Quote from: FrankTrollman;422843Half Orcs only exist because they were a thing in Tolkien's work. In Lord of the Rings, there are barbarian tribes where people are debased and loathsome and not nearly as White as the Numenorians, and they interbreed with Orcs sometimes. It's a thing they do. Them polluting their skin tones with Orcish blood is one of the things that lets you know that Dunlandings are bad people. It was a different era, and astounding levels of racism by today's standards were standard.

*snip*
-Frank

:hmm: can you quote me the pages from Tolkiens works where this intermixing of barbarian humans and Orcs is explained?
I though that the Uruk Hai where the result of experiments Suraman undertook intermixing some human traits with Orcish ones...maybe rape was part of it but I don't recall it ever being stated as such...or are there other "half orcs" mentioned?
:idunno:

Quote from: skofflox;422949:hmm: can you quote me the pages from Tolkiens works where this intermixing of barbarian humans and Orcs is explained?
I though that the Uruk Hai where the result of experiments Suraman undertook intermixing some human traits with Orcish ones...maybe rape was part of it but I don't recall it ever being stated as such...or are there other "half orcs" mentioned?
:idunno:

Possibly in At the sign of the Prancing Pony or The Scourging of the Shire? I'd rather set myself on fire than touch LoTR again, but I seem to remember something of the sort.

Quote from: skofflox;422949:hmm: can you quote me the pages from Tolkiens works where this intermixing of barbarian humans and Orcs is explained?
I though that the Uruk Hai where the result of experiments Suraman undertook intermixing some human traits with Orcish ones...maybe rape was part of it but I don't recall it ever being stated as such...or are there other "half orcs" mentioned?
:idunno:

This is, obviously, from after the publication of AD&D, but it's just what a quick look at Wikipedia gives for citation. I don't have my copy of Two Towers handy at the moment.

^ "Finally, there is a cogent point, though horrible to relate. It became clear in time that undoubted men could under the domination of Morgoth or his agents in a few generations be reduced almost to the Orc-level of mind and habits; and then they would or could be made to mate with Orcs producing new breeds, often larger and more cunning. There is no doubt that long afterwards, in the Third Age, Saruman rediscovered this, or learned of it in lore, and in his lust for mastery committed this, his wickedest deed: the interbreeding of Orcs and Men, producing both Man-orcs large and cunning, and Orc-men treacherous and vile." Tolkien, J. R. R. (1993), Christopher Tolkien, ed., Morgoth's Ring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, "Myths Transformed" - Text X, ISBN 0-395-68092-1

Quote from: Aos;422952Possibly in At the sign of the Prancing Pony or The Scourging of the Shire? I'd rather set myself on fire than touch LoTR again, but I seem to remember something of the sort.

Aos Pictures Presents : Shotgun Wedding at the Prancing Pony

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422843Half Orcs only exist because they were a thing in Tolkien's work. In Lord of the Rings, there are barbarian tribes where people are debased and loathsome and not nearly as White as the Numenorians, and they interbreed with Orcs sometimes. It's a thing they do. Them polluting their skin tones with Orcish blood is one of the things that lets you know that Dunlandings are bad people. It was a different era, and astounding levels of racism by today's standards were standard.

Oh my God. Did you just go there? I think you just did. *shakes head*

Quote from: Benoist;422976Oh my God. Did you just go there? I think you just did. *shakes head*

Yeah, but, how is it not true?

Quote from: Cranewings;422977Yeah, but, how is it not true?

To me, the notion that Numenoreans somehow equate to "White People" in our world and that Dunlendings (who dwelled by the White Mountains, by the way - is there a statement on modern skin colors there too?) and other Edain who did not share the fate of the Men of Westernesse equate to "Non-white People" in our world is right up there with the notion that Tolkien had some issues with his own sexuality by portraying the friendship of Frodo and Sam the way he did through the Lord of the Rings.

It's some stupid, backwards rewrite psychology, the same that inspires scholars today to look at ages past and think that their "modern enlightenment" gives them some sort of moral high ground on people long dead and burried. I don't think so, no. Not by a looong shot.

Statements about the different houses of the Edain on Middle-earth don't equate to some sort of ethnographic statement about the real world, nor does it hide some sort of conscious or unconscious racism on Tolkien's part. Not at all.

Quote from: Benoist;422978To me, the notion that Numenoreans somehow equate to "White People" in our world and that Dunlendings (who dwelled by the White Mountains, by the way - is there a statement on modern skin colors there too?) and other Edain who did not share the fate of the Men of Westernesse equate to "Non-white People" in our world is right up there with the notion that Tolkien had some issues with his own sexuality by portraying the friendship of Frodo and Sam the way he did through the Lord of the Rings.

It's some stupid, backwards rewrite psychology, the same that inspires scholars today to look at ages past and think that their "modern enlightenment" gives them some sort of moral high ground on people long dead and burried. I don't think so, no. Not by a looong shot.

Statements about the different houses of the Edain on Middle-earth don't equate to some sort of ethnographic statement about the real world, nor does it hide some sort of conscious or unconscious racism on Tolkien's part. Not at all.

Dude, the Easterlings were swarthy and had dark hair and eyes. Aragorn, who is "most like" the Númenóreans of old has a "pale face" and "grey eyes". Do I have to draw you a diagram?

There is a reason that Neo-Nazis use Lord of the Rings as reading group material - even though Tolkien himself was quite outspokenly anti-Nazi.  His views on race really aren't that different from theirs.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422982There is a reason that Neo-Nazis use Lord of the Rings as reading group material - even though Tolkien himself was quite outspokenly anti-Nazi.  His views on race really aren't that different from theirs.

-Frank

There is a reason why JRR Tolkien told the Nazis to go fuck themselves when they wanted to use The Hobbit to somehow fuel their racial delusions. And you're falling for exactly the same fucked logic as they did: that somehow the work of Tolkien represents some sort of racial commentary about the real world, but since there's no such commentary, you basically inject your own imagery onto the text of the LOTR and come to your own retarded conclusions. Just like "Tolkien's gay, look at Frodo and Sam," and zillions of other bullshit interpretations of the LOTR.

So yeah. You really are coming up with imaginary correlations, here.

A few more comments: note that the Men of Westernesse, the Numenoreans, fell SPECTACULARLY to Evil themselves. Also note the existence of the Woses, or Druedains:

Quote from: Encyclopedia of ArdaA strange and ancient branch of the race of Men. A secretive people, living apart from other Men, the Drúedain had their own strange wisdom, and at times demonstrated uncanny powers. During the First Age, they played a part in the wars against Morgoth, and those of the Forest of Brethil formed a loose alliance with the Folk of Haleth. They were granted the name Drúedain in recognition of this (as the word Edain was reserved for those Men who aided in the struggle against the Dark Lord). Indeed, it seems that some were even granted a home in Númenor as a reward for their part in the Wars of Beleriand.

The Drúedain were a short-lived people, and by the end of the Third Age only a few remained in Middle-earth. Some were said to remain in the coastlands above Andrast, in the region known as Drúwaith Iaur (which took its name from the Drúedain who dwelt there). Another small group was to be found far to the east, in the Drúadan Forest in Anórien, at the eastern end of the White Mountains, and it was these that aided King Théoden in his ride to the relief of Minas Tirith. In reward, after the War of the Ring, Aragorn granted the Forest to the Drúedain who lived there.

These people are uncivilized, Wild Men ("the word 'wose' is a name from British folklore, referring to a hairy, troll-like being supposed to inhabit woods and forests. It represents Tolkien's translation of an actual word of the Rohirrim into ancient English; the Rohirrim themselves would not have called such a creature a 'wose', but a róg.") who certainly do not represent any "White People's" racial ideal, and they are amongst the greatest foes of Morgoth and Sauron.

So really, your whole notion that there is some sort of racial hierarchy in Tolkien's work is just taking a word like "black" and thinking "OMG BLACK people!" and taking the word pale to mean "OMG WHITE people!" It's just very short-sighted, and kind of mind-boggling, to be honest, from my POV.

The same way, equating orcs somehow to black people, or the word "race" to mean not a particular stock as the word was used in the classical sources that inspired the LOTR, but "race" as we mean it as a loaded word today, is blatantly wrong - wrong on the level of Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, which used the same rhetoric you used here. This just shows to me that you have no grasp whatsoever of what you are talking about, but as usual, you are coming to your own conclusion and then present it as "fact," as if it was so obvious as to make anyone doubt about my own education or intelligence.

Well, no, Frank. You really are wrong, here. Really.

Quote from: Benoist;422978To me, the notion that Numenoreans somehow equate to "White People" in our world and that Dunlendings (who dwelled by the White Mountains, by the way - is there a statement on modern skin colors there too?) and other Edain who did not share the fate of the Men of Westernesse equate to "Non-white People" in our world is right up there with the notion that Tolkien had some issues with his own sexuality by portraying the friendship of Frodo and Sam the way he did through the Lord of the Rings.

That's pretty crazy, too, since last I heard, it was commonly accepted that Faramir was Tolkien's "artist avatar" (if you want to be nice, "Mary Sue" if you don't).

Quote from: StormBringer;422892Holy shit, you are a retard.  Half-orcs come from evil humans breeding with evil orcs.  Ta-fucking-dah.  It's not that difficult of a concept.

Not to mention there is a huge difference between orcs imagined as "ugly humanoids with piggish faces" and orcs imagined as "loathsome, bestial monsters that barely resemble humans". The first case makes voluntary interbreeding more likely, and artwork depicting orcs is all over the scale from brutish humans who wouldn't look that out of place in a human city to green monsters from hell.



(Also, I searched for these images with the Google safety filter off. Don't do this. :eek:)

One last piece before I go to bed, to get a sense of what Tolkien thought about this, since Tommy makes an allusion to Faramir (and I do agree that Tolkien had a great admiration for Faramir, and would have liked to be him, in a way, as he confirmed in a letter, though I do not think he thought of him as a conscious Mary Sue):

In the Return of the King, Faramir says to Sam: "The enemy? His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from. And if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there ... in peace. War will make corpses of us all."

There you clearly see that he is not talking of men as Evil because of their birth, or because of the color of their skin (the Haradrim, for instance), but because of their choices of allegiances. If they were not victims of lies and threats on the parts of Sauron's envoys, then they chose to serve him. And if they were victims of lies and threats, then they might not have been evil at all, despite the color of their skin.

Make of it what you will.

Plus: in threads like this, never forget to link Starship Stormtroppers!

Quote from: Michael MoorcockStarship Stormtroopers
by
Micheal Moorcock

(From Michael Moorcock's "The Opium General" Harrap (1984), reprinted from Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review 1978)

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them -- a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants -- a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence -- a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of 'decadence' in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping -- not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue. I'd been confused in the past by listening to hardline Communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me that those who attended were reactionary (claiming to be 'apolitical' but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to 'have a point'). I always assumed these were for one reason or another the exceptions among sf enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes -- but once again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest, bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists, were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary, elitist or at very best a spoilsport who couldn't enjoy good sf for its own sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's request, to present arguments which I have presented more than once before.

Quote from: Cole;422932But, I always thought that a substantial portion of half-orcs result from humans who live among orcs, and they interbreed. It's not that "evil humans are turned on by the ugly," it's just that they cohabit. Though, presumably most of such humans would be evil, since most orcs are evil. Frank's got a point, upthread. Tolkien invented the half-orc, and they result from orc tribes and human tribes that mingle.

As I understand it, most anthropologists seem to think that red hair is derived from human and Neanderthal interbreeding, a result of living in close proximity and trading extensively.