Orcs in Tolkien's legendarium

He takes a bit of a backseat to start with, but he's always there kind of arching his eyebrows and twirling his moustache and looking like he's wanting to orchestrate a bit of a political kind of rise.

And then when Muriel goes off to Middle Earth to fight against Adar and the Orcs, she loses her sight in that massive volcanic explosion that we love to talk about.

And her father passes away when they're en route back to Numenor.

And so by the end of season two, we're in a completely different state again.

And I think we've said about like other species of Middle Earth having quite distinctive sounds.

Like you've got the Orcs and Damrod with Nampat and their war chants and then you've obviously got the very melodious elves and... then it feels right that Tom Bombadil has this more folk, more grounded sort of sound to his music.

I like the distinction between the different species of Middle Earth and how their songs tell their stories.

Good point.

Last episode, I talked a little bit about orcs and I talked about how it is incorrect to say that all orcs are evil because that's a silly thing to say about an entire race of people.

It is though Correct to say that all orcs are slaves in the service of something bigger and scarier than they are.

Orcs are, in a way, the most tragic figures in Middle Earth.

Because it doesn't matter if they are evil or if they believe in evil.

Orcs have to work in the service of evil because they lack free will.

The real evil of the ring is not who owns it, right? No matter who owns the ring, whether it's Boromir or Galadriel, they will take away the free will of everyone in Middle-earth.

They will turn everyone into orcs.

And we are not.

I like the Orcs and Trolls.

Going back to this notion of Morgoth's Ring we talked about earlier, right? If you haven't heard of Morgoth's Ring, if you don't know who I'm referring to, it's this idea how Sauron ported his very self into his ring and that implies power.

Morgoth's Ring is this notion that Tolkien kind of speaks of is that Morgoth poured his own evilness into creation itself and how this notion, correct me if I'm wrong guys, this notion of Morgoth's ring is like how he's poured his evilness into creation how you can't really eliminate evil properly until the end of time because of how he's poured it into it, right?

Instead, it was to weaken Rohan, so that when Saruman was ready to invade, the Rohirrim would be scattered, disorganised, and without clear leadership.

Diminishing Théoden's ability to think independently definitely helped with that, but Théoden had an equally capable son, Théodred, and nephew, Éomer, who could both step up and were both actively opposing Saruman's subtle preparations with the Dunlendings and Orcs.

So having Grima in place meant that he could sow dissension in the ruling family, taking more of the senior leadership out of the equation, ordering Eamon not to go hunting orcs, then ordering him arrested when he refused, for example.

Second, we need to remember that Saruman was still pretending to be one of the good guys until early in the main story.