Of the Origins of the Orcs

“But in the Second Age Sauron, when he turned back to evil, had gathered into his service all the Orks that were scattered far and wide in the Northern world, cowed and masterless, furtive lurkers in dark places. He rekindled the lusts of their black hearts; and to some he showed favour and fed them lavishly, and training them into tribes of strong and cruel warriors.”

Very little is known about the Orcs (styled as Orks in the J.R.R. Tolkien’s later writings) save that they were the most common minions of the two Dark Powers of Middle-earth – those being Morgoth and Sauron – and the backbone of their massive armies. A foul race of brutish and wicked black-blooded creatures, they “took pleasure in their deeds” (slaughter, torture, plunder, enslavement, destruction etc.) and their hearts were ingrained with disdain for all beautiful things. They are a reflection of everything that can be base in human nature and, according to Lynette Nusbacher, they also represent “all that is bad about modern war”: they lack honor and they are utterly pitiless. United in their “unreasoning hatred of the Elves and of Men who associated with them”, the Orcs were bred solely to wage war on the Free Peoples and to serve their overlord by helping to conquer the lands of Middle-earth:

“In the Dark Lord’s name, we master war! We seek it, we relish it! We will honor Sauron’s name with every riven shield and severed head!”

Yet the origins of the Orcs are shrouded in mystery, with Tolkien’s views on the matter changing as he went back on or expanded upon the ‘mythology’ of Middle-earth. We are left only with a few theories, suggestions and in-universe beliefs scattered throughout the legendarium, and most accounts agree that “Melkor-Morgoth”, the first Dark Lord of Middle-earth, was “their begetter”. But one point was crystal clear: they were not creations of the Dark Powers in the same way that the Free Peoples were “the Children of God”:

“The origin of the Orcs is a matter of debate. Some have called them the Melkorohíni, the Children of Melkor; but the wisest say: nay, the slaves of Melkor, but not his children; for Melkor had no children.”

Melkor-Morgoth, as well as Sauron after him, lacked the power and authority to fashion living beings “with independent wills, and with reasoning powers”: this was something that only the Demiurge, Eru Ilúvatar, could achieve. This reasoning also had applicability in “the case of Aulë and the Dwarves”: the idea of conceiving the Dwarves was the Vala Aulë’s, and he crafted their physical bodies – with the Dwarves revering him in the following ages as Mahal (tr. from Khuzdul, ‘Maker’) – but it was Eru who actually breathed life into them.

The role of the “First-created”– the angelic beings known as the Ainur (the Valar and the Maiar) – was, at most, that of sub-creators: they were allowed to tinker with the shapes of the world (its terrain, its flora and its rational or speechless denizens), already conceived by Eru, and make their own lesser works within His grand design. What the Dark Powers did, however, was twist this generous gift: they dominated the minds of the Children and corrupted them, bending them to their will and distorting their appearance or molding their flesh into base mockeries of life; Sauron is explicitly described in The Silmarillion as “misshaping what he touched, twisting what he ruled”. Therefore, the Orcs (and, by extension, the other “creatures of Sauron”) must have been “corruptions of something pre-existing”,and this particular line of thought is echoed through Frodo Baggins’ point of view in The Lord of the Rings:

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”

“They were Elves once, taken by the Dark Powers.”

“In the legends of the Elder Days it is suggested that the Diabolus subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves, before they had ever heard of the ‘gods’ [i.e. Valar], let alone of God.”

The most widely-accepted theory is that the first Orcs were Quendi/Elves “tortured and mutilated” into misshapen, “twisted forms” by Melkor-Morgoth – who “was first aware of the awakening of the Quendi” and had many of them captured, and brought to his stronghold of Utumno (or Udûn, meaning ‘Hell’ in Sindarin Elvish). Alluded to by Saruman in Peter Jackson’s motion picture franchise, this origin appears in the published version of The Silmarillion as an in-universe belief held by the Elven loremasters from the isle of Eressëa, in the Far West:

“Yet this is held true by the wise of Eressëa, that all those of the Quendi who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes.”

The debased appearance of the Orcs, “a ruined and terrible form of life”, was born out of Morgoth’s hatred for the Quendi, the fairest of the creations of Ilúvatar. as well as sheer pettiness and envy: since, unlike Ilúvatar, Morgoth lacked creatures of his own that could take “him for Lord”, he resolved to mar and pervert God’s designs, which included “the defilement of the Children”, starting with the Elves.

For a time, J.R.R. Tolkien seemed content with this origin, concluding in a note that it was “terribly possible there was an Elvish strain in the Orcs”. This theory that the Orcs were of Elvish stock is further lent credence to by The Silmarillion, where it is suggested that some of the unfortunate Quendi taken by Morgoth were of “a kindred of the Avari” (tr. from Quenyan Elvish: “the Unwilling”) – Elves who had “refused the summons” of the Valar, bidding them to journey to Aman (the Far West). And it is said that when the Orcs first began to creep into the northwestern lands of Middle-earth, the Elves indeed mistook them for Avari “who had become evil and savage in the wild”. 

“The Orcs were bred from some kind of Men”

Tolkien later changed his mind, pondering that “Elves, as a source, are very unlikely”. Instead, he began to consider that the first Orcs were made out of corrupted Men. The only issue with this theory was on a chronological level: the exact “time of the awakening of Men is not known”, but, according to the Elven loremasters, it could not have been much earlier than the Great Journey of the Eldar – those Elves who answered the Valar’s summons – into the Far West. This brief interval hardly allowed  “for the corruption of Men into Orcs” by Melkor-Morgoth, who had been defeated and taken captive by the Valar by this point. Tolkien nonetheless maintained that this “theory remains nonetheless the most probable” and found the solution through “Morgoth’s chief lieutenant”, Sauron – who had evaded capture by the Valar and had assumed regency in the fortress of Angband. Tolkien concluded, that although “the idea of breeding the Orcs came from Melkor”:

“The details of the accomplishment of this wickedness were, however, left mainly to the subtleties of Sauron.”

This is the only theory that presents Sauron as the first Orcs’ begetter,  thus carrying out his master’s vision in his absence: Morgoth was the mind and Sauron was the hand by which the Orcs came into being. And it is also noteworthy that this line of thought led to Sauron being credited with the corruption of Men shortly after their awakening in the unfinished text Sauron: Arising and Fall of Men:

“With regard to Men: see under Sauron: Arising and Fall of Men. The arising and fall took place during the ‘Captivity of Melkor’, and was achieved not by Melkor in person, but by Sauron.”

Interestingly, according to the Elves, one kindred of Men was exempt from this corruption into Orcs: the Drúedain (known to the Rohirrim as Woses), the “Wild Men of the Woods”.

“Doubtless Morgoth, since he can make no living thing, bred Orcs from various kinds of Men, but the Drúedain must have escaped his Shadow; for their laughter and the laughter of Orcs are as different as is the light of Aman from the darkness of Angband.”

The Drúedain had not fallen under the sway of “the Great Dark One (Morgoth), nor did they later ally themselves with Sauron”, and they hated the Orcs with a passion. The Elves speculated that the bitter enmity between the Drúedain and the Orcs was also partially owed to their “remote kinship” and that they regarded each other as renegades. 

Based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s posthumous works, his son Christopher stated:

“This then, as it may appear, was my father’s final view of the question: Orcs were bred from Men, and if ‘the conception in mind of the Orcs may go far back into the night of Melkor’s thought’ it was Sauron who, during the ages of Melkor’s captivity in Aman, brought into being the black armies that were available to his master when he returned.”

“Orcs are beasts”

Elves and Men seem to be the most likely stock from which the first Orcs were bred (with Tolkien appearing to have settled more on Men). Nonetheless, these are not the only theories. Tolkien struggled for a while with the idea of the Orcs being derived from truly rational beings, and considered that they were perhaps made from other “lesser living things”. Since he had already established, however, that Morgoth had been able to corrupt beasts into feral “monsters of horn and ivory” in the days when the world was still young, Tolkien briefly toyed with the idea that the Orcs were originally beasts, whose forms were remodelled and altered by “the Dark Power in the North”:

“The Orcs were beasts of humanized shape (to mock Men and Elves) deliberately perverted/converted into a more close resemblance to Men.”

Suggesting that the Orcs’ “talking was largely echoic” and that they had been taught speech by Morgoth and later Sauron like parrots through repetition, Tolkien then alluded to the Black Speech of Mordor to make his case:

“In The Lord of the Rings Sauron is said to have devised a language for them.”

“A spawn of earth”

In a conversation with Merry and Pippin in The Lord of the Rings, Treebeard compares the Orcs to Trolls saying:

“But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.”

Treebeard’s explanation suggests that Trolls and Orcs were counterfeits, puppets devised by Morgoth in the Elder Days as twisted parodies of the Children of Ilúvatar. Puppets, I say, since they had no fëa (tr. from Quenyan Elvish “soul”), which only Eru could bestow. They would only be mounds of flesh kept ‘alive’ – or given a semblance a life – “while the attention of [Morgoth’s] will was upon them”. Concerning the Orcs of the Third Age, under Sauron’s reign, Tolkien went on to say that:

“They had little or no will when not actually ‘attended to’ by the mind of Sauron.”

Treebeard’s belief and the entire theory that proposed that Orcs were countefeits had its roots in the early outlines of The Silmarillion, when the collection of stories went by the title The Book of Lost Tales. In these drafts the Orcs were fashioned by Morgoth out of, granite, mud and the “slime” of the earth – ‘clay’ figures that resembled foul and deformed versions of the Elves, and sustained by his will and malice:

“Their hearts were of granite and their bodies deformed; foul their faces which smiled not, but their laugh that of the clash of metal, and to nothing were they more fain than to aid in the basest of the purposes of Melko [<Melkor].”

It can easily be gleaned now from where Peter Jackson took his inspiration for the slimy birth-pods, the cocoons in the bowels of the earth, the caverns of Isengard, where “Sauron’s servant” Saruman “farmed” his Uruk-hai in The Lord of the Rings motion picture trilogy.

It is curious that Trolls, who Treebeard claims are similar counterfeits, revert to stone – one of the raw materials Orcs are said to be made of as well- in The Hobbit. 

But this origin for the Orcs clashed with the fact that these vile creatures still exhibit personality and reasoning powers. Tolkien noted that, in spite of their dependence on their masters, the Orcs are “capable of acting on their own”, even if to a limited degree: from doing heinous deeds, unbidden, for their own sport, to setting up their own petty realms in the absence of the Dark Lord. Moreover, they “can try to cheat Morgoth / Sauron, rebel against him, or criticize him”. Evidence for this treachery appears in The Lord of the Rings when Frodo and Sam overhear two Orcs in Mordor mentioning “a pack of rebel Uruk-hai”, but also in notes published in The Nature of Middle-earth:

“But not until Mordor and the Barad-dûr were ready could [Sauron] allow [the Northern Orcs] to come out of hiding, while the Eastern Orcs, who had not experienced the power and terror of the Eldar, or the valor of the Edain, were not subservient to Sauron – while he was obliged for the cozening of Western Men and Elves to wear as form and fair a countenance as he could, they despised him and laughed at him.”

Admitting that Treebeard, however ancient and lore-knowing, is not counted among the Wise of Middle-earth and that “there is quite a lot he does not know or understand” (implying that Treebeard’s explanation concerning Orcs and Trolls is the Ent’s own speculation) Tolkien then fully dismissed this theory and embraced the concept that the first Orcs were “pre-existing real beings” (Elves, Men or beasts) tainted by the Dark Powers:

“But since they are servants of the [first] Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be ‘corruptions'”

“In any case is it likely or possible that even the least of the Maiar would become Orcs?”

In the mythology of Middle-earth we come across several Orc chieftains that “exhibit terrifying and demonic characters” and are, even more interestingly, capable of acting as minor leaders (rather than being subservient to another greater agent of Morgoth/Sauron): Boldog from The Lay of Leithian (the unfinished poem version of Beren and Lúthien), Azog from Appendix A: Durin’s Folk from The Lord of the Rings and lastly the Great Goblin/“Goblin King” and Bolg “spawn of Azog” from The Hobbit. Noting that “Melkor had corrupted many spirits” from among the angelic Maiar, Tolkien began to entertain the notion that those Orc chieftains that were “strong and fell as demons” were in fact fallen Maiar who had incarnated themselves in Orcish shapes and were charged with commanding the Orc armies of Morgoth in the great battles that bloodied the history of the Elder Days:

“For Morgoth had many servants, the oldest and most potent of whom were immortal, belonging indeed in their beginning to the Maiar; and these evil spirits like their master could take on visible forms. Those whose business it was to direct the Orcs often took Orkish shapes, though they were greater and more terrible. Thus it was that the histories speak of Great Orcs or Orc-captains who were not slain, and who reappeared in battle through years far longer than the span of the lives of Men.”

Some traces of the latter-half of the description for these Orc-shaped Maiar seem to fit the “Orc-king” Azog – both the literary version and the cinematic portrayal from Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit. In both mediums he is depicted as an unusually large, strong and cunning Orc, hard to slay, and he acts as “a commander of legions”. And it is also interesting how Tolkien explicitly refers to Azog as ‘a great Orc’ and ‘fell’ (terms which he applied to the corrupted Maiar in Orcish form as well) during his confrontation with the Dwarf-lord Náin from the Iron Hills:

“Thereupon Azog came forth, and he was a great Orc with a huge iron-clad head, and yet agile and strong.”

“But Náin was half blind with rage, and also very weary with battle, whereas Azog was fresh and fell and full of guile.”

And, as another side note, it is also very possible that “the grim servants of Barad-dûr” that commanded the Orcs of the Misty Mountains into harrying and slaying Isildur were also Orcs of this corrupted Maiarin kind. Given the recent defeat of their liege, Sauron, these Orc chiefs hailing from Barad-dûr exhibited enough cunning and autonomy to lead the “Orcs of the Mountains” and orchestrate the ambush on Isildur and his retinue. The presence of these Great Orcs in the North would also explain how the mountain tribes were directed to prepare for war: making strongholds and barring the “passes from Eriador into Anduin’s vales, according to the plan of their master in Dol Guldur.” Azog and the Great Goblin might have belonged to this group of Maiarin Orc generals in the service of Sauron – perhaps remnants from Morgoth’s reign.

Since I have already talked about Azog’s potential inclusion, let us briefly turn to the small arguments that can be made in the favor of the Great Goblin/Goblin King – described as “a tremendous Goblin with a huge head” – being of this kind:

• He recognized Thorin Oakenshield’s Elvish sword Orcrist, “the Goblin-cleaver” – the blade that “had killed hundreds of Goblins” during the Fall of Gondolin all the way back in the Elder Days – almost immediately, suggesting that he is very ancient – maybe even one of Morgoth’s former agents who bore witness to the battle.
• Orc and Goblin are mostly interchangeable terms (Tolkien himself stated that “Orc is usually translated Goblin” in The Hobbit) and thus Great Goblin can be considered synonymous with Great Orc, suggesting that it is perhaps a moniker, an acknowledgement from the lesser Orc minions of their chieftain’s origin as an Orc-formed Maia.

At some point, Tolkien went back to the aforementioned name of Boldog. The name originally belonged to an Orc-captain sent by Morgoth to destroy the Elven realm of Doriath and capture the maiden Lúthien, “fairest of all the Children of Ilúvatar”, only to be felled in battle by her father, the Elf-king Thingol:

“Boldog, I heard, was lately slain warring on the borders of that domain where Robber Thingol and outlaw folk cringe and brawl beneath elm and oak in drear Doriath.”

This Orc character had virtually disappeared from the legendarium after revisions to the tale of Beren and Lúthien. Tolkien ultimately decided to propose a new interpretation for the meaning of Boldog, one that aligned with his Orc-shaped Maiar theory:

“Boldog, for instance, is a name that occurs many times in the tales of the War [i.e. the War of the Jewels] . But it is possible that Boldog was not a personal name, and either a title, or else the name of a kind of creature: the Orc-formed Maiar, only less formidable than the Balrogs.”

Elves, Men, or Maiar? Or all three?

In one undated note, J.R.R. Tolkien argued that the first Orcs did not need to be narrowed to a single source: Elves, Men or Maiar and instead sugested that all three were true and “that these Orks had a mixed origin” :

“Most of them plainly (and biologically) were corruptions of Elves (and probably later also of Men). But always among them (as special servants and spies of Melkor, and as leaders) there must have been numerous corrupted minor spirits who assumed similar bodily shapes.”

Although not necessarily Tolkien’s final view on the matter (with his son Christopher emphasizing his father’s leaning towards Men as a source), this theory seems to be the most probable by far. Thus, the primitive Orcs were Elves and Men upon whom Morgoth/Sauron exercised his “immense powers of corruption and distortion”, nursing their vices and turning them into the loathsome crook-legged and hunchbacked creatures that we have become familiar with. But among these lesser Orcs and their scions were the Great Orcs, Maiar that had been lured by Morgoth into his service and who – assuming a demonic Orcish hröa (tr. from Quenyan Elvish, “body of an incarnate being”) – led the Orc-hosts and tribes.

In another essay, J.R.R. Tolkien then proposed that this ‘mixed origin’ theory was the in-universe belief of the Elves – a de facto expansion or reworking of the original ‘Elvish strain’ theory taught by the loremasters of Eressëa:

“Though as for Orcs, the Eldar believed Morgoth had actually ‘bred’ them by capturing Men (and Elves) early and increasing to the utmost any corrupt tendencies they possessed.”

“Are they Men [Saruman] has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men?”

“It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun, but Saruman’s Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it. I wonder what he has done?”

As it ultimately turned out, the Dark Powers were far from done playing God or from “mocking and degrading” His creations. Time witnessed the appearance of new, even stronger, strains of Orc, that were prominently seen in the twilight years of the Third Age, most notably among the minions of Saruman, by then an “agent of the Dark Lord”. But what set these foul things apart from the rest of their black-blooded kin was their unusual resistance to daylight and, most troubling of all, their appearance, which blurred the line between Orc and Man:

“It became clear in time that undoubted Men could under the domination of Morgoth or his agents in a few generations be reduced almost to the Orc-level of mind and habits; and then they would or could be made to mate with Orcs, producing new breeds, often larger and more cunning.”

To us, the idea of Men being crossbred with such despicable creatures as the Orcs is not only too repugnant to imagine, with Tolkien himself admitting that it is a concept “horrible to relate”, but it seems nigh unfathomable. And yet, once one shakes the disdain and shock at this realization, this unholy union is, unfortunately, not so surprising after all. Let us not forget that one of the foremost theories concerning the first Orcs’ origins is that they were corrupted Men. And, in addition, it is worth emphasizing how fain were wicked Men to do the bidding of Sauron, Morgoth’s “servant and heir”, and the sway that “the Power of the Black Land” held over them:

“And [Sauron] proved even more skillful than his master also in the corruption of Men who were beyond the reach of the Wise, and in reducing them to a vassalage, in which they would march with the Orcs, and vie with them in cruelty and destruction.”

The spawn of the interbreeding of Orcs with Men were known as Half-Orcs or Orc-men (also styled as Goblin-men): some of them had more Mannish looks, while others had obvious Orcish traits:

“But there were some others that were horrible: Man-high, but with Goblin-faces, sallow, leering, squint-eyed.”

Although they were formidable warriors – with Théodred, son of Théoden King, being “hewn down by a great Orc-man” in the First Battle of the Fords of Isen – it is possible that these Orc-men were not the end-result so much as they were a stepping stone in the making of “the great soldier-Orcs that at this time issued from Mordor and Isengard”: the Uruk-hai.

The Uruk-hai (tr. from Black Speech ‘Orc-folk’) were a thoroughbred strain of Man-high “black Orcs of great strength”, hard to slay, endowed with an untiring resolve, able to travel great distances in broad daylight and with a hunger for Man-flesh. First appearing in Mordor, the Uruk-hai were said to have been devised by Sauron himself, though some earlier versions of the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, credit “the Morgul-lords [i.e. Nazgûl] having bred” them in secret at their dark master’s behest to assail the Gondorian province of Ithilien. It is never explained how the Uruk-hai were fashioned, but it is implied that they may have been a refined version of the Half-Orcs, though far more Orcish-looking. (The New Line Cinema film continuity established by Peter Jackson even assumed that the Uruk-hai had been ‘created’ by “crossing Orcs with Goblin-men”.) Centuries later, Saruman – “an obsessed servant of Sauron”  as late actor Christopher Lee described him and so enamored of his ways – rediscovered or was taught the foul craft  of the “special breeding of Orcs”.  Thus, as he sought to build “a great force for the service of his new master”  – who had instructed him to conquer Rohan – but also for his gamble at claiming the Ring for himself, Saruman made Half-Orcs and his own “perfected” Uruk-hai in the caverns of Isengard:

“Saruman’s defection to the service of the Dark Lord left him with one monstrous obsession – to build an army worthy of Mordor. To that end, the beautiful grounds of Orthanc were reduced to the sprawl of industry as he had his new Orcish servants raise up an army of hideous creations, the fighting Uruk-hai. Warriors as tall and broad as the mightiest of Men, resistant to sunlight and able to fight without tiring, these would be his weapon against the Free Peoples.”

As a side note with regards to Half-Orcs, they came close to appearing in the New Line Cinema film continuity.  When making The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim anime, the filmmakers debated on the nature of the “enemies of Gondor” whose aid the renegade Dunlending lord Wulf was mentioned to have enlisted in the Appendices. In addition to the “Eastern invaders” that were explicitly confirmed, early scripts briefly toyed with the idea that some of Wulf’s other allies were Half-Orc sellswords from the distant South (which is why the concept pieces depict them as a blend between Haradrim and Orcs), before discarding this idea in favor of Variags and other “Southron mercenaries”:

“As mentioned in Tolkien’s Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, enemies of Gondor entered Rohan from the east and southwest, seemingly in coordination with that realm coming under attack itself. Héra finds a dead mercenary on the plains. In the earliest versions of the script, the notion of Wulf’s hirelings from the South being Half-Orcs was explored. This took the form of pointed ears, sharpened teeth and fiery eyes in some of the first concept art produced. The idea was dropped, but costume and war-paint elements from those concepts carried through into the final design.”

Are there any Orc-women in Middle-earth?

To conclude the article, I shall address this question, which has become popular since the somewhat the controversial appearance of Orc-women in Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The first allusion to their existence is found in The Silmarillion:

“For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Ilúvatar.”

And in a letter to a Mrs. Munby, J.R.R. Tolkien explicitly confirmed the existence of Orc-women, while also explaining that since the Orcs, unlike the Free Peoples, are not the moral focus of the stories, there are only scant details about their lives – especially from the in-universe perspective of fictional chroniclers:

“There must have been Orc-women. But in stories that seldom if ever see the Orcs except as soldiers of armies in the service of the evil lords we naturally would not learn much about their lives. Not much was known.”

It is very possible that the Orcs and their women were so alike in appearance that it was very hard to distinguish between them, as was the case of the Dwarven-race:

“It’s true you don’t see many Dwarf-women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for Dwarf-men.”

Sources

You can find my original article here.

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• The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A “Durin’s Folk”, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, “The Disaster of the Gladden Fields”, J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
• The Peoples of Middle-earth, “The Tale of Years of the Third Age”, by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
• The Hobbit, “Over Hill and Under Hill”, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Silmarillion, “Of Thingol and Melian”, by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
• The Lays of Beleriand, “The Lay of Leithian”, by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
• Morgoth’s Ring, “[Text] VII”, by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
• Tolkien Gateway
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, “Flotsam and Jetsam”, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A “The Númenorean Kings””, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Peoples of Middle-earth, “The Heirs of Elendil”, by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
• TheOneRing.net: Christopher Lee Interview on ‘Troldspejlet’
• Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, “The Palantíri”, by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
• The Treason of Isengard, “The Council of Elrond (1)”, by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
• The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A “The House of Eorl”, by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Art of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, by Daniel Falconer