> J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, created what he came to feel was a moral dilemma for himself with his supposedly evil Middle-earth peoples like Orcs [...] so killing them would be wrong without very good reason. Orcs serve as the principal forces of the enemy in The Lord of the Rings, where they are slaughtered in large numbers in the battles of [...]

Admitting that there's a very wide diversity of beliefs under the "Roman Catholic" banner - historic Roman Catholic armies have been eager participants in well-documented battles for the past 1,500 or so years. I'd assume that Tolkien would have had a wide variety of perfectly historic Roman Catholic arguments to chose from, to justify his fictional slaughter.

(If I recall, the orcs slaughtered in LoTR are pretty much all soldier or near-soldiers. Do orc women, children, or other non-combatants ever appear in the story?)

In many ways, that Wikipedia article feels like a Hays Code-era whitewashing of Roman Catholicism.

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the_af 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Your criticism of Catholicism is valid, but regardless: this dilemma of Tolkien is real, and well-documented (e.g. in his letters, etc).

He really did struggle with this, re: the origin of the Orcs, whether they had souls, whether it was ok to default to massacring them without second thought, etc. He never really resolved it.

Most Tolkien fan communities are aware of this dilemma, it's one of those well-known things, along with "did Balrogs have wings?", "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" and "why did Sauron need to put his power within a ring, anyway?".

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KineticLensman 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?"

If the allies were counterfactually sensible enough to fly the ring to Mordor, Sauron could have been counterfactually sensible enough to station an Orc/Troll Battlegroup at the Sammath Naur, with a Nazgul combat air patrol.

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bell-cot 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If trying to rationalize things - I'd say Sauron knows that giant eagles are a thing, and able to serve as mounts. So to prevent Western aerial reconnaissance and insertion/extraction of observers/spies/special forces in Mordor, he's got to have some sort of aerial observer / aerial denial systems going. Which systems would make a "fly the Ring to the fire" gambit too risky.

(Vs. voice-of-canon Gandalf makes it clear that anyone seeking to destroy his Preciousss is simply beyond Sauron's Vile McEvil worldview.)

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KineticLensman 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly.

In fact, when Gandalf catches up with Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli in 'The White Rider' chapter, he explicitly tells them that Sauron has committed a major strategic blunder: attacking too early, as soon as he thought the Ring was in play. If he'd kept some forces back to guard Mt Doom, he'd have been alright. Especially because, as later becomes clear, Mt Doom isn't a normal volcano where you could just lob the Ring in from your low-flying eagle. The Cracks of Doom are in a chamber deep inside the mountain.

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bell-cot an hour ago | parent [-]

Speaking of things needing rationalization: Smelting iron, which the dwarves are supposedly past masters of, requires furnaces which routinely exceed 1,500 °C. Vs. even exceptionally hot lavas are considerably colder. So why bother forming a Fellowship of the Ring, or embarking on a long & dangerous journey to Mt. Doom, when it'd be vastly quicker & easier to smelt local?

	▲	the_af an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Mount Doom's and dragon fire are magical/mythic in nature, while Dwarven forges aren't. Fundamentally, this is not the kind of mindset with which Tolkien wanted us to read LotR. It can be done for fun, but if done seriously, it'd be missing the point.

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the_af an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Note I wasn't really trying to go into the argument, just pointing out these are well-known and very debated topics in Tolkien fandom.

My own opinion is that debating this is missing the point. Tolkien was about the hero's journey, which necessitates the hard path to victory. It's not at all about flying a modern superweapon into Mount Doom; that's too literal a reading.

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bell-cot 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes - I am not saying that JRRT himself was anything less than saintly, or did not struggle with the issue.

My issue is with the Wikipedia article's heavy identification of JRRT's personal dilemma with the Roman Church and its doctrines. Historically, for that Church - one could just assume that the orcs were Protestants, so slaughtering them was perfectly okay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Wars_of_Religion