The Great Tolkien Reread: The Uruk-Hai

"Merry and Pippin Captured by Orcs" by Inger Edelfeldt

Neither Pippin nor Merry remembered much of the later part of the journey. Evil dreams and evil waking were blended into a long tunnel of misery, with hope growing ever fainter behind. They ran, and they ran, striving to keep up the pace set by the Orcs, licked every now and again with a cruel thong cunningly handled. If they halted or stumbled, they were seized and dragged for some distance.

At long last, The Two Towers delivers the story that it has been teasing, through found objects and the interpretation of clues in the landscape, for two chapters. Merry and Pippin, carried off by the orcs who slew Boromir, are on their way to Isengard to be interrogated and tortured. But the two groups that make up their captors—the titular Uruk-hai, loyal to Saruman, and the orcs loyal to Mordor—quickly come to blows, and the hobbits are able to take advantage of the situation and escape into Fangorn forest.

Like "The Departure of Boromir", this chapter is told in a tight third person on a character who until now has been viewed more remotely. But whereas Aragorn had been a key mover and shaker in the story even before we got a glimpse of his thoughts and feelings, Merry and Pippin (though really the chapter is told primarily from Pippin's point of view) have mostly functioned as The Other Two. Pippin even seems aware of this. When he first regains consciousness and realizes the hopelessness of his situation, he muses that his role in the quest so far has been "Just a nuisance: a passenger, a piece of luggage. And now I have been stolen and I am just a piece of luggage for the Orcs." Even hoping for rescue, he concludes, seems selfish given the importance of the mission that could end up distracting from.

With typical hobbit matter-of-factness, then, Pippin (and eventually also Merry) set about arranging their own rescue. They achieve this by acting as keen observers of their captors, which gives the readers their first close-up glimpse of what until now has been a faceless enemy. Through Pippin's eyes, we discover differences in personality and opinions among the orcs. The leader of the Isengard faction, Uglúk, is prideful and overbearing, constantly crowing about his soldiers' achievements—"We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We slew the great warrior. We took the prisoners". The Mordor captain, Grishnákh, is wily and insinuating, disdainful of both Saruman and his servants. Both of them see the hobbits as a prize of potential strategic value, and are eager to claim them for their side—or for themselves.

One of the criticisms that is often leveled at Tolkien is that in creating the orcs, he created a species who are congenitally, incurably evil, and thus inherently killable. What we find in "The Uruk-Hai" is more subtle and, perhaps for that reason, more disturbing. The orcs are cruel, yes—when they learn that the hobbits are to be delivered intact, some ask whether this is because "they give good sport". But they are also clever and strategic, ably managing their prisoners, their different factions, and their pursuers (until, of course, they are caught and killed). They have knowledge and craft—the potion they give the hobbits to enable them to run without growing tired, and the salve that instantly heals Merry's wound, are both just as effective as comparable elvish substances (perhaps more so), though their effect is unwholesome. The impression the chapter seems to be leading us to is less that the orcs are evil by nature, as that they are evil by culture.

In "The Uruk-Hai", that culture is a military one, but it is not the kind of militarism we've seen from warriors like Aragorn, Boromir, or Éomer. "Orders" is a repeatedly stated explanation for actions that the rank and file find misguided or baffling. Higher-ups are both too stupid to understand the reality of the situation on the ground, and liable to punish severely any failure to achieve their aims. Uglúk both boasts and complains that his warriors are taking on the bulk of the work of fighting and evading capture, while Grishnákh darkly promises that Mordor will not be pleased to hear about an orc troop flouting its authority. By the end of the chapter, Merry and Pippin have so thoroughly grasped this mentality and its vulnerabilities that they are able to expertly manipulate Grishnákh into removing them from the field of battle.

'you haven't got your prey home yet. And it doesn't seem to be going your way, whatever happens. If we come to Isengard, it won't be the great Grishnákh that benefits: Saruman will take all that he can find. If you want anything for yourself, now's the time to do a deal.'

There's an echo here, one assumes, of the sort of industrialized, mechanized warfare Tolkien experienced, taken to its very worst extremes. But there is also a deliberate contrast with Éomer and his warriors from the previous chapter. Éomer, too, has orders that he doesn't approve of, and underlings who question his decisions. Those decisions, however, are guided by core values—by, as Aragorn reminded him in "The Riders of Rohan", the necessity of every person to make their own moral judgment. He chooses to defy his orders because his sense of right and wrong tells him to do so, and his warriors respect that choice because they respect him.

This, then, is the distinction Tolkien draws between good and evil warrior cultures in his world. The good guys fight because it conforms to their values, because they have made a free and informed choice to follow orders from commanders they trust, and because they believe in the fight. The bad guys fight because they fear punishment or crave reward, without really understanding what the fight is about, and with no ability to influence decisions from on high. Even at the moment of their final confrontation, the narrative wants us to see beauty, freedom, and unity in the riders of Rohan, all the qualities that are missing in the orcs.

Merry and Pippin heard, clear in the cold air, the neighing of war-horses, and the sudden singing of many men. The Sun's limb was lifted, an arc of fire, above the margin of the world. Then with a great cry the Riders charged from the East; the red light gleamed on mail and spear. The Orcs yelled and shot all the arrows that remained to them. The hobbits saw several horsemen fall; but their line held on up the hill and over it, and wheeled round and charged again. Most of the raiders that were left alive then broke and fled, this way and that, pursued one by one to the death.

Later in this passage we're told how, after Merry and Pippin escaped the battlefield, Uglúk was slain by Éomer in single combat. This is the extent of the personhood Tolkien grants his orcs. They can be human enough, and distinctive enough, to be worth killing face to face. But there is no space in this story for a warrior on the side of good who is fighting because they've been told to, and who doesn't trust Aragorn or Gandalf's decisions. There certainly isn't space for an orc who is fighting because they genuinely believe in Mordor's cause. Because if an orc fights from free and genuine choice, then it is also possible for them to choose not to fight. And if they did that, then where would this story be?

Next time: Don't be too hasty! On October 20th, we encounter "Treebeard"

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