Orcs: Tolkien Couldn't Decide If They Had Souls | Tolkien Lore Explained

SECTION: The Sentence He Couldn't Finish

In September of 1954, a Catholic bookseller named Peter Hastings sat down and wrote Tolkien a long, prickly letter. He loved The Lord of the Rings. He'd read it closely enough to worry about it. And what worried him was the theology - could evil, in this invented world, actually make things? Could a dark power breed a whole living people of its own?

Tolkien wrote back. The reply runs for pages, and it's one of the most revealing things he ever put on paper, because we get a glimpse of what his thinking looks like in real time. He gets to the Orcs. He's describing them as creatures born from sin, naturally bad - and then something happens. He starts to write another word. And he stops.

Here's the line. Here's where he stopped. "I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far."

That's a writer catching his own hand. He needs a word that closes the door on these creatures, that makes them safe to hate and safe to kill by the thousand. The word is right there. And he can't write it down, because if he does, he's writing off an entire rational race as beyond saving, and his faith won't let him say that about anyone.

That flinch is this whole episode. It's a collision, not a plot hole or some lore gap he forgot to fill. A war story wants a disposable enemy - orcs you can cut down without a flicker of guilt, the way you cheer when the tide of Mordor breaks at the Black Gate. But the man writing that war story was a daily-Mass Catholic who believed, all the way down, that no living soul is ever past redemption. Those two things can't both be true at once. And for something like forty years - from the first Orcs he scribbled during the First World War to the private essays of his old age - he couldn't make them fit.

He never solved it. That unsolved sentence is the interesting thing we'll cover here.

SECTION: What Morgoth Cannot Do

The word "irredeemable" was a trap for one reason: the rule that governs everything in Tolkien's universe. Only Eru - the One, God - can give real life. Nobody else. Not the greatest of the angelic Valar, not clever Aulë who shaped the Dwarves out of stone and had to have them brought to life by a higher hand. Making a thing that lives, a thing with a self inside it, is God's act alone.

Which means Morgoth - the first Dark Lord, the fallen Vala who becomes the root of all evil in Arda - can't do it. At his core, he's sterile. The published Silmarillion says it flatly. "Naught that had life of its own, nor the semblance of life, could ever Melkor make since his rebellion." He can burn, he can twist, he can dominate and defile and mock. He cannot originate. Everything he "creates" is stolen material, ruined and turned to a new use.

Tolkien spelled this consequence out in a 1954 letter to Naomi Mitchison. The Orcs, he wrote, must be corruptions of something - because the powers they serve could not and would not make living things of their own. Whatever an Orc is, it started as something else that Morgoth got hold of and wrecked.

And with that, the trap closes. In Tolkien's world, evil is never original. It's always parasitic - a good thing bent out of true. He put it as plainly as he ever put anything, in the words he gives Elrond at the Council of Elrond: "Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so." That rule catches the Orcs too. If even Sauron - the second Dark Lord, the maker of the One Ring - started out good and fell, then a whole species that was evil from the moment it existed isn't just unlikely. It's forbidden by the rules of the world. Nobody in Arda is born damned, because being born belongs to God, and God doesn't author evil.

This is old and serious theology under the fantasy - the idea that evil isn't really a thing in its own right, but a hole in a good thing. A wound. An absence. A shadow needs a light to be the absence of. So pure evil, evil with nothing good underneath it, can't stand on its own two feet. It's always borrowed, always second-hand, always a spoiling of something that was fine to begin with.

Which means the theology hands Tolkien a monster that, by definition, used to be something innocent. That's a beautiful idea. It's also a disaster for a war story.

SECTION: The Orcs Who Talk Like Us

Because there's another problem, and this one isn't buried in a letter. It's right there in the novel millions of people read.

When you actually listen to Orcs talk in The Lord of the Rings, they sound like people rather than animals or machines. Tired, mean, frightened people - but people.

Go up to Cirith Ungol, where Sam is hiding in the dark and two Orc-captains, Shagrat and Gorbag, are talking over the body they think is a dead spy. They gripe about their bosses. They're sick of the war. Gorbag has a little daydream he keeps returning to - slipping off somewhere quiet with a few trusty lads, somewhere with good loot handy and no big bosses breathing down his neck. He wants out. He wants a life. And when they talk about a comrade who got left behind in a tight spot, Gorbag calls it what it is - a dirty trick. A regular elvish trick, he says.

And there's a lot in that word. Gorbag has a name for treachery, for the low, dishonorable thing you don't do to your own. His name for it is "elvish." His moral compass points backwards - but it's a working compass. He knows loyalty from betrayal, and he minds the difference.

It happens again later, out on the plains of Mordor, where Frodo and Sam watch two Orcs fall to quarreling - a small tracker and a big soldier. The tracker is done with all of it. He suspects his own side of atrocities, he's frightened, he wants to go home, and the argument ends with him putting an arrow in the soldier and bolting. That's a conscript who's had enough - fear, suspicion, self-preservation, disgust at his own army. The full inner emotions of a person.

And this runs a lot deeper than two orcs complaining. Orcs have a pecking order, a whole social ladder. The big Uruks lord it over the smaller breeds, whom they call snaga - their own word for "slave." A creature that keeps slaves has a society, and a society runs on rank and rules and grievance.

Scholars have written about the strangest part of all this. Orcs clearly have a moral code. They just don't live up to it. They know that abandoning a comrade is a low, dirty trick - they say so, in as many words - and then they turn around and do it. That's the behavior of a fallen thing - something that knows better and picks worse. Which happens to be the exact Catholic definition of a sinner. And sinners are precisely the ones grace is written for.

Tolkien knew exactly what he'd written. In that same 1954 letter he called the Orcs rational, incarnate creatures - and then, in the same letter, said they were corrupted no more than plenty of Men you could meet today. He's comparing his monsters to fallen human beings. And again, mercy is for our fallen human beings.

He'd built creatures with a conscience. And a creature with a conscience can't be killed without a reckoning.

SECTION: Five Escape Attempts

So Tolkien spent decades trying to build a version of the Orc that let him off the hook. He tried, again and again. There are roughly five attempts, and the thing you want to notice is that every single one fixes one problem by creating another.

Attempt one - the famous one. Orcs are corrupted Elves. Melkor caught some of the earliest Elves, tortured and warped them over long ages, and bred a ruined mockery of the Firstborn. This is theologically tidy. Elves are real, God-given beings, so Morgoth only marred them - he didn't make them. Clean. But it opens a horrible door. Elves have immortal spirits. If Orcs are ruined Elves, do Orc spirits live forever too? When an Orc dies, does its soul go to the Halls of Mandos with the rest of the Elvish dead? Nobody wants to picture that. And it drags in a timeline problem, because Orcs seem to be marching to war before the story leaves room for it.

Attempt two moves the source from Elves to Men - Orcs debased after Mankind woke, their weaker spirits easier to dominate and break. This fixes the timing a little. It fixes nothing else - a ruined Man is still fully a person, still reasoning, still exactly the thing you can't damn wholesale.

Attempt three - drop the soul entirely. Maybe Orcs are just clever beasts, animals given a roughly human shape and taught to ape speech the way a parrot does, with no real mind behind the eyes. That would make them killable. It would also mean nobody told Shagrat and Gorbag, who scheme and moralize and dream of early retirement without anyone supervising them. Parrots don't resent their bosses.

Attempt four - darker still. Maybe Orcs are puppets. Automata, animated by Morgoth's own will poured out into them, his limbs at a distance, so that if you pulled the controlling will away they'd go slack and stupid. This one keeps the theology perfectly clean - no minds of their own means nobody to save. It just erases every Orc scene in the book, where they plot and desert and murder each other with nobody pulling any strings.

Attempt five is the white flag. Maybe it's a mixture - some beasts, some fallen Men, maybe a little ruined Elvish stock early on, perhaps even a few lesser spirits wearing Orc-shapes, all interbred into one messy race. Which is another way of admitting there's no clean answer.

Underneath all five is the same vise. The only origins that make an Orc guilt-free to kill are the ones that empty it out - the beast, the puppet. And those are the versions the novel refuses, because the novel already showed you an Orc who wants to quit his job and live somewhere quiet. Give an Orc a soul, and you can't slaughter it without a moral cost. Take that self away, and it stops being the creature you actually read. There's no third door.

SECTION: The Canon That He Crossed Out

This is where I think a lot of people misunderstand things. So it's worth spending a little time on it.

Ask a hundred fans where Orcs come from and most will tell you, confidently, corrupted Elves. It's the version in The Silmarillion. It's the one the movies hint at. It feels like bedrock canon.

It probably isn't. And the story of how it got printed is interesting.

The Silmarillion that sits on my shelf was published in 1977 - four years after Tolkien died. He never finished it. What you're reading is a book his son Christopher assembled out of decades of overlapping, contradictory drafts, choosing, cutting, and stitching to make one readable whole. It's a magnificent act of devotion. It's also, in places, Christopher's best guess at what his father might have settled on - and for the Orcs, he had to guess, because his father hadn't settled anything.

Even in the published text, the giveaway is right there in the wording. Rather than "this is how Orcs were made," it says "so say the wise" - an in-world rumor, a thing the loremasters believe, held carefully at arm's length. Tolkien almost never states the Orc origin as flat fact, because by the end he didn't believe it as flat fact.

We know that because of a second set of books. In 1993, Christopher published Morgoth's Ring, a volume of his father's late private papers, and in it a cluster of essays scholars call "Myths Transformed" - Tolkien, around 1959, tearing his own account apart. It's here he floats the Men, the beasts, the puppets. And it's here he leaves a note to himself that lands like a boom of thunder once you know the published book. In effect: Orcs are not Elvish. Change it.

Held up against the 1977 Silmarillion, that private note means the single most famous "fact" about Orcs - the corrupted-Elves origin - is a version the author had privately crossed out. Christopher printed it anyway, but what else could he do? He had a book to finish and a father who'd left the central question open. Someone had to choose. He chose, flagged his unease as best he could with that "so say the wise," and then, sixteen years later, published the papers that showed the world how unsettled it all really was.

So when you say "canon," be careful which canon you mean. The novel is one thing. The Letters are Tolkien reasoning out loud, and often changing his mind. The Silmarillion is an editor's construction. And the late essays are a man dismantling his own official story. On the Orcs, those four voices don't agree. They were never going to.

SECTION: The Mercy He Couldn't Withhold

Tolkien did manage to write, beautifully, about a creature who seemed past saving. Just not an Orc.

His name was Gollum.

By every reasonable measure, the whole story treats Gollum as finished - a murderer, a liar, five hundred years hollowed out by the Ring, so far gone that nobody who meets him expects anything but the worst. Frodo, early on, says plainly that Gollum deserves death. And Gandalf gives him the answer that turns out to be the moral backing of the entire book. Many that live deserve death, he says, and some that die deserve life - can you give it back to them? Then don't be so quick to deal out death in judgement, because even the very wise cannot see all ends.

And then the payoff, the line that quietly runs the whole plot. The pity of Bilbo, Gandalf says, may rule the fate of many.

He's right. Which is pretty amazing. Bilbo's mercy, then Frodo's mercy, keeps Gollum alive all the way to the Crack of Doom - where Frodo finally fails, claims the Ring, and it's Gollum, still breathing only because he was pitied, who bites it from his hand and falls with it into the fire. The quest succeeds because a creature everyone had written off was not written off. Mercy here is the mechanism that saves the world.

So the idea is stated plainly. Tolkien built an entire novel around it - extend pity even to the thing that looks beyond redemption, because you cannot see where its road ends, and neither can God's judgement be safely guessed by you. Gollum gets that grace. And it works.

Which is what makes the Orcs ache. The exact logic that saves Gollum - don't damn what you can't fully see, leave the door cracked for the ruined thing - is the logic Tolkien couldn't quite carry up to a whole race of Orcs, because a war needs its cannon fodder and pity doesn't win battles. He wrote the rule. He watched it save Middle-earth. And then he stood in front of the Orcs holding that same rule, and his nerve to apply it ran out. Call that hypocrisy if you want, but it reads more like a man feeling the weight of his own belief and not knowing how to bear it.

SECTION: Why the Sentence Stays Unfinished

So why couldn't he fix it? He fixed everything else. He built languages that actually work, genealogies going back ten thousand years, a cosmology with its own book of Genesis. The man did not leave loose ends for lack of effort.

He couldn't fix this one because it isn't the kind of problem that has a fix. It's a collision between two things he refused to give up. He wouldn't surrender the war story - the clean, thrilling clash of good and evil where you can root for the fall of Mordor without a lawyer's footnote. And he wouldn't surrender the belief that reason and an inner life mean a creature can always be saved, no exceptions, because the moment you allow one exception you've built the machine that damns people by category.

That second thing wasn't abstract for him. Tolkien wrote most of this in the years around the Second World War, and he'd fought in the first one. He knew exactly what "a whole race you may kill without a second thought" produces once real people start believing it - he'd watched it happen. The idea disgusted him. So his hesitation over the word “irredeemable” was about more than abstract ideas. This was a man who'd seen, in his own lifetime, where the clean and convenient answer actually leads. To write off a race by category, even a made-up one, was to rehearse the worst lie of his age. He wouldn't do it.

You could feel that he carried this open wound for the rest of his life. In 1965 - eleven years after he stopped his pen on "irredeemable" - the poet W.H. Auden asked him straight out whether the idea of a wholly wicked race might actually be heretical, a genuine error against his own Church. And Tolkien, who could out-argue almost anyone on almost anything, basically shrugged. He said he didn't have the formal theology to know, and that he'd never felt bound to make his invented world line up perfectly with Christian doctrine. Which is a careful, honest way of admitting he might have written something his own faith would call a mistake - and that he still, after all those years, had no answer.

He died in 1973. The sentence was never finished. There's no final essay, no last word tucked in a drawer that settles the Orcs. The dilemma just stays open, exactly as open as he left it.

And maybe that's the most serious thing in the whole story. He had the disposable-monster word right there in his hand, the word that would have made his enemies clean and his conscience quiet. He put it down. He chose an unsolved problem over an easy lie. For a man who spent his life making things fit, leaving this one thing broken on purpose might be the most interesting sentence he never wrote.