Posted: May 12, 2000 at 09:51:58: by Martin Read
: : The Orcs were Elves that Morgoth captured and corrupted during the great Journey (to Valinor, were the Valar were eager to protect them from such abuse) Granted that Morgoth did the corrupting at Utumno, and that could be said to be the place of origin for the Orcish "race", I really think that by calling orcs a minor race you are mistaking their origins for being something akin to trolls.: I'm not sure if I get your meaning.
: My point was that there probably weren't that many orcs when compared with some other races, at least men. By 'minor' I meant that the are a minority.
: Orcs may have been corrupted elves, but I don't this much limits the characteristics we can attribute to them, because we don't know Melkor's limits in working his 'material'.
: Some characteristics that I picture the Orcish race with are that they did not have many males who were too young/old/sick or indispensable from other duties to partake in war, and that they had relatively few females, and even if the 50/50 relationship had been preserved from the elvish times, then the females were hardly distinguishable from the males and also went to war.
: Therefore I believe that, unlike with other races, a great majority of an orc population was able to participate in military action, but because we don't see overwhelmingly great orc armies, there were relatively few orcs compared with other peoples.
: Ie. A full muster of Rohan produced an army of 100 eoreds, 12000 men. That would put Rohan's population at around 100000, would it not? But an orc population 100000 strong could in my opinion field an army greatly in excess of 50000. Thus I don't think that in the Third Age the orc populations climbed to many hundreds of thousands simply because we don't see orc armies of many hundreds of thousands.
: -Foradan There are socio-economic reasons to support your argument about low orc numbers. As orcs did not farm (there is no evidence available that they did) they must have lived from hunting and gathering and raiding farming communities (mostly human). Hunter gatherers are never in very dense populations as the way of life does not permit this. Also if they raided it is evident that as a parasitic population their numbers must have been smaller than that of their host/victim population. This does not of course apply to "kept orcs" where as, in the case of Sauron's orc population, slave-farmers (Nurn) could be used to support larger orc numbers.
|
