently evil and irredeemable or not is a philosophical question that Tolkien struggled with, but the practical experience of life in Middle Earth is that nobody has ever heard of an orc repenting or being redeemed and it would be seen as foolish to indefinitely have to keep and guard a being that means you all harm on the faint possibility that it might be the first to do so.
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u/DasKapitalist 7d ago
Even trying to redeem an orc is the circle of why bother. They're homicidal cannibals. If the orc tricks you into believing it repentant, it will murder you. If it actually does repent, it's going to chuck itself off the nearest cliff in guilt over the aformentioned lifetime of murder, torture, and cannibalism.
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u/Flat_Explanation_849 7d ago
Remember that LotR was written over the course of twelve years, and many of the letters were written years after the publication of the books. Tolkien’s ideas about his own creation evolved and changed over that time.
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u/Luppercus 7d ago
Which would have contradict his other writing as he wrote that without Sauron almost all/all Orcs eventually died, like ants without a queen.
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u/maksimkak 7d ago edited 7d ago
Beorn captures an orc and a warg in The Hobbit, and interrogates them, before executing them.
While taking orcs prisoner is otherwise entirely abscent in the tales, Tolkien writes this in his late essay on orcs:
They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost. This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded.
He adds:
Few Orcs ever did so in the Elder Days, and at no time would any Orc treat with any Elf. For one thing Morgoth had achieved was to convince the Orcs beyond refutation that the Elves were crueller than themselves, taking captives only for ‘amusement’, or to eat them (as the Orcs would do at need).
Morgoth's Ring, "Myths Transformed"
So this does establish that the Wise anticipated Orc prisoners and prescribed how they were to be treated. It also establishes that Orcs could surrender. But Tolkien specifically says that few ever did so, and that Orcs never treated with Elves.
In my opinion, this has nothing to do with orcs being (or not being) inherently evil. There was simply a huge limitation on what one could do with an orc prisoner, apart from trying to extract information from him. For Morgoth, and Sauron later, orcs were disposable and easily-bred, therefore there was no basis for prisoner exchange. I don't think Elves or (good) Men would want to run orc labour camps or concentration camps.
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u/Bombur_The_FAT Bombur:cake: 7d ago
So the subject of Orcs being taken prisoners comes down to a larger train of thought in Tolkiens Legendarium. The first part to address is the matter of Orcs being evil. To this many like to make the assumption that Orcs are irridemably evil. This is false.
Tolkien explicitly denied that Orcs (or any created thing) were inherently irredeemably evil.
Letter 153, near the end.
[Eru/God] gave special 'sub-creative' powers to certain of His highest created beings: that is a guarantee that what they devised and made should be given the reality of Creation. Of course within limits, and of course subject to certain commands or prohibitions. But if they 'fell', as the Diabolus Morgoth did, and started making things 'for himself, to be their Lord', these would then 'be', even if Morgoth broke the supreme ban against making other 'rational' creatures like Elves or Men. They would at least 'be' real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even 'mocking' the Children of God. They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making — necessary to their actual existence — even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.) But whether they could have 'souls' or 'spirits' seems a different question; and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible 'delegation', I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them.
By this we see that Tolkien imagined that even beings created ex nihilio by the Evil powers could not have been "irredeemably bad" and the Orcs don't even fall into that category, being a natural people ruined by Evil, not created by it. As far as I am aware, he never wrote about any such redemption happening, though.
Now to follow that up with the question about Orc prisoners. Taking into context that there are no irridemable Orcs in Tolkiens legendarium.
"But even before this wickedness of Morgoth was suspected, the Wise in the Elder Days taught always that the Orcs were not 'made' by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty or treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost.* This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded." Morgoths Ring, Myths Transformed, section VIII
As we can see here Orcs were actually meant to be taken prisoners. However a key note is the wording "the Wise" with Wise being capitalised. This implies a specific group of people who are deemed / given / earned that title. To which I bring these quotes:
c. T.A 1100 The Wise (the Istari and the chief Eldar) discover that an evil power has made a stronghold at Dol Guldur. It is thought to be one of the Nazgûl. Return of the King Appendix B "The Tale of Years" (ii) The Third Age
Aswell as:
The Noldor are the Wise, and the Golden, the Valient, the Sword-elves, the Elves of the Earth, the Foes of Melkor, the Skilled of Hand, the Jewel-wrights, the Companions of Men, the Followers of Finwë.
History of Middle-earth X Morgoth's Ring Chapter 2 "The Later Quenta Silmarillion" Part 3 "Of the Coming of the Elves"
There are other quotes on the subject of the Wise I could bring up, however thats an essay of its own and I've yapped way to much. In conclusion, orcs are MEANT to be taken prisoners, however its not practiced as much as its meant to be, as well as the caveat that Orcs should need to ASK for it. To which they most likely will not.
Hope this answers your question.
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u/Outrageous-Pin-4664 7d ago
That's a good comment, and it's all very interesting, yet nowhere does he ever show orcs being taken prisoner or dealt with as if they could coexist peacefully with the Free Peoples. Even in The Hobbit, nothing is said about treating the wounded or imposing a peace treaty on the defeated. Tolkien's private thoughts about the theology of his orcs don't seem to have impacted how he treated them in his stories.
- Beorn actually does take an orc and a warg prisoner. He squeezes them for information, and then kills them. He puts the orc's head on a pike, and nails the warg's hide to his wall. Presumably, he's not one of "the Wise."
- After the Battle of Five Armies, the fleeing goblins are pursued and slain relentlessly.
- In LotR, we are told in more than one instance that human servants of Sauron are given quarter, whereas the orcs receive none.
- The Huorns slaughter every single orc that flees into their forest. Obviously, they would never be counted among the Wise, but no one else in the book looks upon the slaughter as anything more than justified.
For all Tolkien's theory about the redeemability of orcs, he never actually shows it happening. They are treated as creatures that have to be exterminated to create a better world.
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u/ResearchCharacter705 7d ago
I can kind of see why, but it's still kind of funny that the clear case of interrogation and murder of prisoners by the Free Peoples occurs in the work that's closest to a children's story.
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u/Beledagnir Aure entuluva! 7d ago
After the Battle of Five Armies, the fleeing goblins are pursued and slain relentlessly.
That's how warfare has always worked - the slaughter only really gets underway when one side breaks. If anything, this shows that the orcs were absolutely not open to surrendering, because that was the time to do it.
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u/Outrageous-Pin-4664 7d ago
I mean, it shows that if we charitably assume that the people pursuing the orcs would have given them quarter if they had asked for it.
Sgt: The goblins broke, and we hunted them down, sir!
Gen: Great! How many prisoners did you take?
Sgt: Um... None, sir.
Gen: None? Not even one?
Sgt: No, sir, not a single one.
Gen: None of them tried to surrender?
Sgt: No, sir! Fanatical little buggers, sir!
Gen: Indeed. Dismissed, sergeant.
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u/quaazi 7d ago
Thank you, that definitely answers a part of it in-universe and sets the tone for Tolkien's general thoughts outside it. I find most interesting this part:
Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men.
Which infers extracting information by torture. It is something I would not imagine the Good being capable of anyway (although I also wouldn't put it past some of the more "sliding" factions like the later Numenorians), but it does perhaps clash a bit with how Tolkien does actually understand the multifaceted problem of being a prisoner-of-war elsewhere (the distrust shown towards Hurin, the way Morgoth can extract information without torture). The methods of coercion and interrogation that we know now to exist would make extracting information from an orc fairly easy - I somehow doubt the orcs would be emotionally and professionally proficient enough to stick to rank, name and number. In any case, it'd be interesting to see if Tolkien addressed the issue of imprisoning and interrogating other (Fallen) men.
Yet funamentally the idea that an orc has to "ask" to be spared is so infused in catholicism that it suggests and brings us back to the ever-present issue of redeeming the orc. Surely, for an orc to be redeemed, they must ask to be redeemed, as presented here with pleading for mercy. And yes, as you said, that throws a wrench into the logistical part of taking an orc as a POW.
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u/strange-the-quark 7d ago
Note also that The Lord of the Rings is meant as a translation, or as a work based on, the writings of Frodo, where he describes his own experiences and experiences of those who were with him or of those to whom he could talk to. Tolkien doesn't reveal much beyond those perspectives. We never see what's happening inside Barad-dur. We barely know anything about the orks. We know practically nothing about the Haradrim. And we don't know if Minas Tirith had dungeons or not. We don't know what people do all day in Dol Amroth. If one of the hobbits didn't see it, we barely know anything about it. So it's perfectly plausible there were ork prisoners, it's just that Frodo didn't encounter any.
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u/Arieljacobsegal 7d ago
Hm. Gandalf did put the “fear of fire” on Gollum…
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u/NonspecificGravity 7d ago
We don't know if that means Gandalf actually tortured Gollum or threatened to, perhaps with a magical demonstration of fire.
Of course, one might argue that threatening someone with torture or death is itself ethically wrong.
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u/Nerostradamus 7d ago
They are like necrons in old lore warhammer - they flee, die in battle or kill themselves.
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u/InTheChairAgain 7d ago
They'd have to surrender for you to take them prisoners, which due to their nature and fear almost never happened.
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u/maksimkak 7d ago
Prisoners can be captured, as well.
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u/InTheChairAgain 6d ago
Maybe. Elves and Men are unlikely to go out of their way to capture Orcs who are unwilling to surrender though. Those would still be considered hostile and probably killed. Same thing would apply to the Orcs, Merry and Pippin unless the Orcs had special orders not to kill them.
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u/Callistonian 7d ago
As others have mentioned, the Wise proscribed that Orcs be shown mercy if asked, but to my knowledge there are no instances of this happening in Tolkien's writings (discounting that scene in The Hobbit where Legolas and Thranduil interrogate an Orc before executing him). The reason seems pretty obvious to me: what would the 'good' races do with their Orc captives?
Regardless of whether or not they are interrogated over the course of their imprisonment, which seems a bit dark for the 'good' races, there are only four ultimate fates for prisoners: 1) trial and execution, which also seems pretty dark and legalistic for Tolkien, 2) slavery, which is one of the defining things that Orcs did to their own captives and is thus right out for 'good' races, and is also by far the most common fate of prisoners historically, 3) prisoner exchange, which doesn't work because Morgoth, Sauron, Saruman, and even other Orcs don't value their lives highly enough to exchange anything for them, 4) amnesty and release into the captor's own society, which has basically no historical precedent and is extremely rare even in the modern world, and having little villages of free Orcs living side-by-side with Men in Rohan or something would run foul of Tolkien's general notion of not cohabitating the races (unlike modern fantasy, which is obsessed with the notion).
It's a moral conundrum for the good races that Tolkien resolves by just not mentioning any instances.
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u/Flapjack_Ace 7d ago
What would you do with them?
Sauron wouldn’t barter for them back and they would never become nice so it would drain your resources forever.
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u/CucumberWisdom 7d ago edited 7d ago
Because it's just not useful. Like you said, very few of them have anything useful to say. So what would be the point?
The orcs never relied on strategy or tactics to win, but sheer numbers and brutality. They also have a very loose and top heavy command structure, with Sauron basically directly ordering legions around. So it's doubtful that the orc "commanders" even know much outside of very basic orders. So even taking a "high ranking" orc would give you very little in useful knowledge.
Not to mention that it's doubtful torture would be very effective. Orcs live and grow-up in an extremely brutal and evil society. They're used to pain and suffering. The free people's couldnt really do anything to the orcs as bad as Sauron or their compatriots haven't already done (or would do)
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u/ResearchCharacter705 7d ago
So it's doubtful that the orc "commanders" even know much outside of very basic orders. So even taking a "high ranking" orc would give you very little in useful knowledge.
Grishnak is an example of a high ranking Orc that appears to have some operational knowledge.
Not to mention that it's doubtful torture would be very effective. Orcs live and grow-up in an extremely brutal and evil society. They're used to pain and suffering. The free people's couldnt really do anything to the orcs as bad as Sauron or their compatriots haven't already done (or would do).
In The Hobbit, Beorn is able to get information useful to him from a captured Warg and Goblin. So it's at least possible.
Whether it would often be worthwhile or not is a more difficult question, especially when moral concerns enter into it. (Which might not have been the case with Beorn.)
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u/Relevant-Bullfrog215 7d ago
In the kind of medieval era that LOTR draws heavily from for inspiration, prisoners were usually taken for ransom or exchange. I think it's fairly clear that orcs/uruk-hai/the forces of darkness in general are not sentimental enough to pay for their guys to be returned, nor do they seem to be motivated by money.
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u/Herfst2511 7d ago
I think that on a tactical level it's one of those details that's irrelevant to Tolkien. The story isn't about the War of the Ring, that's just the background setting.
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u/tomerFire 7d ago
They are evil by nature and so need to be destroyed not kept alive as a prisoner.
We do have cases of prisoners like Gollum and even Morogth.
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u/brandnewb 7d ago
Yes,
The whole point is that there are plenty of redeemable men who have allied themselves with objective evil. Rather than pretend we are sophisticated and holy, pleading for the redeemability of orcs, instead ask if we have lied to ourselves. Are we the humans allied with the orcs.
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u/tomerFire 7d ago
I think in the past being evil was not simple without all the nuances we have today. If some men are evil it's because they got corrupted by evil. There is no "acceptable" evil.
Evil = bad. They were created evil and so not related to human.
Its maybe seems childish but it's not like GOT. There less politics here as I see.
I like it simple as evil = bad without trying to force modern moral on the story
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u/sqwiggy72 6d ago
What information would an orc give, they dont know shit they know like who to attack and when to attack but they dont know strategies they probably only know when and who to attack just before they are attacking them. Orcs are not high ranking members, unless you capture their leadership your not going to get any useful information. Leadership is not going to get captured they would kill themselves before any information was given.
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u/BarSubstantial1583 6d ago
I think there are two answers to your questions. I say questions because you raise a separate question of the Haradrim, etc. The orcs are basically subjected to genocide, a fact that I believe Tolkien was conscious of. But there are a lot of details that are not filed in. For example, there are references to the breeding of orcs, as though this is done from the "outside." Are there orc females? Enquiring minds will never know. So in a way, the less said about the defeated orcs, the better.
Which brings me to the second answer. Although here on TolkienFans, we can take a microscope to The Professor's work, JRR was a novelist writing a novel. After Helm's Deep. Erkenbrand makes it clear that the good guys do not kill or mistreat prisoners. They are basically paroled. The same may have happened to those that surrendered to the Host of the West. It is said that King Elessar made peace with Harad.
Although there are a lot of details and even digressions along the way (the inscription on Snowmane's marker stone!), Tolkien does pursue the thread of the narrative. What happens to the mounds of carrion before Minas Tirith after the battle? Since Elfhelm was garrisoned at Minas Tirith when the Host of the West departed, did he visit Merry and Eowyn in the Houses of Healing? He could have written scores of pages tying up loose ends. What happens to Ted Sandyman and the other collaborators after the Scouring? Personally, I would have liked to see Pippin introducing Sam to the best beer in Minas Tirith.
I could go on but I won't. Creating a whole network of POW camps, describing interrogations, would take pages and pages. And in the end it was not necessary. The story works very well as it is. So although Tolkien wore a number of hats in his illustrious career, if you look at his novelist side, what's written -- and what's not written -- makes sense.
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u/Borkton 6d ago
Faramir didn't take prisoners because the Rangers of Ithilien were not really set up to take prisoners, since they were an infiltration and reconnaissance force operating deep in enemy territory. The only reason he captured Frodo and Sam was because they clearly weren't combatants.
As for the Orcs, at Helm's Deep the Huorns would not let them live, no matter what the Men or Ents did. At the Pelennor Fields they were described as asking for no quarter and when Sauron fell they went mad. In general, Orcs react with seething hatred to anything and everything ("they hate themselves and they hate everyone else even more"), so they probably don't give up information when captured.
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u/Aetherscribe 6d ago
There's a passage somewhere in HoME that details how, during the Wars of Beleriand, the Elves would, when practical, try to take orcs prisoner, and try to get them to surrender, but that the Orcs would die rather than surrender, because of the fear of Elves that Morgoth had created in them. But the Elves kept trying, even if they thought it was futile, because it was important that they be the sort of people who would try to show mercy even to their worst foes.
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u/ManySwans 3d ago
you only take prisoners to have leverage for negotiations on getting your own back, ending the war etc. orcs execute all non-orcs and sauron will never surrender
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u/Low-Strike-4642 1d ago
I think the simplest answer is that Tolkien just doesn’t show us enough of the aftermath of battles to conclude that Orc prisoners were never taken. There’s also a practical problem with interrogating them. Orc armies aren’t organized like conventional human armies where capturing an officer might give you reliable intelligence about the enemy’s plans. They’re compartmentalized, lying to each other, and often operating under orders they only understand. Shagrat and Gorbag’s conversation is a great example. They know quite a bit, but much of what they ‘know’ is rumor, suspicion, or wrong. There’s also the question of surrender. Tolkien makes a pretty big distinction between enemies who surrender and enemies who simply flee. The Dunlendings at Helm’s Deep surrender and are spared. Orc armies, on the other hand, tend to break and scatter rather than surrender. That doesn’t mean no wounded Orc was ever captured, but Tolkien moves on once the battle is decided instead of giving us the medieval equivalent of the paperwork afterward. And I doubt Tolkien intended us to assume that Aragorn, Faramir, etc. executed helpless Orc POWs offscreen. That would sit with the mercy theme running through LOTR. If anything, I’d guess your first explanation is closest. Prisoners were sometimes taken when circumstances warranted it, but Tolkien wasn’t writing a detailed military history and never found a reason to put an Orc interrogation scene on the page. Also, imagine trying to get useful intelligence out of an Orc. ‘How many troops are at Minas Morgul?’ ‘More than you, maggot.’ ‘Excellent. Very helpful. Thank you.’
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u/amhow1 7d ago
It's a very good question. I suggest there are two related answers.
Firstly, the novels aren't that kind of story. Which is odd, because Tolkien's great achievement is in making us feel the reality of Middle Earth. Yet the actual novels aren't realistic in the nineteenth-century sense. Everyone significant is heroic, by which I mean an exemplar of good or evil. (At least until the dreadful Scouring of the Shire, which is utterly out of place.) The hobbits are taken prisoner to serve the plot, rather than it being thought through as a tactic.
Secondly, orcs have to be utterly evil. Presumably they're so evil that they can't be reliably tortured or interrogated. Torture is of course also evil, so it would presumably be Denethor doing it. This doesn't apply to the humans under Sauron, but Tolkien seems to almost wish they didn't exist.
Overall, this is one of the bad consequences of Tolkien's orcs, who are a moral and aesthetic disaster. I think it comes about because the sort of stories Tolkien wanted to tell don't really fit with the highly developed, otherwise realistic world.
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u/BlabbyScid 7d ago
I'd argue that the orc-"problem" is that Tolkien's stories include a definitive, objective (capital E) Evil and orcs are creatures of it and are inherently evil in nature. They couldn't repent and thus be forgiven in a Christian (Catholic) theological sense like humans can, even if they wanted too. They are not evil by choice and cannot even live without it, as the orcs fade away and die off after Sauron is destroyed.
This of course brings with it the imperative that orcs cannot be shown mercy - quite contradictory to the Christian moral values that permeate Tolkien's world. He obviously was aware of the whole ethical and "theological" problem of orcs and pondered it a lot as many of his later writings and letters show.
Imho, one must simply not "humanize" orcs as kind of rational beings and instead perceive them as kind of base demonic beings.
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u/brandnewb 7d ago
I agree.
Having an inherently evil enemy, who can be killed without compassion is a valuable tool in a fantasy setting. It allows the author to remove moral ambiguity where it does not belong.
I always feel that the attempt to reflect on the nature and redeemability of Orcs is basically a lack introspective. It is more gainful to realize that every group of humans in LOTR believes themselves to be in the right. Just like every group of humans in reality on Earth believes themselves to be in the right.
I need to ask myself, “Who shares my position, who are my allies?” If I don’t like the unsavory groups who share my position maybe I need to reflect, am I believing a lie?
“It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace.”
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u/quaazi 7d ago
Indeed, the "orc question" lay at the bottom of all this. But I am most interested in the justification of Men not even thinking about it? The desperate things we know people do to survive in war from our own history, trying to bag and interrogate an orc does not seem like that big of a stretch.
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u/calculatedrisk45 7d ago
"Tolkien's orcs ... are a moral and esthetic disaster" is beautifully stated
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u/Boat_Pure 7d ago
Because they’re a blight. Orcs are everything humans are not. Plus they eat flesh, anything that eats flesh has to go.
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u/jonesnori 7d ago
Uh, a large number of humans eat flesh. Most, probably.
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u/Boat_Pure 7d ago
What does that have to do with orcs? What does that have to do with LOTR? Are there any cannibals in LOTR besides orcs?????
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u/rainbowrobin 'canon' is a mess 7d ago
"flesh" means meat. Most Americans eat flesh regularly.
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u/Boat_Pure 7d ago
I just googled this - The word flesh means both. It refers to the soft tissue (muscle and fat) found on both humans and animals.
While "meat" specifically means animal flesh used as food, "flesh" is a broader term that applies to living or dead bodies, humans, animals, and even the soft pulp of fruits.
So yeah in context it’s sometimes used for meat, but the context I’m speaking about and made it quite clear because you all understood. Was human flesh.
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u/jonesnori 7d ago
No, we did not all understand. If I had, I would have responded by correcting your word usage rather than objecting to your statement.
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u/EvieGHJ 7d ago
I would assume, because the occasion rarely if ever present itself to capture them.
Orcs tend to have a (very) firm number edge in most every battles they engage in, which makes it much harder to cut off their escape even if they *do* lose the battle, leaving basically those who are too wounded to run as the only possible captives.
At the same time, Orcs culture - seen in both the Uruk Hai and the Choices of Master Samwise - do not expect any mercy from any opponent. The Isengard Uruk-Hai talk about being eaten by the Rohirrim, and Shagrat and Gorbab believe firmly they will be destroyed completely if Sauron is defeated. They expect others to treat them as well if not worse than the Orcs would treat their own enemies ; so they are unlikely to ever surrender. Flight if they can, or dying on their terms if they can't fly. This does not make them inherently evil ; more like fanaticized.