In this scattershot series, we’ll be delving “too greedily and too deep,” prying gems out of the glorious rough that is the extended legendarium of Tolkien’s world. This includes drawing on The Lord of the Rings itself, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, and the History of Middle-earth (or HoMe) books.
Previously, on Tolkien’s Orcs…
I concluded in part 1, which covered the monstrous hoi polloi of Middle-earth as presented in
The Hobbit and in
The Lord of the Rings, that Orcs are driven to mayhem and frankly, the will to do anything substantive
by the power of Sauron. Which is to say, when there’s no Dark Lord in the neighborhood to give them some moxie, they become idle (relatively speaking) and their numbers stay down. But what about before all that? What happened before Sauron even became the head honcho of evil?