One of the "nice" things about pejorative racism is the fact that it allows us to "de-humanize" our foes, so we can escape the feeling of guilt that slaughtering them may excite even in our most brutal minds. Native Americans suffered this sort of "de-humanization" to the point that deliberate attempts to exterminate them all were quite acceptable to a significant portion of the U.S. public. Of course, the most well-publicized, recent example of this trick came with the racism of the Nazis. First the Jews were deliberately degraded to "vermin" status, stripped of their humanity and labeled as degenerative elements in our species -- a "race" whose removal would purify and uplift our species. Then they were slaughtered.
When JRRT uses Orcs in this fashion, as creatures so far twisted away from "human" standards as to be nothing more than "vermin," I think he unwittingly was playing into one of the forms of racism that, in our Real World history, has become the most atrocious -- Orcs, "dehumanized," are now available for use as "sword-fodder," candidates for utter extermination.
Here JRRT got trapped in his orthodox Christianity. He believed in One God acting as the Only Creator. So, JRRT was not able to allow Morgoth to create the Orcs as a fully separate class of totally evil, totally un-redeemable beings. If he had created the Orcs as a species completely separated from the "human/ Elf" he might have been able to get away with this. But Morgoth (in a Christianized existence) had to make his Orcs from matter already at hand, he could twist, corrupt -- but not really create anything new. So, the Orcs originally were Elves, and later some Men were likewise altered into Orc status through capture, forced-breeding, torture, fear, pain, coercion. Even JRRT realized this meant that Orcs, by absolute dictate of his Christian religious base, HAD to be redeemable, HAD to be viewed as something other than noxious vermin. But here, I think he stumbled, he simply could not bring himself to regard the Orcs as anything other than verminous -- besides, it would require considerable re-writing of his lengthy book to sort out this problem.
This "paradox" would plague JRRT later, after LotR was published and it drew a number of Christian thinkers who started analyzing the tale in depth. They spotted this conundrum quite early on and asked Tolkien for clarification. One way to get out of this situation would be to simply deny that Eru, God of the Middle-earth universe was the Judaeo-Islamic-Christian God -- but JRRT was unwilling to de-couple Middle-earth and our own Real World, unwilling to drop his Middle-earth "god" as God. So he was forced to admit that Orcs were "human" too, and even though he did not want to admit it, his Christian critics pointed out that this automatically made them ensouled beings created by the All Good, All Powerful, All knowing, All Merciful God of Abraham. Therefore, they deserved better treatment than mere extermination as absolute vermin.
Tolkien was forced to accept this truth, but he "waffled" here, admiting that Orcs MUST indeed be redeemable, but did they have souls? Was it still OK to exterminate them?
"They [Orcs] would at least 'be real physical realities in the physical world, however evil they might prove, even 'mocking' the Children of God. They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making -- necessary to their actual existence -- even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.) But whether they could have 'souls' or 'spirits' seems a different question..." (Letter #153, Sept. 1954, p 195)
So, JRRT admitted the "redeemability" of Orcs (grudgingly) but he was still trying to argue that they might be denied the possession of a "soul," and therefore, presumably, one could slaughter them and incur no guilt. But this would force him, at least in part to deny the Christianity he tried so hard to put into LotR.
"With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin." (Letter # 269, May, 1965, p. 355)
WHAT?! Tolkien now says that the book does not need to follow the principles of Christianity? But how then can it be a "Christian" book? Well, JRRT tells us elsewhere, it is STILL consonant with Christianity in some points, but maybe, where it suits his purposes, it is NOT so Christian after all?
Tolkien concluded this passage of Letter #269, with a very "lawyer-sly" and convoluted argument in which he compared his Orcs to the Real World "dehumanized" monsters (did he have Hitler and his henchmen in mind here?). But how does this make them souless? Tolkien's argument holds no water in the Christian faith, because even our worst "monsters" are still considered Children of God, with souls and a chance at redemption. So, if the doxology of Christianity is to be operant in Middle-earth, then Orcs MUST have souls, MUST have the grace of potential redeemabilty. Only by denying the full Christian connection with Middle-earth, can JRRT get around this impasse. He cannot tell us, though he actually tries to do this in Letter #269, that Christianity will work in ME only for some items, but not all. If Orcs are to be souless and irredeemable, as I think JRRT originally intended them, then the book is no longer consonant with Christian principles.
There was, perhaps, some room for a "compromise" even here. By accident or design, JRRT, when he depicted his Orcs interacting with one another, gave them a rudimentary system of ethics and morality. Perhaps JRRT could have added a few paragraphs to LotR to enhance this, as I think such episodes hint at a less than verminous, "absolute evil" nature for the Orcs. As we read through LotR we might want to mark such passages and consider: do the Orcs have any "redeeming" characteristics; and just what would we accept as evidence of "redeemability" anyway? Do they ever act for the good of the group rather than the self? Do they have laws, rules, principles of "morality" that they hold up as goals for "proper" Orc behaviour, even if they rarely meet their own standards? Are there heroes among the Orcs? Maybe, JRRT's Orcs are more "human" than he himself was able to realize?
Poor JRRT, he wrote his book with a "racist" "dehumanizing" formula at hand, at least where the Orcs were concerned, and yet he wrote it to be compatible with Christian ethics and doxology -- he only realized after 1956 that the two schemes might be incompatible. Sigh, no matter how much he wanted it, he could not have it both ways -- dehumanized, souless, unredeeemable Orcs could not exist in a Christianized book, one or the other would have to go. Unfortunately, JRRT "went" before he could correct this inconsistency.
