#short 1 minute explanation of how Orcs multiply so quickly, and whether or not there are Orc women. Follow our podcast "Gossip Gollum" on Apple Music, Spotify, or whatever you get your podcasts.
In fact they are so alike in voice and appearance that many people think there are no orc women and the orcs are manufactured in alchemical pits in the ground which is of course completely preposterous.
Dad Ork: When a mummy ork and a baby work have a special hug.... Ork Son:They make a baby ork Dad Ork: A baby ork? If we only produced one little runt like you when we hugged we'd be hugged as a race son.
You can find in Tolkien's writings that orks were created from Pukel Men men thereby explaining Pukel Men's Hatred their Deep-seated Hatred of orks!!! 🤠👍
My headcanon was that female orcs lived in the fortresses and caverns the orcs live in, working in manufacturing, food production and home defence and the male orcs went out to fight, the orcs who secured kills and came back alive had their pick of females to breed with, after a short gestation period the orc females would birth more of a litter than a single orc who'd live in the fortress, the weakest would be killed by their fellow young orcs and the strongest would reach adulthood and either join the armies and raiding parties or join the manufacturing base.
I doubt that as infants or little toddlers, they'd go around knifing each other; perhaps the weakest die out of neglect, or their war-chief tell them to "put it out for the wolves and wargs to eat". As they grew into adolescence, though, I don't see why some particularly cunning orc-children might not take up their dad's blade and put it in the back of their enemy.
Just remember the Spartans and you‘ll get the picture. Ancient Greeks were pretty shitty towards each other and other folks throughout their entire existence.
Tolkien's orcs have no standards of beauty, in fact, whenever they see something beautiful, they want to destroy or desecrate it. And as they hate themselves as well as every other orc, the concept of love or affection is similarly alien to them. If anything, they would mate out of pure malice, out of desire to inflict pain.
Our real life orcs, africans, also find their own women the least attractive and whites the most, as does every other race, so no, they probably have similar beauty standards
@@marthvader14 plus (aside from the flagrant racism) that ain’t even accurate. If I remember correctly my Tolkien’s admission, the Orcs were more styled after Mongolic people’s, not Africans.
@@marthvader14 also you’re talking of Africans as though they’re this monolithic block. Which on a continent the size Africa…. Well it betrays your ignorance.
I imagined Orcs had an exceptionally fast pregnancy and maturation cycle in order for them to be so plentiful at all times. Similar to many animals. It wouldn't make sense to send these breeding Orcs into battle, being the limiting factor in propagation. Or they could have litters. Similar to the Skaven (rat men) of Warhammer fantasy. This would also match the corruption and mockery that Melkor aimed for. The latter makes more sense
How about both? It seems that Saruman could just whip up and army of hundreds of thousands of Orcs in a few hundred years, so it seems to be quite possible
I read somewhere that there are areas to the east of Mordor which are not quite as barren but are occupied by orcs, and that is where their actual cities and settlements (and families) reside.
The areas east of mordor are settled by the Easterlings. A race of men. Orcs inhabit many places of Middle Earth a town or village typically wouldn't be their first choice
@@tid06 yep, Also, the orcs live short life, with almost as great life force as the elves : which mean it as to become something... Like growing adult fast, and easily have many children's (opposed to the elves who struggle to have babies) You take some, you lose other. It's balance. And Morogt wanted a big army, fast.
I always thought Orcs were made out of cooked Mud like a cookie ..heated by fire and cooled with water and added some dark magic .thus they're given life .and the reason they can multiply fast bcoz of that way .like we've seen Saruman witnessed pulling out from the mud ..his first UrukHai race. 🤔😅
Funny u say that because that’s similar to an idea that Tolkien was playing with, that Orcs might’ve made out of clay/mud/dirt and animated by Melkor. Because Tolkien was never quite satisfied with his ideas on orc origins and never settled on one definitive version of their origin story.
@@MerkhVisionI like the idea that it’s a combination of both. In Shadow of Mordor/War some orcs would mention getting sent to the vats to be brought back to life (if with your memories intact or a clean slate is up for debate even to them), so perhaps the vats could be used to keep a steady source of meat shields (live, fight, die, repeat) but to improve the orcs themselves, some “family planning” might be needed.
@@MerkhVision Yeah but he went back on that since only Eru could grant life to things. The same reason Aules dwarves were not alive until Eru granted them life.
@@tid06did he ever consider going further than that and making orcs fancy golems of sorts? Ogres might be twisted ents but they're basically moving rocks that stop moving in the sun. And dragons strike me as kind of made from inanimate stuff in regards to their origins.
I actually wouldn't doubt if that's a factor here but they are corrupted and twisted elves in the first place. They were basically turned ugly in the first place then the population likely had to start inbreeding at some point, so yes Pretty fugly beings lol
Considering they are breed to be war meat - likely not many are even part of the breeding program. I wouldn't even be suprised, that if we go with the corrupted elves lore (Tolkien was rethinking it many times, ultimately wanting to change it) - Sauron is straight up keeping the original Melkor victims and makes them and their first generation children constantly reproduce. Elves are immortal after all. No need to change what's not broken.
So he forced marriage a Human mating with an orc. Same thing, what we do when we created Pitbull puppy that forcing A terrier breed with a bulldog. And trained them to fight and made them agresif dogbreed breed. Yes, Pure Evil.
@@7Elvenpath nah man. You got them all wrong. Pitbulls are good boys. Some of the best people I know are pittbulls. And I don't think Saruman staged elaborate wedding ceremonies for them...
Personally, I like the implication that they're *right there with the rest of the orcs* , they're just not sexually dimorphic enough to even be distinguishable. My head canon is that, as a magically engineered warrior race, they don't even have gender the way the others do since that just gets in the way of their primary purpose of fighting wars. 50% or so of the species just have different "bits" than the other 50% and they have extremely short gestation periods, birth litters of very independent young, and grow fast. I mean, if I were engineering what are basically organic combat droids I'd go as far as making them hermaphroditic and capable of parthenogenesis to maximize replacement potential.
Orcs come from orcus (latin). they are demons. They were created by taking the creation of the good gods and twisting and corrupting the true creation of the good gods, because Melkor wont create stuff, only corrupt, like Rings of Power. Orcs exist to destroy by their creation/breeding and live the natural order around them. (s. the transformation of Isengard by the production of an ork army) They are an industrial creation to destroy nature around them. As a twisted unnatural creation by pure evil to destroy nature....they dont have women....they are not male....they dont work in any natural way of a normal natural race like humans, elves, dwarfs, even ents.
@@jgt2598 My head Canon is they are Hermaphrodites... which I'm sorry but makes them even more creepy and twisted to me... Also they probably have every STI going. It's like having an Army of roided up Frank-N-Furters chasing after you.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the reason they used women is that if you're going to use heavy prosthetics, it's best to start off with a smaller head, so the end result doesn't look too big. That would allow them to create the ordinary orcs whose heads are approximately human sized, compared to the Uruk Hai who are obviously played by men, and their heads look big due to the size of the prosthetics on top of a man's head.
I imagine it like they breed together and the women don't produce babies, but birth half formed fetuses (kinda like kangaroos) who then crawl into the mud and grow there using the nutrition from the soil. And this is why we have that scene where the adult uruk hai is uncovered from the mud. That way we don't need to think about innocent baby uruk hai roaming about. And because they're birthing an entire litter of these and the gestation period is short, they multiply very quickly.
That's actually an interesting idea. Dropping the half-formed fetuses into nutrient-rich mud where they gestate and grow rapidly into physical maturity. Completely gross, but a cool concept.
With the elves, it's marriage first. Tolkien's elves had elvish (idealized Catholic-like) mindsets, thinking of them as just like humans isn't true to Tolkien. These are not DnD's chaotic good genderfluid elves with open relationships. Nor are they the Witcher's elves who think themselves so much better than humans despite partaking in the same depravity (looting, burning, killing, r*ping).
I always just figured orcs reproduced like Minecraft villagers. Two orcs come together with enough food in their bellies, and a little monster goes scurrying into the darkness.
I always thought the original story was written for children, so it can be just discarded if you are actually trying to create a fully functional LOTR world
It’s likely very much akin to the beastmen in Warhammer fantasy. They are originally “created” from a specific situation/corruption of another living species, but then became a “natural” species so to speak. Now they repopulate in varying ways, and some ways are more obvious than others. We also need to remember that Sauron and Saruman were breeding orcs during a time when elves were not as abundant, and also likely a lot harder to capture/obtain(due to their lack of presence at that time). So we know that Saruman and Sauron were breeding orcs, but in a more “scientific”/“natural” way. So you could then infer that morgoth likely bred them in a similar way, but it’s more likely that he had to create them first by corrupting the elves with dark magic. Morgoth is a lot more powerful a being than Sauron or Saruman, and it’s very much within his capabilities to have powerful enough magic to create a completely new race from corrupting elves. I personally think it’s likely that they originally were created by twisting elves with magic, but that it was no longer necessary once they were “manifested” into the world. They essentially became a new part of the ecosystem, adapted, multiplied, evolved, etc. Now they repopulate/multiply in natural ways, and also can be bred through more “scientific” means(akin to like how humans mass breed livestock).
A lot of extras in the Movies were actually women made to look like men. In Specific there weren't a lot of available male horseback-riders available in New-Zealand to act as the Rohan cavalry, so most of them were female riders with fake beards.
@@kathev9050I hate that trope so much.. Producing through r*pe alone is just so inefficient and unlikely to succeed. I've always preferred female monsters (who look just as monstrous as the males) as being part of the equation. It makes much more sense and it's so much less cruel and disgusting. I also like how Warhammer handles most their monstrous races. Lizardmen have spawning pools, orcs and goblins are fungi (spores), skaven have females (typically turned into broodmothers through science/magic), and beastmen have females but also can reproduce through r*pe including with livestock (gross but I really like that, makes sense in a world of chaos shenanigans).
Then there’s the uruk hai. Who are tall, built, smart and don’t fear the sun. As well as the Olog-hai which were even more fearsome than the Uruk-hai because they’re basically the troll equivalent of Uruk-hai
I think even Tolkien himself said that, due to orcs reproducing sexually, it just stands to reason and logic that femalenorcs exist, there just weren't any named in the books.
They hired women to play male orcs in the movies, because with their smaller faces they have more room to build upon with prosthetics. They were indeed playing male orcs.
Tolkien wrote that Orcs, like all other mammals, are sexually dimorphic, but that because he only wrote of Orcs going to war and never Orcs at home, we never met any Orc women, because Orcs don’t send their women to war.
Next question: What did all these Orcs eat? They weren't growing crops in the dungeons of Utumno. My guess is, like Elves, they didn't have to eat a whole lot.
They didn’t have tv, video games, smartphones, computers, or the internet. What else are they going to do after a long day of rampaging, murdering, or torturing everyone else?
I tend to support the idea that the Orcs were tortured, and mutilated from Elves, to become what they now are, and that it's mostly Morgoth's fault, but one thing I don't understand is how he changed them spiritually so much? I don't believe that Orcs are immortal, and only die via violence, even though that would probably be what kills then either way, but Elves ARE ageless, so what happened? How did Morgoth rip their immortality from them? Why don't their souls still travel to the Halls of Mandos? Morgoth didnt create their souls; he couldn't, so why are they so different? Did he strip their agelessness from them, just to tack it onto the dragons he was forging?
It's never stated openly, but if you notice when Shagrat & Gorbag are talking after Frodo's capture, they seem to be reminiscing about the War of the Last Alliance. 3000 yrs+, & both are still in prime fighting shape, so the implication is that they remain immortal. Also explains their numbers, since without a limited reproductive window like humans, they can be steadily pumping out new recruits for centuries at a time.
Tolkien adresse this in the nature of middle earth. He says that when melkor tortured the elves, their fea, spirits, left their bodies and fled to the halls of Mandos. However, their bodies remained alive and resulted in what we now call orcs
@@michaelcollier3893 Tolkien said that the orcs are not immortal, and if not killed by violence or illness will age and die. He also said that they have shorter life spans than humans.
@@argaveus101 I've never heard that. If it comes from Tolkien's later writings, remember that Christopher Tolkien said much of those were philosophical musings (basically Tolkien asking himself 'what if') and they directly contradicted his earlier work. It also makes no sense within the story. See above post about them being soulless. That would make them essentially zombies. Yet they reproduced naturally, had emotions, ambitions, creativity, needed food, rest & medicine for injuries. They also could not have been so short-lived. Bolg was the son of Azog, killed at Moria. Bolg was killed at Erebor 142 years later, & was still fit to fight. That puts them on par with dwarves at minimum, but there are other points aside from my earlier example where orcs seem to be referencing long expanses of time.
Here I was thinking they come from spores when another dies in battle or when they are in a "WAARG!" state, they passive spew out spores. Oh wait, that's warhammer 40k.
There were no female orcs in the source material. It's literally written in the books. It's cool that they had actresses playing as orcs, but it doesn't change the fact that there were no female orcs in the canonised Tolkein universe. This is just another example of Amazon's Rings of Power breaking established Canon.
“For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar…” -The Silmarillion, Chapter: Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor
I just want to point out that the theory of Melkor creating the Orcs out of corrupted Elves isn't 100% canon. Treebeard for example said that Orcs were created in the mockery of the Elves. While it is possible that corrupted Elves helped Melkor create the Orcs, from what I read Tolkien died before he really figured out the Orcs origins.
@@bloodoftheunicorns2621 No, but Tolkien never explicitly confirmed it either, wich is why I prefer thinking of the Orcs as: A) a generic term for most beings corrupted by Melkor, or B) a "natural" race that ended up corrupted by the first dark lord.
You would think considering the origin of orcs, they would be more powerful and maybe use some archaic type magic. Tolkien may have underutilized the orcs. Their society would have been fascinating if he had more grey areas in his work. With Tolkien was usually “good or evil” and little in between.
Tolkien wrote his orcs as antithesis of everything good or respectable. Even giving them skills with machinery was an act of evil in his eyes, probably because of WWI trauma.
Goblins from Goblin Slayer: We take females from most races and make them into playthings. Orcs from LOTR: We kidnap Elves and corrupt them until they are like us.
peter jackson took many creative liberties creating the movies. that method was used as an allegory in the writtings that jackson used in a literal way so to not imply orc sex.
@@R2D2xC26 tolkien used the phrase "born in mud and slime" in a literary way to call the orcs "dirty beings", similar of lets say you would call someone "pig" or "scum", but jackson did it in a literal way. tolkien said orcs are elves so they reproduce the same way, and urukai are a combination of orc and human, so orcs basically r*pe human women to create hybrids.
@@josericardomartinezramirez4113 Uruk hai are not bred with human, they’re just a better breed. Orcs bred with humans already exist separately as Orc-men/half orcs, never seen in the movies tho
Uruk-Hai aren't necessarily made in Vats, that's a movie invention. And the Shadow games are not a source as they openly contradict the history established in the books making them non canon (like Minas Ithil being taken in a Siege, or there being an Ent-Wife East of Mordor etc)
Tolkien flip flopped. I like to think that saruman didn't solve the sunlight problem, and just dipped his orcs in some mud to shield them from the sun.
