Not posting this as a reblog because I don't want to screw with somebody else's notes, but the whole "theological implications of Tolkien's orcs" business has some interesting history behind it.
In brief, a big part of why the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe™ is so cagey about what orcs are and where they come from is that later in his life, Tolkien came to believe that orcs as he'd depicted them were problematic – albeit not because of, you know, all the grotesque racial caricature.
Rather, he'd come to the conclusion that the idea of an inherently evil sapient species – a species that's incapable of seeking salvation – was incompatible with Christian ethics. Basically, it's one of those "used the wrong formula and got the right answer" situations.
In his notes and letters, Tolkien played around with several potential solutions to this problem. (Though contrary to the assertions of certain self-proclaimed Tolkien scholars, there's no evidence that he ever seriously planned to re-write his previous works to incorporate these ideas.) In one proposal, orcs are incarnated demons, and "killing" them simply returns them to their naturally immaterial state; in another, orcs are a sort of fleshy automaton remotely operated by the will of Sauron, essentially anticipating the idea of drone warfare.
Of course, this is all just historical trivia; any criticism of The Lord of the Rings must be directed at the books that were actually published, not the books we imagine might have been published if Tolkien had spent a few more years thinking through the implications of what he was writing. However, the direction of his thoughts on the matter is striking for two reasons:
- Tolkien's orc conundrum is very nearly word for the word the problem that many contemporary fantasy authors are grappling with fifty years later. They want epic battles with morally clean heroes, and they're running up against exactly the same difficulty that Tolkien himself did – i.e., that describing a human-like species who are ontologically okay to kill is an impossible task.
- After all the work he put into solving this impossible problem, one of Tolkien's proposals was literally just "what if they're not really killing the orcs, they're just sending them to the Shadow Realm?"
