sinick

Oh, hey, cool!

I'm trying to avoid cluttering up your fic comments with off-topic stuff and also trying to avoid Tumblr altogether, so it's nice to see that you're here too!

So.

I was thinking about Eltariel's reaction to seeing an Uruk act "like a person," and how Tarks might react to having to interact with Orcs/Uruks as something more than howling red mouths with swords...and I got to wondering about Gollum's diet. Bear with me here.

Gollum can't eat Elf food; from the way he rejects it, it's implied that he has the same problem with it that he has with touching things Elves made, i.e., his badness levels are just too high. But he can't eat anything except raw flesh and (IIRC) eggs. This, again, is played up as a sign that that guy just ain't right. (I mean, cannibalism, yeah.) But he spent most of a very long life in a cave, where his food supply consisted of raw goblins and raw fish, and for much of that time he was wearing the One Ring, which had a vested interest in keeping him alive. So of course it changed him into something that could live on raw goblins and raw fish.

And the One Ring is also an aspect of the mind and will of Sauron.

So. The boss villains in Tolkien like to improve living creatures in ways that an outside observer might interpret as mucking them up. What if Melkor, or maybe Sauron, decided that the remarkable omnivory of Eru's children was a silly affectation, and/or that the ability to digest things humans find poisonous was worth losing the ability to digest other things, and/or that one way to keep his creations from interacting peacefully with the folk of the West was to make it difficult for the two to share food? What if Orcs/Uruks can eat, for example, unsoaked lupine seeds, or poisonous mushrooms, or rotten meat, but can't eat, for example, bread grains or dairy? So Westerners would look at what they eat and go "Ewww! Evil diet of evilness and evil!" while on their side armies of Orcs/Uruks would spoil a lot of Western food supplies instead of stealing them, increasing their destructiveness.

The other inspiration for this what-if was wondering what grog might be made of, and reading up on hardy, productive crops for marginal areas. I got to wondering whether grog might be millet whiskey, and if so whether the Orcs/Uruks who lived in Mordor before Sauron moved back in ate millet roti and millet porridge.

Which leads me to another, long-cherished, headcanon--that different groups of Orcs and Goblins were developing cultures of their own, TYVM, before Sauron decided to make them great again. Before he disrupted their farms and workshops for his war effort. Before he broke up their families in order to breed more soldiers. I mean, I don't think that they were all (or even mostly) peaceful, but surely they were doing something with their lives besides sitting around waiting for Sauron to get back and occasionally robbing somebody.

Thoughts?