A problem of evil.
There’s a story that Zhou Enlai, in one of his conversations with Henry Kissinger, cited Shakespeare. Kissinger praised Zhou for knowing “our literature,” to which the Chinese Communist replied, “Do you know ours?” Of course Kissinger did not. The point was that Zhou possessed the knowledge of Western culture which imparted to him an understanding of Kissinger’s actions and preferences; and Kissinger did not have a comparable advantage. The Communist was therefore at a qualitative advantage in negotiations, and in the relationship in general.
This story was told to me well over a decade back by an (American) aviator then moonlighting as an intellectual, who is now (I am told) an intellectual moonlighting as an aviator. I’ve never found a citation for it, and I consider it in the “too good to check” category, because what it communicates is true even if its particulars are not: literature is instruction, and stories are vehicles for tutelage. It’s why we tell them, from the earliest children’s morality tales to, well, Shakespeare. Fiction — this was another one of the aviator’s insights — is the mind rehearsing for that which may or may not come. I have written about this in a past Armas, so I’ll merely repeat my favorite example here:
There is the illustrative tale of Michel Cojot, who ruined his career and marriage obsessing over whether he, a French Jew, would have acted with honor in the Holocaust[, and consumed endless quantities of literature on the topic]. Cojot ended up one of the Entebbe hostages, and proved himself a hero. Upon the transit to Israel, one of his fellow passengers remarked that it seemed as if Cojot had prepared his whole life for this. Cojot, a man at last at peace, realized that he had.
Stories matter, and the great stories matter greatly, because they are the templates for entire cultures and therefore their fates.
This brings us to the orcs.
The orcs are J.R.R. Tolkien’s invention, originating mostly as “goblins” in The Hobbit and then emerging fully into themselves in The Lord of the Rings. They are the horde-infantry of evil, numerous and objects to be killed, the base tools of the Enemy. Like all the Enemy’s soldiers, they are perversions of things originally created good. The Wargs are fallen wolves. The balrogs are fallen Maiar, which is to say lesser angels in the Arda cosmology. The Nazgûl and the Easterlings are varieties of fallen Men. The orcs, then, are fallen or corrupted Elves — at least in Tolkien’s original telling. The point is that they, like all the servants of the Enemy — again in the Tolkien legendarium, originally Morgoth and then Sauron — illuminate a specifically Catholic perspective on creation, befitting the author’s own faith. Creation is good, and is corrupted, with death entering into it, only by the choice of the created themselves. Even Morgoth, originally Melkor, and Sauron the Maiar were once fair and beloved.
We have to understand the purpose of the characterization in this explicitly religious light. If this literature is tutelage, and it is, then the lesson here is one familiar to the well-catechized of most Christian denominations. The orcs — nearly undifferentiated, base, enslaved, antlike, and shackled to their appetites — are the consequence and endstate of corruption, of the choice for evil. This is true of all their companions in the Enemy’s armies. It is not that they are denied the opportunity for repentance, but the metaphor for their state is clear: they are in hell and the time when their nature would have allowed them that choice is gone. Tolkien does provide episodes where repentance is offered: to Boromir, who repents (of lust for the Ring) before death; and to Gríma Wormtongue, who is offered forgiveness (for serving the lesser Enemy in Saruman) and freely rejects it. It is also offered to Sméagol, who accepts it and then rejects it, thereby gaining and then losing his salvation, no doubt to the perplexity of a certain class of Protestants. Hell is not a sentence, but a choice, and this too is a Catholic (and Orthodox) lesson imparted by the tale.
These characterizations are tremendously important for the integrity and purpose of the work. Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision,” and the nature of the orcs — and all the freely fallen of Middle Earth — is tightly bound to this framework and concept. Without it, it is purposeless fantasy, and for all the beauty of its prose, not worth the read. Without it, crucially, it is not Tolkien, and any adaptation with that absence merely wears the skin of his work, much as Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis had Puzzle the Donkey wear the lion’s skin and pretend to be Aslan. The mere form of the thing was never salvific, nor even instructive: what is required is its nature and substance.
Literature is a conversation, not a mere transmission, and so the living have the opportunity to respond to the dead. At its best this is education and the elevation of the former in the latter’s light and tradition. At considerably less than its best we have the movement now, on more than one front, to rehabilitate the orcs and even issue apologetics for them. It seems an incredible thing to write, but also an inevitable thing: in an age with an accelerating normalization of all manner of real evils, from Hamas to brujería to polyamory, it should be no surprise that a fictional evil gets its own due-time reappraisal. The two major fronts for this are the venerable Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, which has nothing to do with Tolkien except that it lifted the concept of the orcs wholesale from his work; and the Amazon Prime series Rings of Power, now in its second season.
Dungeons & Dragons never developed a legendarium or cosmology (and certainly not a moral vision) as did Tolkien, but its orcs were instrumentally the same: the brute foot soldiers of mayhem and villainy, available whenever a dungeonmaster needed danger or combat for the story’s purpose. But all things must pass, and so did what was denounced as racial essentialism in the characterization of orcs as evil. Orcs in Dungeons & Dragons now are just like you and me, a lively and enriching race that brings diversity to the dungeonmaster’s campaign. Their depiction is accordingly overhauled. Whereas they originally looked like a Frank-Frazetta nightmare, now they look like the DeviantArt doodling of the median CalArts grad. In other words, like this:
That’s a real illustration from the real game, and it communicates what the orcs are now. Instead of inhabiting a singular role as bearers of evil, orcs are — take your pick — varied, body positive, family oriented, dismissive of gender roles, avid falconers, explorers, and for some reason dress as Spaniards of the first Bourbon century. What’s interesting about this is not really the game itself, which I have never played — my roleplaying days were forty years in the past, FASA Star Trek and West End Star Wars — but the extremely obvious progressive political motivations at hand. (Here’s a whole thread of D&D leftists discussing how great this is, and how much it advances equity and toleration.) The leftist stewards of modern D&D could have revised anything about the world of their game, and this is what they chose as their centerpiece: they chose to render evil as good. It seems like a giant tell, because it is.
Rings of Power is vastly more offensive as it is based upon, and licensed from, Tolkien’s own works, mostly but not entirely in The Silmarillion. The insult and artistic fraud here is direct, as the teaching and moral cosmology of the source is not merely cast aside, but deliberately inverted — this is where much of the Dreher readership will nod in recognition — and the orcs are cast as sympathetic victims of events. In the place of corruption as instruction for the reader (or viewer), Rings of Power accepts the excuse that “[t]he serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” Orc fathers care for orc wives and orc children, and orc parents hope to stay out of war. Viewer reaction among the rapidly diminishing cohort who hoped to see some of the great Tolkien tales onscreen has been nearly uniform:
There is a lot of this out there, and we have to understand what it is. Peter Jackson made many questionable choices in his film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, some of which I strenuously dislike, but he never deliberately sought to change the nature of the work. (He did achieve that end more than once, but it is clearly accidental at best and incidental at worst: there is no conscious inversion of meaning.) Rings of Power on the other hand clearly and explicitly means to overturn and reverse that nature. This is not new for the series, which in its first season embraced contrary narratives including Númenor as MAGA country, and (most offensively) romantic tension between Sauron and Galadriel. But it is an escalation of sorts, in directly attacking the “fundamentally religious and Catholic work” at its heart, in the denial of evil and its effects. Tolkien’s faith denies the possibility of just a little sin, just a little fallenness, and his work reflects that faith: it is why it was never possible to use the Ring for good, for example. Tolkien’s estate, on the other hand, is pleased to license his labors to Hollywood types who traffic in fallenness and have an interest in telling you there is no such thing. The orcs can never be wholly good, of course, because they’re ugly for one thing, and we know the role they come to play for another — but look, they’re relatable. They have children. Won’t you empathize.
It is a small-time artistic parallel to the spirit of the people who were protesting on behalf of Gaza on October 8th, 2023. And that’s the point. A moral inversion like this happens either because someone wants to make evil familiar and sympathetic, or because someone is incapable of thinking in any other way. In either case, the “religious and Catholic” nature of Tolkien’s work is inadmissible and cannot be accommodated — and in fact the “religious and Catholic” of any sort cannot be tolerated at all. It seems like a ridiculous fan’s complaint — they changed the orcs — but beneath it is a real malevolence from real powers. You have to see the pattern of which it is a part. Yes, they changed the orcs. They changed the orcs for the same reasons they change so much art and culture now. They changed the orcs for the same reason they installed a satanic idol in the Iowa State Capitol, for the same reason Pride parades are what they are, and for the same reasons the Paris Olympics opened with a blasphemous tableau.
They did it for reasons dangerous to you: because they want you to inhabit a moral universe in which corruption is neither whole nor serious, in which evil is not a choice, in which the Enemy’s servants command your sympathies, and — most perilous of all — in which repentance is never required.