YouBet said:
Solo Tetherball Champ said:
Ulrich said:
One concept that I will admit to having a little trouble with is the convenient cannon fodder species. I don't know if it has a name, but it's either orcs, robots, Nazis, insects, or something else significantly different enough from what we recognize as a "good person" that it's ok to kill the them en masse with no pangs of guilt.
The orcs and Nazis are purely evil, the robots and insects lack a soul. So it's ok to kill them by the thousand to demonstrate the hero's prowess.
Do I enjoy a guiltless kill fest? Yeah. But the part of me that studies philosophy raises a little red flag.
Fun bit of trivia:
Later in life Tolkien really struggled with the fact he allowed an apparently innately evil race into his setting, particularly as he incorporated more of his catholic worldview into it.
He never really answered the question to his satisfaction, but the closest he got is settling on that orcs are a ruined form of men (rather than elves), warped and twisted by the original dark lord, which required a dramatic overhaul of a lot of the Silmarillion.
Why? Catholics don't believe in innate evil? They believe it's all learned?
Not Catholic so I'm ignorant here.
Pretty much: No one is innately evil. Someone may be flawed or tainted, but even then still has the capacity for good. Evil is something deliberately chosen.
So, in Tolkiens cosmology you have Eru Illuvatar, the One
God over everything. Think of him as the God of the Bible.
Without getting bogged down in the details (oh, are there
details....), Eru created the physical world to house the incarnates, The Children of Eru (Men and elves). Angelic beings of greater and lesser power entered into the physical world to
shape it so it would be habitable for elves and men. In early versions of his stories they read more like the Greek
gods, but in later versions can be better described as angels and archangels. The most powerful of these are the Valar, but the less powerful are called Maiar. The Valar are only invoked in the books like how Catholics may invoke a saint, but you see Maiar in Gandalf, Saruman, the Balrog, and Sauron in the LOTR narrative.
One of the Valar wanted the power to create life, and when he couldn't he increasingly threw a tantrum on an apocalyptic scale. What he couldn't destroy he would corrupt, warp, or taint. This guy was Melkor/Morgoth, the original Dark Lord. He also managed to corrupt or sway many of the Maiar to join him (Sauron, Balrogs, etc). Think of him as Satan.
Tolkien wrote many versions of this cosmology. In earlier versions, Morgoth just wanted to rule, and he created orcs and ballots out of slime and stone. In later versions, Tolkien decided that only Eru had the power to grant life, Balrogs are fallen spirts and Morgoth was much more nihilistic and destructive in his defiance of Eru, so perverting and warping elves (later on he decided orcs came from men) into orcs was one more way to "get back" at "daddy".
