Orcs and Demons

 On the subject of evil...

A few months back I was invited to write a guest post on a blog the Notion Club Papers, named after a draft story by JRR Tolkien of the same name.  The blog is kept by a man named Bruce Charlton, and I have followed his writing over the past few years with some interest on where he is going with things.  He writes about or at least touches on a number of topics that interest me, specifically Tolkien’s writings.  He also does mention or bring into his writing (to a much lesser degree) Mormon philosophies and themes, though largely in fairly general strokes.

Anyway, he wrote a post about demons, and stated something to the effect that his belief was that demons were spirits that had never incarnated on this earth.  This follows fairly closely with Mormon theology, also, with the summary of that story being that a certain number of spirits chose to not follow Satan in a pre-mortal existence, were consequently denied an opportunity to be born on Earth and receive a body, and are now causing mayhem.

I explored a counter-story in the comment section of that post, postulating that it may actually be that demons did in fact incarnate on this earth, and they did so in the form of Orcs.  Dr. Charlton was interested in the idea, and extended the invitation to take the comments and try to pull them together into a post that he would publish on his site.  The idea was not to necessarily create a polished essay, but to try and combine all the comments into something of a cogent line of thinking.  It actually took me a little while to do it, as I didn't know if I wanted to get back into writing anything like a post on these types of topics again.  

I was glad I did, though, and it helped set the stage, I guess, for writing again in this format - for better or worse.

There are some things I would reword or emphasize differently, even just a few months later.  For example, in the preamble paragraph (that Dr. Charlton wrote to tag on to my post in order to help summarize and highlight) it mentions Sauron being referenced as a Necromancer primarily due to what happened with the Orcs.  While I do think that Sauron had a role in building on and expanding what Melkor did with the Orcs, I think it would be more accurate now to say that his Necromancer reputation may have had more to do with events on Numenor, overall.

But, as with the posts I am writing here, the whole thing was not meant to be final or polished, but really a thought starter or theory that could be explored and changed as needed, or discarded at some point if something else entirely proved a better explanation.

So, the link is immediately below (Rather than copy the entire text here, I thought it easier to just link to where it already exists).

The Notion Club Papers - an Inklings blog: Could Tolkien’s orcs be incarnated demonic spirits? An invited guest post by commenter WW