Orcs and gooseberry bushes?

[lexin]

You know what I've been wondering about lately? The science behind orc creation. The difficulty is that I never took biology; when I was young I was deeply squeamish and having realised that biology involved dissections, I took physics. That out physics master was a looker while the biology master was a complete creep only helped my decision

Comments

[phyloxena]

The canon-consistent (I believe) version is that orks are distorted (morally and physically) elves, they can mate and breed with humans, they (at least early non-crossbred generations) are potentially immortal (but die in batches in acts of violence), and the "extinguishing of their light" (presumably performed by Morgoth) resulted in drastic changes of ecology/etology, from extreme R-strategy (stable monogamous families, low numbers of expensive offsprings e.g. gorillas, elephants, ruling or upper-class families) to extreme K-strategy (no love to speak of and tons of disposable babies, e.g. herring, mice.) As a trained bilogist, I venture to suggest that ork-babies have lower birth-weight than Elv-babies, pregnancies and infancy are shorter and development is accelerated. Ork females fight alongside ork males (as high Elves did, or could) and non-orks cannot tell them apart. Grywnak could be a 2000-year old girl, for all we know.

[azdak]

Ork females fight alongside ork males (as high Elves did, or could) and non-orks cannot tell them apart

This sounds more like Pratchett than Tolkien...

[the rest of this is really adressed more to the original post than to your comment, for which I apologise]

I don't know how well up Tokien was on evolutionary biology. "Twisted" elves sounds vaguely Lamarkian, as if Morgoth captured some Elves, did something unspeakable to them that warped them horribly, and those characteristics were then passed on to their children. But I suppose it could have been some kind of yucky breeding programme.

[phyloxena]

Why Pratchett? Dwarfs? 1st Age Elves are pretty androgynous in appearance and social roles.

[azdak]

Yes - because he pretty much invented the "Dwarf women look exactly like dawrf men right down to the beard and helmet, which is why you never realise there are any female dwarfs in fantasy stories" idea. It goes way beyond a little superficial androgyny into the realms of the seriously funny.

[legionseagle]

There are very few Elven women, either: Arwen seems to be the only woman present at the Rivendell feast in FOTR.

[lexin]

So an argument that elves are hermaphrodite could be made?

Don't tempt me...I've already far too many MPREGs to my name as it is.

[legionseagle]

Or just that the women go in for really, really convincing drag, just like the dwarves. Perhaps one should warn for femslash when writing Legolas/Gimli, just to be on the safe side>

[azdak]

There aren't all that many Human women come to that (unless there were a great many more Eowyns in the ranks, a la Monstrous Regiment). One gets the impression that the Y chromosome suppressed some hideous genetic defect that killed most females before birth.

[anna_wing]

Taking into account everything that Tolkien every said about them, I'd suggest that orcs are genetically engineered from material taken from elves, men and probably animals. After all, if you want something with good night sight, it would be so much easier to splice in genetic material from something that already had a tapetum, rather than trying to breed one from scratch. Morgoth was a god and had infinite time, but still, economy of effort and all that. In a non-dualist worldview that would be the end of that, and there would be no problem with orcs being intelligent, but if you insist on a separable soul then you have to think a bit harder

[anna_wing]

Apologies for the incredibly long post above. It's terribly easy to get carried away with this sort of thing.