I remember seeing three black books with a red eye stamped on them in the Rochester Christian School library, checking them out, and riding home on the bus knowing that this was going to be a lost weekend. By Monday, my seventh grade life was changed forever as I was now far more interested in learning Elvish than French or Spanish.
Lord of the Rings presented me with an interesting problem. Jesus taught me to love my enemies and nobody seemed to love orcs. Shouldn’t Elrond organize a redemptive project to reach out to the Goblin King? Weren’t there any Dwarf Martyrs who would go to Moria and reach out to the orcs in possession? Where was the Saint Francis of the Shire?
The simple answer of course is that orcs are ruined beyond repair. Like devils they cannot be redeemed. The great mistake Tolkien made (made worse in the movies) was letting orcs talk. We learn from their talk that there are very bad orcs (the White Hand sort), pretty bad orcs (the Red Eye), and local goblins who seemed squashed by the rest (the Hobbit). Orcs complain about their treatment, so they have a rudimentary sense of justice: why should the leaders get man flesh while the rest of us get horse?
It was easy for childlike me to imagine this as an opening to orcs. We would begin by evangelizing the goblins . . .building on their proper sense of oppression by the White Hand orcs. We could also confront the riders of Rohan on their too easy colonialism that alienated the indigenous peoples of the Mark. This might help those people groups to see that siding with utter evil was not a proper response to Gondor’s colonialism.
By now a certain type of reader (hello Hope!) has decided that I am taking these fantasy novels too seriously, but Tolkien (at least) took them very seriously. I did as a kid. Weirdly, a certain kind of adult worried that reading Tolkien might lure me into the occult, but anybody reading the books knows that if what you want is magic, Tolkien is a let down.
Wizards in Tolkien are more like a combination of angels and Biblical prophets than “magicians.” Think Merlin with more powers, not Faust.
Nobody seemed to worry that the good guys just hated orcs because orcs (like the Biblical demons) were not human. We have to love our human enemies as Christians, but we do not have to love demon enemies since demons by nature are irredeemable. Yet orcs are errant elves not demons, mortal not immortal, with a culture that should allow conversation and repentance.
Could the descendants of Beorn adopt infant orcs abandoned for “imperfections” and raise them without hate?
The serious point in this (and there is a serious point) is not to pick on Tolkien. Instead, we can read Tolkien recognizing that his “evil” characters are underdeveloped and serve as challenges for his “good people” and not as characters. They are opposition, not folks.
We do not live in a fantasy novel. There are no orcs in our world: no mortal race we can safely just hate and fight. ISIS is an evil organization, but the members of ISIS are humans created in God’s image. Putin is a brownshirt thug, yet still an immortal soul for whom we must pray mercy.
I am no pacifist. The world is broken and sometimes fighting is necessary, but we must recall that no foe is “totally evil” anymore than we are “totally good.” No culture is so bad that traces of Christ cannot be found in it just as no culture is so “Christian” that the Fall cannot be seen in its evils. The world is not made up of “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys,” but “Better People” and “Worse People.” Yesterday’s “Better People” can be today’s “Worse People.”
However rich Tolkien’s world is, it is morally simplistic. (No problem there if we recall it is a fantasy novel!) So when reading Tolkien remember: if it were real, we would have a duty to reach out to the orcs and try to dialogue . . . and then we could fight if we must.
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