The Sauron Strategies: One war to win them all, except...: Half-orc identity

» proudfoot - Half-orc identity

In response to message posted by desertblue:

Half-orcs were the creation of Saruman, to bulk out his army with fighters that could mix the best features of Orcs and Men. These best features being: Men's strength + height combination plus need for discipline & order, and Orcs' endurance, ferocity & obedience to superior force. He needed half-orcs because his Orcs were mostly the lesser breeds of the Misty Mountains who were not up to facing the Rohirrim's cavalry charges in daylight, and his Dunlending hill-men lacked the equipment and tenacity to face the armored Rohirrim one-on-one long enough to secure a victory.

Half-orcs were certainly not created in the way Saruman's uruk-hai are depicted in the FOTR movie. Peter Jackson was pressed to show the extent of Saruman's treachery, as was discovered and described after the fact in TTT. From a cinematic point of view it made more sense to show some mad science type of sorcery than take up time & cinematic pacing with a discourse on half-orc breeding.

Breeding was what happened. According to Tolkien, Orcs increased "after the manner of the Children of Iluvatar", which meant in reproduction they were compatible with Men and Elves, after a fashion. Saruman bred Dunlendings and Orcs together, using basic heredity to create his half-orc fighters and spies. This was done in imitation of Sauron's creation of the uruks, and a sign of his moral corruption. (See some of Michael's earlier articles on the possible connection between altered humans and uruks.) If you thought that hatching uruks from pods was bad, would you have liked to seen them being made the "old-fashioned way"? Goodbye to the PG-13 rating!

For the record, I thought the film's depiction of uruk-hai/uruks was pretty good. They were bigger, straighter, and tougher than the regular Orcs, just as fierce & ugly, and they were not put off by heroes wielding weapons of quality. Their seeming poor performance at Amon Hen had to be balanced against the overall quality of Aragorn, Boromir, Gimli, and Legolas as warriors. (Not to mention the absence, for cinematic plot purposes, of Northern Orcs and Mordor Orcs as sword fodder for the Fellowship.) I would not want to be part of a low-level D&D or MERP party and see Lurtz & company charging out of the trees! Right now we can only anticipate the further treatment of Saruman's uruk-hai in the TTT movie, especially since actors for Ugluk and Grishnakh were originally cast for the film, and Helm's Deep is a showpiece of the film. (Ugluk is a definite, portrayed by Nathaniel Lees, who has appeared on the Hercules/Xena shows before.)

-- posted by proudfoot