Скачать или смотреть Orcs Aren't a Race: What Rings of Power Got Wrong About Evil

There's a module at the University of Nottingham called "Decolonizing Tolkien." Students are told The Lord of the Rings is offensive—that orcs represent "ethnic chauvinism" and racist stereotypes.

Amazon's Rings of Power apparently agreed. They gave us orcs with families. Orcs with feelings. Orcs who are just misunderstood.

Here's the problem: If your first instinct when seeing orcs is to think of a human race, that says everything about your assumptions—and nothing about Tolkien's.

Orcs aren't a race. They're corrupted elves. They're the mockery of creation. They're what happens when something good is twisted by evil until it becomes unrecognizable.

And if you can't see the difference between "a corrupted perversion of something good" and "an ethnic group," you've already accepted a premise Tolkien would reject completely.

This isn't a debate about fantasy creatures. This is a battle over whether we're still allowed to talk about evil as something real, something objective, something beyond cultural perspective.

Tolkien spent decades wrestling with the theological problem of orcs. He wrote letters struggling with whether they could be redeemed. Not because he was being racist—but because he was trying to reconcile his fantasy with his Christian theology.

In the Silmarillion, Tolkien tells us explicitly: Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, could not create life. Only Eru Ilúvatar can create. So Morgoth took elves—the firstborn children of Ilúvatar, immortal and beautiful—and twisted them. Broke them. Corrupted them into mockeries of what they were meant to be.

That's the origin of orcs. Not a separate race created evil. But a good race corrupted into evil.

This reveals everything about what evil is in Tolkien's theology: Evil is not a substance. It's the perversion of good. It's parasitic. It's what happens when something meant to reflect divine glory is bent toward the will to dominate.

This is profoundly Christian theology. Augustine said it first: evil is the privation of good. And Tolkien built his entire mythology on this foundation.

So when you see an orc, you're not seeing a race. You're seeing a tragedy. You're seeing what was once beautiful and has been broken beyond recognition.

But modern critics can't see that. Because they've lost the category of spiritual evil. Everything, for them, is political. Everything is about power dynamics between groups.

The moment you make orcs just another misunderstood culture, you've lost the ability to talk about corruption. About evil. About the difference between creation and mockery.

Here's the irony: The most evil character in Tolkien—Sauron—appeared beautiful. He presented himself as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts. Fair to look upon. A bringer of progress and reform.

Rings of Power got this right. They showed Sauron as deceptive and charming. But then they made the opposite mistake with orcs. They tried to make evil sympathetic at the bottom after accurately showing it was deceptive at the top.

The real question we should be asking isn't "Are orcs racist?" It's "Why are we so desperate to avoid calling anything evil?"

The critics calling Tolkien racist are revealing their own obsession with race. They're the ones who can't see ugly creatures without thinking of ethnic groups.

Tolkien saw beyond that. He saw spiritual reality. He saw that evil is about what you've become, not where you're from. About choices and surrender to darkness. About the corruption of the soul.

And we need that wisdom desperately. Because we live in a world that can't name evil. That calls everything "complicated" or "a matter of perspective."

Tolkien gives us the language to call evil what it is. To recognize corruption when we see it.

The orcs aren't a warning about "the other." They're a warning about ourselves. About what we're all capable of becoming if we're not vigilant.

That's what Rings of Power lost when they tried to humanize orcs. That's what the critics miss when they reduce everything to race.

They lost the wisdom. The warning. The truth about what evil actually is and how it works.

And in a world desperately needing to recognize and resist corruption, that's a loss we can't afford.

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📚 SOURCES:
Tolkien Letters (edited by Humphrey Carpenter)
The Silmarillion
University of Nottingham "Decolonizing Tolkien" module

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