From the Vault: Orcs in the Deep

So I hope you enjoy. But of those unhappy ones who are ensnared by melk Or, little is known of a certainty, for who of the living has descended into the pits of a toumbno or has explored the darkness of the councils of melk Or. Yet this is held true by the wise of Eressia, that all those of the KINDI who came into the hands of melk Or aerotomno was broken, were put there in prison, and by

slow arts of cruelty, were corrupted and enslaved. And thus did Melcor breathe the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the elves of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes, For the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the children of Iluvatar, and nought that had life of its own, nor the semblance of life could ever milk or make since his rebellion

in the ain Alundli before the beginning. So say the wise, and deep in their dark hearts, the Orcs loathed the master whom they served, in fear the maker only of their misery. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Land and I'm Joe McCormick. And man, I had to read that opening part quite a few times. That, of course, is from The Silmarillion

by R. R. Tolkien. Yeah, and of course we're talking about Tolkien because today's publication date is September two, which also happens to be the credited birth date of both Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbits central to J. R. Tolkien Saga of Middle Earth. Uh. Thus this has become known as Hobbit Day, which falls during Tolkien Week, at least as proposed by the American Tolkien Society in nine eight. So this tradition is roughly a month older than I am.

That's funny. So it's a week long festival then, yeah, yeah, apparently a week long celebration of Middle Earth and all things Tolkien. I was not aware of it until just like last month, and I realized that the publication day lined up perfectly, and I'm like, oh, well, we've already

done an episode on the One Ring. We did another one on Hobbits and how their their biology works and how they, you know, relate to multiple meals per day and to sunlight, and so I thought, we gotta come with something else that we can talk about on hobby Day itself. So you wanted to talk about orcs. I guess you've had Tolken on the brain all year, right, Are you still you're still reading it with the family?

No way, I haven't been reading it. We've been meaning to come back around to Fellowship of the Rings, but instead we just we just got into Star Wars this year, so that's where we are. But I couldn't. I couldn't let the stars seemed to align on this particular episode. So I thought, well, we've got to we gotta do something, and I started looking around. I thought, well, maybe it's orcs.

Orcs are such a central part of the work and something that has been highly influential on fantasy in general, like, generally speaking, fantasy games, fantasy books, fantasy movies, they're just lousy with orcs. You know. I was trying to think when I first started, when I first became aware of orcs, and I think before I ever read any Tolken, I played the Warcraft games, which which have orcs in them, which are essentially the palace guard that Jabba's Palace from

Return of the Jedi. Yeah, they're green, and they've got tusks, and they've got kind of like a bulldog faces. Yeah, they have that. They look a lot like those Gamorian guards from from Jedi. Um. They also, of course, of course, um that whole gaming system I think has its roots too and being inspired by the Warhammer games as well, which yeah, which I'll touch based on that in a little bit, because I think they're very important to the

history of how we interpret orcs. UM. I think I've I have always pictured the Orcs of Middle Earth in less detail, like, you know, more abstract, brutish creatures in the you know, in the rough semblance of human beings. And part of that might be that I at a very early age I saw at least parts of the original UH animated version where all the animation is pretty much like that. It's kind of like abstract shapes and less detail, and the Orcs and other evil things things

are often shown in kind of a silhouette. This is the ralph back she won with the does have rhotoscoping in it. Rotoscoping animation. I believe that's the technique they used. Yeah, it was. It's it's interesting. It's a little bit different from the Rank and bass Uh animation that you saw on The Hobbit and then saw on the Return of the King, which you know, basically finished what this film didn't. Oh, this is the one where Sauman is Santa Claus. They

give him a red robe. It's been so long, I don't even I don't even remember that honestly, but but I I remember flashes of it. It had it had some sort of an impact on me. Um. I'd say that, I think in hearing about Middle Earth and all um, it probably also has a lot to do with like the two earliest stories that I remember my dad telling me were he would tell me about Beowulf and Grendel.

So had this like really early idea of Grendel in my head, And then I remember him telling me about the Battle of Hastings, So I have I think I ended up sort of cobbling together this this Middle Earth orc as being a combination of Norsemen or Viking and that figure of Grendel. M hmm. But that's just me personally, just based on like where I came into learning about

Bahabbed and what I've been exposed to previously. Um and as as we're going to discuss here, there's there's subsequently been so many different visions of orcs and what worcs are, and we're still in the process, uh of of defining and redefining what an orc is. For some reason, I remember thinking that the Orcs of the Peter Jackson movies have a very dickensiean villain kind of flare, Like they've

got this, you know, sinister Cockney accent that you hear. Yeah, the Peter Jackson orcs are are are very important in our our modern perceptions of them, but even those are are suitably very There are a lot of different visions of what an orc is in those films. They range from like big like dark brutes to more goblin e forms.

There's like one general that shows up and I think Return of the King that has this very like elephant man um tumorous appearance, and then by the Hobbit films they seem to have refined it a little bit to where you have either refined the work in general or that or just they've decided to portray these sort of misty mountain orcs as being almost kind of nos ferratu in like they kind of look like big beefy nos Feratus in a way in a way that I think

really works more the classic Max shrek nos ferat or the klaus Kinski nos Ferra to the Max shredded nos Ferrati. That's that's what they are. Like. This is very just very beefy um juice to Max. Now we mentioned mentioned U Warhammer just a second ago. I've long been a fan of of Warhammer, and Warhammer forty thousand one is like the Fantasy version. One is essentially like a sci fi version of the same universe, and it is evolved

since then. And you have orcs in both of them, and in both games orcs are depicted as green skinned, almost bold dog like in their cranial structure, and even more to the point, though these orcs are presented in a manner that I would I would dare describe as fun.

Uh They If Orcs are often you know, serving to to represent a kind of dark savagery of humanity, I'd say that the the Orc Boys as they're sometimes called, this with a z uh run counter to that, embodying the spirit that kind of celebrates a kind of goofy primal rebellion, especially in in Warreham or forty thousand, the futuristic version, which is a very dark and nihilistic, you know,

grim dark kind of fictional setting. The Orcs are pretty much the only faction that actually resonate with any lightness and whimsy. Like you see are the depictions of them or the way that the various collectors have painted them up, and they often have bright colors and kind of a fun, goofy quality to them. I ran across one I think is like a current figure where it's like an Orc captain and he has like a big pirate hat on and a bunch of cool colorful iconography. They have this

kind of slap dash technology to them. Uh, they're they're a little bit monstars in space jam. I haven't seen space Sham, but it's when the nerdy aliens get really big and good at sports and then then become the monstars. Okay, well I'll take your word for it. Um. Yeah, I guess I'm imagining from your telling of it, like sort of lighthearted monstrosity, kind of cartoonish monstrosity. Yes, Okay, space

Jam never gets too bleak, you know they don't. Space Jam doesn't go full grim dark a grim dark space Jam reboot that would be that would be scot that'd be so good. Now, this embracing of Orc nature. You'll find this elsewhere as well. Uh. Indungeons and Dragons, of course, one may play a half work or even full bloody to work, which allows room for that sort of thing, and will come back to Dungeons and Dragons in a bit. But one title, and this is one that our former

co host Christian Uh turned me onto. Uh. There's a comic artist by the name of James um stoke O I believe that's S. T. O. K Oe, And he has this comic series called Orc Stain, and it presents a delightfully crude and whimsical vision of a world just overrun with Orcs. The protagonist himself as an Orc warrior, and it has this kind of I would say, you know, the art that accompanies the British musical um Act Gorillas. It has kind of that Guerrillas Tank Girl kind of

vibe to it. It has this very kind of punk rock aesthetic, which I've I've I've seen I've seen that with orcs elsewhere where. This is kind of convergence of like punk art culture and the embracing of the orc. Yeah, punk monsters, I think is actually a pretty good tradition. I don't know how it got started, but I think of in the old uh the old teenage meeting Ninja turtles, comics like the Bebop and rock Steady. H you're a punk monsters exactly. Yeah, good point. So what does all

this mean? What are orcs and and why do they resonate with us? So why do we continue to tell stories about Orcs and involve works in our games and our fiction, etcetera. Um? Can can we discuss science in relation to orcs? And are there problematic aspects here as well? Uh? So that's where we're gonna be talking about in this episode. But the first step, I imagine is to discuss what Tolkien says in Universe about the creation of the Orcs coming back to our cold opening, and then also discuss

where he even got the name orc itself. All right, well, let's enlist in the Orc army, all right, Okay, So in Tolken's writings, the Orcs are the most common evil foot soldier. They're like the ubiquitous enemy um. In the Hobbit we deal more with goblins, which are often understood to be either lesser Orcs or a particular species or subspecies of mountain orc. And Tolkien apparently rolled out a few different contradictory origin stories for the Orc in his work.

But according to the Token Encyclopedia, which is a book I typically turn into for such matters, uh, they were twisted forms of life that Milk Corp spawned in the pits of Utum. No no, uh. They served as the bulk of his armies, and then after his defeat they served as the bulk of Saron's armies as well. Now, was milk Or the same person as Saron in an

earlier incarnation? Or was milk Or the god that Saaran served my understanding, and this is a good point for us to point out that neither of us are Tolkien scholars or or professed to be Tolkien experts pro it's you're you keep wanting to do these token episodes, and then we get the mail from people who are like, actually, I know and I I and I love it. I invited. I I definitely want to hear from from people more knowledgeable in the in Tolkien scholarship than I am, or

just in general, you know, or or scholarship if you will. Uh. Now, my understanding is that melk Or was the original fallen god that rebelled against everything. Then he was defeated Saaron, being like a fallen hephaestus type forge god had served milk Or. But with milk Or destroyed or you know, taken out of the picture permanently, now it's time for

Saron to shine. Basically, Sawon was milk Or's VP. Okay, cool, Now now we we kicked off the episode here with that cold reading about the creation of the Orcs in the in the Pits of Autumn. No, you know, the idea that they would have been created, you know, this sort of blasphemous process that takes place in a fallen god's dungeons, like it was a sort of a mockery

of life. Yeah, the idea that they captured els and twisted them through torture into this new terrible form of life, and that the Orcs therefore were products of pain and hate. They lived only for pain and hate, and outwardly they were quote and this is from the token Encyclopedia, bent, bow legged, and squat, so they were ape like in many respects, but cunning and cruel. Their skin looked as if burned. In their eyes were quote crimson gashes like

narrow slits and black iron grates behind which hot coals burn. Now, there are different varieties of orc, we're told in Middle Earth, from the goblins of the Misty Mountains to standard orcs, and then later you get these taller, more sun resistant Urakai orcs that were made by Sauron much later. And it sounds as if the idea is that Sawin ends up combining orc stock with human stock to create a

more human statured, day tolerant trooper. Yeah, and I think that ties into the idea that a lot of creatures in Middle Earth or in Tolken's world, like, if you're a bad creature, you're often sort of confined to a nighttime existence. You can't go out in the sun trolls are this way, and the Hobbit trolls are turned to stone when Gandalf tricks come into staying up till till the sun comes out. And I guess the idea is also that maybe the Orcs or the goblins just don't

really like sunlight. Yeah. Now, the Token Encyclopedia and other sources as well, it has you'll find lengthy passages discussing the role of Orcs to the history of Middle Earth. Uh there's there's no shortage of of of information uh there. But basically, the idea is that throughout their history the numbers swell and shrink at times when dark lords rise up and then fall away. Um when they when dark lords come back to power, the Orcs are there to fill the ranks of the evil armies. But even when

they're defeated, they never completely go away. They kind of shrink to the hidden corners of Middle Earth. Um. And even with the defeat of Sauron and Middle Earth's transformation into a modern world, there's this idea that the Orcs are out there somewhere. So that's the the in universe explanation or as cannon and origin stories can be cobbled together. But of course we know that J. R. Tolkien did not create Middle Earth out of nothing. He forged it

out of existing mythological, folkloric and historic motifs. And I would say, actually, maybe more than anything, out of linguistic motifs. You know that Tolken loved language, and you often get the sense that his story came out of having a word for something, you know, like you'd find you'd find a word for something an old Norse. That's just a great word. And and it almost feels as if the

character springs from the sound of the name. Sorry that that makes sense, I know, no, absolutely, I mean you you really you can't discuss Tolkien creating anything without without bringing in language, like clearly, like that was his his his primary um scholarly interest, and everything else kind of like springs out of that. And then thus that's where a lot of these characters and species come from as well. Yeah, so it seems that Tolkien actually derived the term orc

from a usage in Beowulf. Beowulf is, of course the great epic of Anglo Saxon. It's an epic poem from the early Middle Ages. We don't know exactly when it was composed, it was written in Old to English, which is the ancestor to modern English, but also which is you know, it's so unlike modern English that you can't just read it, you know, it's basically like another language. You need you need a glossary or translation basically to understand it. Uh And so the term specifically that appears

in Beowulf is or caneus or caneus. It is a creature that's mentioned during the introduction of the monster Grendel, you know, the real first big bad that that Beowulf has to fight. Beowulf arrives at at roth Car's mead hall, and the mead hall is being terrorized by attacks from

this monster Grendel. And so I'm going to read from the J. Leslie Hall translation of Beowulf in the part that mentions orcs uh so or the word or canaos at least Hall translates for that bitter murder, the killing of Abele all ruling father, the kindred of Cain crushed with his vengeance in the feud he rejoiced, not but far A drove him from kindred and kind that crime

to atone for meter of justice. Thence Ill favored creatures elves and giants monsters of ocean came into being, and the giants that long time grappled with God, he gave them requital. Now in the Hall translation here there are a couple of different words. They get translated as giants. One is the old English gigantists, and the other is a yoton s, which I think is where we also get the word yoton like the Norse mythology giant a

couple of different kinds of monsters. So in the line that mentions orkans, it's a yotanus and ilfa giants and elves and or can a s which I think here is translated as monsters of ocean, but other translations have have chosen different terms for it, sometimes calling it a

a demon or a goblin or something like that. Uh. There's also an interesting translation note in the j. Leslie Hall version of Beowulf, which notes that when Grendel himself is introduced, the word used to describe him could be translated as demon and often is or could be translated as stranger. Uh. Literary and linguistic conflation of the unfamiliar person with the monster of hell, and j. Leslie Hall actually chooses stranger in in this translation, making for an

interesting set of lines. A foe in the hall building, this horrible stranger was Grindel, entitled the march Stepper, famous who dwelt in the moor, fins, the marsh and the fastness that. So, if you think of Grendel as a stranger, this gets into some interesting territory about what monstrosity means, and that a lot of times are our mythical monsters are sort of ways of mentally metabolizing concepts of people who are unfamiliar or who you worry might be threatening

to you somehow. Yeah. Absolutely, But then also just from a surely like in that on the other hand, like just from an imaginative perspective, like I hear that, and I just love the idea of Grendel as this, as as the stranger, as this, you know, this being that is um that is almost from another world, you know, because in many many respects he is well and much like the Orc that we were just talking about, Grendel

here has given an unholy origin story. Right. They say that he has descended from Kine, who in the biblical story murdered his brother Abel Caine was you know, the third human to exist and Abel was the fourth and Caine, I guess, got jealous of Able having having good offerings to God that God was very pleased with, and so Kane murdered him. And then God comes to Caine saying, hey, where's your brother? And Kane says, am I my brother's keeper.

So God curses Kane and sends him off wandering in the wilderness to the land of not and Kane's offspring apparently become the monster Grendel. So it's like there there's a sort of there's a generational curse that has passed

down for that original crime. Now, in a nineteenth century glossary of Anglo Saxon terms, the scholar Thomas Wright notes that orc means possibly hell, devil, or specter or goblin uh, and he notes that it is phonetically similar to Orcus, which was a Roman god of the underworld I think somewhat regularly conflated with Satan during times of Christian syncretism. Yeah. Yeah, Orcus of course has come up on the podcast before.

And this also brings to mind that that line from William Blake that of course is um is adapted and switched around a little bit most more probably more famously to most listeners in Blade Runner. But that line fiery, the angels rose as they rose deep thunder rolled around their shores, indignant, burning with the fires of Orc. Oh yeah, that's come up before. I know you like that one, and that's great. I mean, Blake is always great, but Orc there is different. Work is not so much a monster.

There is kind of like I don't recall exactly some kind of character. Yeah. Yeah, you you're dealing with the Blake um um cinematic universe there as opposed to any of these others. UM. I should add add one thing. It's it's interesting that we don't have to really discuss what a goblin is in any of this UM. There's something about the goblin in particular that I think you'll

find just about everywhere. Like we've discussed um various Chinese folklore's and mythologies before that involve something that is translated as a goblin. And it does seem to suggest that there is just sort of an intrinsic goblin nous to the human imagination, Like there is a space preserved for the goblin that we we don't even really need to

even expand on too much. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's just there's a general fear of something that is evil that is roughly shaped like a human and has human capabilities in a way, but cannot be reasoned with and has no and has no like mercy or morality, and is just sort of like meanness and cruelty and human form or right human form. Yeah, or even kind of uh, I guess sometimes with the Goblin, I get a sense of like the diminutive nature of the goblin'sgested

like a hidden supernatural element to it. And even though the the the idea of Tolkien's orcs, they kind of evolve out of an idea of a goblin, they become something different, They become something more like a human and therefore kind of divorced from like the supernatural world of pure fairies, in the same way that Token's elves are something different than like the the ideas of the fair folk or even the Tuatha de Dan and uh that

that you find you know, Irish mythology. Well, yeah, Another thing that's funny is that by the time you get to Tolkien, suddenly elves are thought of as these sort of like superhumans. They're like human links, but they're they're like so beautiful and so graceful and so rational and good. Um. But but here in in Beowulf, the elves just seemed to be another type of monster. They're listed alongside the Yotanas and the monsters of the ocean. I mean they're

in the same line. It's a Yotanas and Ilva and uh and Orcanus altogether. Now. Um, speaking of the idea of of orc is being related to sea monsters, I of course looked up Orc in Carol Roses, Giants, Monsters and Dragons, one of my favorite books too, to look up various creatures and uh and and actually she has another book related to fairies. In the Fairy Book, she has a listing for for Orc, just saying it's one

of Tolkien's creations, very short, not much to it. Uh. In the Monsters book, she mentions Orc or Orco, a monster described by Plenty of the Elder in the Natural History. Came out in sevente or thereabouts, and it's described as a very large oceanic creature, said to be larger than a whale and capable of eating whales. It was known as Orco later on and referenced in Orlando Furioso in Oh yeah, but the poet Lodovico Ariosto so Orlando Furioso. I must, I must admit this. We were talking about

it before we started. I just figured out that this, this epic poem is not about a guy named Orlando Furio, so it means something like Orlando's frenzy or something. Uh. So, So Orlando is the hero of the story, and he slays I think he slays a lot of monsters in it. Um, but I looked it up in Orlando Furio. So it's in Canto seventeen that the the Orco monster is mentioned. And so I want to read from the William Stewart

Rose translation. So uh, we get the narration. While with much solace seated in around we from the chase, expect our Lord's return, approaching us along the shore, astound the orc, that fearful monster we discern God grant fair sir, he never may confound your eyesight with his semblance foul and stern. Better it is of him by fame to hear than

to behold him. By approaching near to calculate the grizzly monster's height, so measureless is he exceeds all skill of fungus hue in place of orbs of sight their sockets two small bones like berries fill towards us. As I say, he speeds out right along the shore and seems a moving hill tusks jutting out like savage swine. He shows abreast with drivel foul and pointed nose. Okay, so what do we know about this monster? Uh? He's too tall

to calculate his height. No one has the skill to calculate how high he is, and that that makes it sound like he must be like leaving the atmosphere. Um. He also has he's of fungus hue, and I guess the'rengus is of a lot of different hues, and he in place of eyeballs, he has bones that are like berries. Now, up until that point, I'm definitely picturing what I think

this is. But then the tusks kind of throw it off because the tust sound like more something you would see for see in you know, an actual tusk sea creature, but also in the fabulous uh chimerical uh sea monster that you see in various maps. Oh yeah, exactly like the kind of like a wild boar's face on a whale's body. Exactly. I think something like that might be kind of imagined here, except he's advancing along the shore, so he seems to be able to leave the water. Um.

I don't know, Well, it brings to mind um. And then because it does seem to be there is a connection here. So when you read this, I could not help but picture the orca the killer whale, you know, because there's something about like you know, the fungus hue uh in place of orbs of side imagining those big eye spots that are of course not their eyes, even though it's it's almost impossible to look at a killer whale and not think of that as their eyes. Their

eyes are actually much you know, smaller, um. And are there those big eye spots I think actually make killer whales cuter than they otherwise they look less like the like the vicious wolves of the sea that they are. Um. But but yeah, there's this connection between Orcus and um or kinnis Orca that's the scientific name for killer whales, or kinnus meaning belonging to Orcus, or simply the kingdom of the dead. Uh. The Roman idea of orc orco

sea monsters was or became associated with the killer whale. Yeah, I guess that's right, And and I want to be clear. I think a minute ago we we describe the killer whale as vicious, which we don't mean in a in a negative moral sense, but we do mean in a descriptive sense about like their behavior as they prey on sharks, which is just awesome. Yeah. There as when concerning um orcas and their their natural prey, I think viciousness is

a well deserved adjective. Watch any Nature documentary about their their hunting of baby whales and you will agree. Um. But then again, hey, it's that. That's the world. They're just doing their part in it. The blessings of milk or all right. On that note, we're gonna take a break, but when we come back we'll talk more about works. Thank alright, we're back now. There are certainly a number of ways to crunch the idea of an orc that the of Tolkien's orc a humanoid other that is also

not human insignificant ways. I have to come back to something that um, that author Terence Hawkins Um wrote about in his novel American Neolithic, of which there's a revised edition out. I believe it has to do with the

Neanderthal surviving into into modern a's. But there's this wonderful line where the Neanderthal character is speaking to the reader and says, quote you for whom we have always been the other, our existence buried deep in your racial memories, since the time when glaciers girdled the world and the contest between man and animal was yet to be decided.

We haunt your legends as we haunt your dreams, misshapen versions of yourself, bad copies formally Cobalds or Grimlin's now more locks and orcs, um so so in this line, basically it's the idea is that, uh, there might be some connection between the idea of orcs or more locks or other type beings and maybe the notion that humans did live alongside Neanderthals for a period of time and

played at least some role in their destruction. Well, depending on how you define destruction, because of course we do see the disappearance of the Neanderthal as a distinct branch of the Homo genus, but also it does appear that

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals also intermingled. Yeah, we went to see we went a good deal into this in our almost Cannibals episode because we're basically there was one point we were discussing the idea of cannibalism by neander Dolls by early humans, and you see examples of cannibalism in both groups, but there's less evidence to suggest that, say, humans aid all the neander dolls or the Neanderals aid humans. Um. I mean it, basically, there are a number of open

questions about what exactly happened between Neanderthals and humans. To what extent anything happened. UM. A lot of sources seem to indicate that there was there was probably at least a competition for resources, if not something more you know, nefarious, uh, with of course in the neander Dolls eventually um, fading away, leaving only us. But what well, I take that back, also some trace of Neanderthals within our own genetics. Now it's interesting to think of a true humanoid other and

how human society would process its downfall. Uh. There's another huge issue to consider them, and that is that that is our tendency to dehumanize due to xenophobic, nationalistic, uh and or racist attitudes. And this is an issue that certainly comes up in the consideration of orcs. Yeah, I think one of the most difficult things when you dig

into the history of of ideas about monsters. As much as we love them today and they're fun in the in the forms we have them, they may often have their origins in ideas that if we were fully understand them, we would find quite repugnant. I mean, I think a lot of the origins of monster legends are probably in some process of dehumanizing people who are human. Yeah, it's and it it is. It's truly heartbreaking because you want

monsters to be this pure escapism. But then yeah, when you start pulling the various threads, you often find yourself confronting something like this and nothing else. You confront the you know, the basic idea that that these that monsters always emerge from, if not one particular time, they emerge out of different times and and Tolkien's works especially, I mean they're emerging out of twentieth century Europe, you know, out of a period during which there were two devastating

world wars. Uh. Certainly there's plenty of European racism and xenophobia going around at the time, the wartime demonization of the enemy like this, these are all elements in the soup, no matter no matter how much you want to focus on these just being purely fictional beings in a you know, in another world or in a world that is inspired purely out of like the scholarly consideration of myths and

and fairy tales. Right. I mean, I think at the very least, what you can definitely say about the orc, no matter what else we know about them, is that they are a dehumanized form of the enemy to be represented in war. Um and in a way, you know, if if Tolkien was trying to consciously sort of recreate something like a mythology. We see something like this in

lots of mythologies, you know it. It is of course common for humans to to to dehumanize their enemies and to think of them as something you know less than the people like us, right And and I mean we we see this everywhere. I mean, this is one of the reasons that arguably the zombie fiction has been so so successful is that it presents a completely um, you know, ethically acceptable enemy that can just be eradicated without any

second consideration. Um. And I think that you know, you remember when we did um the episode about daydreaming, and one of the studies we looked at discovered that one of the most common things that people daydream about is they just sort of fantasize about violent conflict and that people they think like, oh, if there was a fight,

what would I do? Uh? You know, there there's this kind of thing, And so obviously people's brains are drawn to this kind of scenario to fantasize about, you know, for understandable reasons, like you like you want to be like that. That's where a lot of potential risk lies and you want to imagine, like, well, what could I do to get out of this? How could I win? That kind of thing? But then also that you know, I think about In Lord of the Rings, there's part

where sam Wise gamge uh. He recognized as a fallen soldier from the other side from somebody who's fighting for Saron, but is a human fighting for Saron one of the for one of the men from Harad, and sam Wise looks at him and he feels bad. He says, wait a minute, you know, was this man really evil or what kind of lies or threats brought him here so far from home? And wouldn't he rather be living at peace.

That's interesting. It's a kind of strange moment where suddenly, out of this otherwise kind of manichean uh good versus evil war fantasy war with a with a non human enemy, suddenly there's this this breakthrough where one of the characters on the supposed good side thinks, wait a minute, aren't the people on the other side humans too, Aren't that you know? Don't they have lives? Don't they have moral

complexities behind their story. This is one of the things that you see time and time again in in this discussion. And I do want to I want to drive home that this is a This has been a topic of of continual consideration by token scholars and literary cultural scholars alike, both in reference to the original works and the you know, the original writings there are token and these various film

are incarnations. Because on one hand, yeah, like there's this idea if you read uh uh you know, like in our our cold opening, this idea of the orcs is just this purely inhuman thing just made out of savagery. Uh you know that, Like that sounds more in keeping with the zombie myth, right, just like no ethical problems

at all. But but along the lines of this example of a human fighting for sau and there are plenty of examples in the Lord of the Rings were Token does engage in a certain humanization of the Orcs, like

they're given some sense of individuality. I believe they're you know, scenes where they've been taken captives by their works and their overhearing or conversations, Uh yeah, Maryan Pippen when they're kidnapped by the Orcs, they sort of interact with the Orcs in a way that suggests to me, at least that the Orcs are sentient, you know, they're they're not like, they're not like robots, you know, they're they're not just evil killing machines, like they've got motivations of their own.

So that makes everything a lot more complicated. Everything we're about to talk about a lot more complicated. Um, now, we can't possibly cover the entire discourse on this topic. It looks like there's some very good sources out there

that you can find. I I ran across a book that I've is cited in a source that I'm gonna mention by Demitra Fimi title Token Race and Cultural History, that is supposedly quite good, but Some of the key issues that are often brought up about orcs are that orcs are clearly described as having dark skin, Orcs are described as being quote unquote slantide. And there's this sense that, yeah, orcs are human shaped and are more or less human like, but then they are also less than human or described

as less than human. And it is often suggested that like, you know, nothing but brutal violence it's against the orcs, is is permissible, and that you know that that is that they should just be eradicated by the higher um uh species of Middle Earth. And I mean some of this I think might be as getting back to the token um duality here. I think part of it is just by if you start telling stories about something, you're

gonna end up humanizing it. So I can see where you could start with your with your you know, you're just completely um you know, irredeemable enemy. But then you you can't help but but but but humanize it a bit in the same way that um say, like in in the Clone Wars, you know you have the Droid army. The droids are like a great example of an enemy army that is set up to be easily and dispatched

without any ethical quandaries. And you still see this kind of creep in clone wars uh storytelling in which you'll you'll end up sympathizing with the droids. You know you can't help, but but apply uh, you know, sort of human characteristics to the droids at times. Now, one of the works I was looking at for this is a paper by Robert T. Talley Jr. Uh let us now praise famous Orcs, simple humanity and tokens in human creatures. This was published in myth Floor back in and Um.

He he looks at at both sides of the of the discussion here. Basically. Now, Tally ultimately does not himself accused Token of racism, but he does outline much of the evidence that can be cited in such a charge, admitting, quote, it is true that no one can read about these quote Swart and quote slant eyed orc so many times

without becoming offended. And he also points out that Tolkien himself notoriously wrote in one of his letters, quote the Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the human form seen in elves and men. They are or were squat, broad, flat nosed, sallow skin, with wide mouths and slant eyes, in fact degraded in repulsive versions of the two Europeans

least lovely Mongol types. Uh. That is not a good sentiment. Yeah, And according to Anderson Riric, the third in why is the Only Good orc adad Orc published in MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Uh, Tolken's friend C. S. Lewis even made passing mention of racism in light of the book's first publication, but again, but apparently did not pursue the idea all

that much. So, you know, it seems to have been something that was at least in the conversation concerning orcs uh for quite some time, and maybe even on on Tolken's mind at least at times. I mean, I can't help but I had forgotten that passage about the human

servants of of Mordor. But that's interesting as well. I've also seen it argued that this sort of view of the racial enemy tied up with the orc was also readily exhibited it in World War One and World War two propaganda against both Germans and the Japanese, where you see like a monstrous racial version of the enemy depicted in propaganda posters and then on top of that, we're talking about an era of eugenics, ideas of racial purity. Um. All that going on in the background, and this is

ultimately again the world that these works emerge from. UM. Now fimi UM concludes, according to to Tally, that that Tolkien's quote objectionable racial uh characterizations are consistent with the discourse of his time, and in any event, consistent with the quote hierarchical world in which his mythic history unfolds. Now that being said, I don't think that makes it

any easier for modern readers or viewers. You know, once you start focusing on these these elements, once you start you know, noticing them in your your reading of the tax or the viewing of the movies that spawned from them, you know, you see modern adaptations dealing with this in in almost diametrically opposed ways, right, um. Because one way you could deal with it is to try to embrace even harder the distinctions that would make you know, whatever kind of like monster enemy and it is it is

clearly not human. You know, you want to go full zombie or full robot to suggest that like, no, no, no, the orcs can't be They're not a metaphor for like in any people, they're just that they're not human at all. They're like, you know, bio robots or something. And then the other direction would be to actually try to humanize them more and make them seem more complicated. But yeah, it is true. I mean, like it much fantasy and

epic writing is this way. But as they're they currently exist in the story, the orcs are in this uncomfortable middle position where they are sort of human, but they're they're they're not treated with the fairness that we would

have hope should be afforded to all sentient creatures. Yeah, and it's I guess that's that's the ambiguity of it that makes it difficult, and um, you know, and it's also I would say with Olkin, it doesn't seem to be nearly as is clear kind of situation as we have to say with HP Lovecraft, you know who, we have such you know, damning examples of racist sentiment in his in his private letters, and then and then when you look at his works of fiction in light of

those letters, I mean it's just it's, um, you know, you can't ignore these elements in his work. Um, you know, told Tolkien's writings certainly have been accused of containing wrong or outmoded attitudes to race, with the works very much of the center of all this. But but then you, I mean, you have defenders pointing out well, okay, Token himself was anti racists, both in peace time and during

the Two World Wars. I don't know, you're still left with with what we still have is just continual discussion of like, how are we supposed to process Um Tolkien's work as a as a modern consumer and a modern thinker. Well, I mean, I guess one of the ways that we're left to deal with it is just to uh, is to don't let yourself get Lord of the Rings brain, or at least certainly don't let yourself get orc brain,

thinking outside of the fantasy of the text. You know, the real world does not have orcs in it, Like you know, all the people, even people you might be in conflict against our human and that you know, and and to maybe lean more into the same wise gamge way of thinking about things, to to always try to remember that even somebody who you might be at war with is still a human and they've got their own motivations,

they are morally complex in the same way that you are. Yeah, yeah, and I mean I think it's one of Tolkien's letters. He even said something similar where He's like, well, in the real world you have works on both sides of a conflict. Um, because I guess in a sense of the works, the orcs is us right. Uh. I want to note too that I thought Dungeons and Dragons UM, the game, the company behind it, they recently made mention of something this some of this concerning works in a

diversity statement. UM. They put this out. This was this year. They wrote, quote, throughout the fifty year history of D and D, some of the people's in the game works and drought being too prim and examples have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That's just not right, and it's not

something we believe in. Despite our conscious efforts to the contrary, we have allowed some of those old descriptions to reappear in the game. We recognize that to live our values, we have to do an even better job in handling

these issues. If we make mistakes, our priorities to make things right, and then they go on to stress a forward facing commitment to betraying orcs and drought as quote just as morally and culturally complex as other people's, which which I think is a way to go, especially considering and Orcs and drought have such a prominent role in Duns and Dragons of storytelling, the drought being the dark elves of the undertarg Yeah, the more I think about it,

the more I think that the clear defining line, really, I guess would have to be sentience, right, that there there was an idea here, maybe in older versions of D and D, apparently somewhat ambiguously represented in in The Lord of the Rings, that there are some types of people or types of creatures that are sentient, they're thinking beings like us, but they are also wholly evil, And in a way that's just sort of that's sort of self contradictory, right, Like, you know, a sentient being couldn't

be as an entire people wholly evil because their sentience would sort of necessarily imply that there is, you know, that there is moral complexity to them. Yeah, I mean, it works when you're talking about and basically comes down to the alignment system in Dungeons and Dragons, which on an individual level doesn't really work in the real world. Like I mean the idea that I mean I am I am I neutral evil? Or am I am I

neutral good? Like I think in reality we have multiple alignments in ourselves at all times, and it's about it's about nurturing the alignments that are the person we want to be, you know. And then certainly when you get into a species wide alignment, like what is humanity's alignment? Uh, I mean, it depends on what we're doing at any

given time. It depends on what you're focusing on. I mean, they're there aspects of humanities, um, you know, role in the world that are that would seem you know, at least lawful evil even or neutral evil, and there are other things that are that are not so. So. Yeah, it's it's one of these things that when it works well within a game context, as long as you're not thinking too hard about it, I guess, I mean, ultimately,

I don't think it's ever gonna go away. The convention of having uh, various types of fantasy storytelling in which there is some kind of conflict and the enemy of the Heroes is an army of monsters. But I guess that mindset has its its place within fiction as just the same way a horror mindset does or anything like that. You know, don't pull it out into the real world and try to use it on humans. Yeah, alright, on that note, we're going to take a break, but we'll

be right back. Than alright, we're back. So let's let's move back to the in universe concept of the Orc

and consider how we might apply science to the situation. So, first of all, I'd like to refer back to the writings of our Scott Baker, who mentioned on the show before, and heck he's been on the show a couple of times, asn't me u, But he wrote this Second Apocalypse so OCCO, which takes a lot of inspiration from Tolkien but applies a different, uh philosophical and at times science fictional limbs

to everything. And in the place of Orcs, he presents these creatures that are called the Shrink, which are described as one of the the quote unquote weapon races that were engineered by the Big batties in this series, the

the alien in Karai. So these are depraved, like thoroughly inhuman creatures from another world that they in cry and they've taken members of the elf like non men uh in this world, and they've used the technique or the old science to twist them into savage creatures of the bassist and most violent instinct, often to scribed as retaining the beautiful faces of the non men, only twisted with like raw violent emotion and with kind of emaciated bodies.

And so they're they're engineered to combat the non men warriors while also consisting on next to nothing like they were told that they just they live off of grubs and insects that they find uh on as they scavenge other lands that are otherwise fruitless. They could otherwise not support an army at all, And they're all part of the scheme to you know, essentially destroy the world and

eradicate conscious beings from it. And so I think it's an interesting take on the idea of an orc, or at least an orc as an engineered warrior being more or less an organic robot made for savagery and war that is itself incapable of self reflection. Uh. And if you're indeed the you know, the Inkari or a dark lord of Mendle Earth. It makes sense, I guess to

create such servants. Uh. And indeed, this whole concept it probably gets closer to the idea of like a zombie army, or a droid army, or a subservient reanimated skeleton army, you know, something that is just purely the tool of

the great adversary. Well, yeah, and tying into something I was talking about earlier, it seems to me significant probably the most significant thing that they are imagined as as basically being not sentient or not able to reflect on their own behavior, which I mean at that point, it does seem like that being probably does lack whatever it is that that we think of as most significant to be human, right, like if you know you're you're not

capable of reflecting on your own behavior. Yeah. And and the with Baker's work, Yeah, there's this idea first of all, that it is not conscious. He's you know, he's going to tell you of a creature's conscious or not. It's kind of his whole thing. But then also the idea

that they are definitely engineered. They're a thing that is created, They're a a new creation based on uh, you know, some designs or raw materials from this other species, you know Peter Watts in the novel Eco Praxia, I recall imagine something like this, But it is a type of human soldier who has had their nervous system modified, essentially so that they have the ability to at will turn off their consciousness during combat, essentially to become a more

efficient killer. So the brain still works the same, except it's just not conscious while it's fighting. And apparently this makes you better at being a soldier. Interesting. Um, so, so I think these are these are interesting ways to think of a particular like weapons species in a fantasy or sci fi context. But but I was also interested to see what else could be glean science wise from

the Orcs of Middle Earth. So I turned to the book The Science of Middle Earth by Henry Gee, who is himself a long time editor at the science journal Nature as well as a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. And so he covers a great deal up from Middle Earth in his book, but beginning with the sixth chapter he begins to discuss it works a bit, and the sixth

chapter is tie inventing the orcs. Um he spends on a fair amount of time discussing some of what we've already discussed, like where do we get the word orc? What does it mean? It's ties into mythology. Uh. But he also points out, Okay, let's let's talk about how how they're made and how they reproduce. So he starts by pointing out that there's a fair amount of incongruity

concerning the origins of Eric Orcs and Tolkien's Middle Earth. Um, you can look at various descriptions and cinematic depictions, uh that on one hand make them look like they're bread, and another it looks like they're created via torture. Um. And if it's torture, are we're talking about something that is more? Is this the way we're describing something that's being done to the body that can't be understood, like something like the technique, something like a sci fi genetic

engineering or is it something psychological? Right? Uh? I seem to recalling the Peter Jackson movie that at least some of them, maybe this was only the uru Quai, or or maybe it was all of the Orcs, but somehow the servants of Saramon were being like grown of the earth, like they came up out of the ground. Yeah, that's and that's something that the g U discusses as well. Yeah, that this idea that that there's something that's just like pulled out of the earth, like this sort of primal creation.

They're just made of mud and stone. Um or maybe their plants or fungus. Yeah, well yeah, maybe there's some sort of fungal element as well. Um, So he didn't get into the fun Now now I'm thinking about the

fungal orc idea. That's a whole different theory. But but that the author here, he does discuss one interesting evolutionary aspect of orcs in Tolken, and that is that we have in an oorc army a collection of varying orc subspecies, which he says would ultimately fit well with the idea that orcs have, in periods of decline withdrawn to various corners of the world. You know, this, this bunch withdrawals to the misty mountains, this one withdrawals to these waste

lands over here, et cetera. So he writes the following quote. The enormous variety of orcs, which is it turns out, is crucial to the story, can be seen as a consequence of the smallness and isolation of populations evolving in their own particular ways to suit local conditions, their isolation enhanced by mutual antipathy and incomprehension. Evolutionary theory tells us that evolution happens faster and has more idiosyncratic results when

populations are small and isolated. So Tolkien's portrait of the Orcs as a collection of very diverse kindreds is biologically very accurate, except that is, for one thing, sex. You know, one thing you could not accuse the Lord of the Rings of is having too much sex in it. Yeah. Yeah, apparently there have been there agievements and mentions one paper that is like saying there's no sex in Middle Earth?

Like what does that mean? Like, if you take that literally, does it mean like there's no They're like sex sexual reproduction is not a thing in Middle Earth? Um, I think that would probably be going a bit far. But in trying to piece together exactly where Orcs come from and how they reproduce it, it does has become a little sticky. Yeah, I mean there there is remarkably little little sex in the Lord of the Rings. I mean people are described as descending from parents basically, so you're

you imagine there is some sexual reproduction going on. I remember GIMII at some point gets very um, I don't know, excited about the idea of how beautiful Galadriel is. But they're just not very sexually charged stories. Uh. And this is kind of interesting if if Tolkien is in a way trying to create a sort of epic mythology, because

I don't know, most world mythologies are pretty crammed with sex. Yeah, I mean, people are always be be getting other folks, right, Um, Whereas in the Tolkien books, like even with the Orcs, there's occasionally like reference to one being the son of another, you know, of parentage, but there's not a lot of detail there, and certainly there are no scenes depicting it. So he basically points out, well, if we're talking about evolution and and the biology that work, like sex is

obviously an important part of the equation. But of course we have little or no evidence of Orc sex in the books. Um, which I don't know. That seems a little maybe nitpicky, uh to to say, but but because they're I know, they are apparently five references to Orc reproduction aside from discussion of creation or breeding by others, which G thinks is is miniscule, But to me that

kind of sounds like a lot. I would if you had to, if you ask me to guess how many references to orc reproduction there are in the book, I would have guessed like maybe one. I would have just zo. I mean, I think they're I vaguely remember a passage where one character is talking about, well, the Orcs have been reproducing in the mountains. There are a lot of them. Um Like that would have been the only one that

it would have come to my mind. Not only is there no mention of of of actual Orc sex, there's no mention of female orcs. And this is perhaps more significant now. Naturally, this doesn't mean there were no female orcs, nor does it mean that there was no Orc sex, you know, no more than the absence of sex from the rest of the books mean that sex didn't exist

for other species of Middle Earth. But he he does point out that the idea, you know that we could compare this to the idea of a purely manufactured or species, much in the same way that the you know, the clones and the droids and star wars are are created, and it would this would actually be in keeping with the industrialized warfare of the world wars, you know, full of mechanized artillery and this overall degregation of the individual soldier,

as well as the overall quote emasculating effects of industrialization in the world. So in other words, perhaps there's no female or or male work at all. There's only just neutral flesh machines that serve this fallen god. You know, it's interesting that Tolken was was very uh, he would very strenuously reject the idea that Lord of the Rings

was an allegory for any particular war. Like I think the thing most often raised is like people saying like, oh, I see, you know, it's supposed to be about World War two and Hitler is Sauron and you know, the Orcs or the Nazis and all that, which I mean, obviously coming out of the World War two era, it would probably be hard not to try to make that

comparison in in like an epic struggle. But Tolkien always like he thoroughly rejected the idea that Lord of the Rings was an allegory for any particular historical events on Earth. You know, he he in fact thought allegories were quite stupid, and he did not like them. But nevertheless, this is one where it's like really hard to miss that what would seem like allegorical significance the way that the mortor war machine in has these tones that so resemble the

production lines of mechanized warfare going into World War two. Yeah. Yeah, indeed, in fact, this was interesting. I've never heard this, but he uh pointed out in the book as well that there's an earlier version of the Lost Tail, the Fall of Gone to Lend, which features a siege not by Orcs and trolls, but by quote vast articulated fire breathing machines. Tolkien apparently later abandoned this idea in favor of living

creatures you know that works, the trolls, etcetera. But at least at one point there was this vision of the the Armies of more Door being like mechanical industrial creations. Yeah, and I think that's it's there in the book. Still, even though the Orcs are biological in some way mythological biological, the the Armies of more Door, I think, are very much seen as like a sort of an industrializing wave of something that destroys the natural landscape and replaces it

with industry and machinery and ash and smoke. Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah it's and certainly you look at more door and what is more do or about this sort of geologic vision of like pure industrial dynym right, I mean nothing, nothing, No trees grow there, you know, it's just like a it's it's a vast asphalt parking lot full of factories for weapons. Yeah, it's exports are war

weapons and volcanic ash. That seems to be it. Now. Now, all this being said that there are mentions to mention of orcs like breeding in the wild, so they still seem to reproduce in the wild in some manner. But who knows, it could be like a Jurassic Park situation right where there's some sort of mutation that observed that that occurs or something. Um, you know, he suggests, yeah, maybe do suggests, well, maybe orcs lay eggs. Maybe that's

what it is. Uh. He ultimately says, you know, if if it's there are a number of different ideas you could propose, since there's no real discussion of it in the book, as long as it doesn't break anything else in the book. I mean it's all kind of fair game, like he has. He has some fun with the idea that perhaps it works are use social insects and there's

like an unseen or queen that does all the egg production. Uh. And indeed, he points out that the goblins of the Misty Mountains and the uh and the the orcs of Maria behave much like an ant colony in some respects.

That would be interesting. But again, I think in the few glimpses we do get into orc psychology, the orcs seem far too selfish and and individualistic to be used social uh animals right, Like, I mean, the like the individual worker ants own bodily existence matters quite little to it compared to you know, protecting the queen and the reproductive possibilities of the hive. Individual orcs really do seem to sort of be in it for themselves when they can,

you know, when they think they can get away with something. Yeah, that's absolutely now. Now. Another idea that he brings up is okay, perhaps works reproduced by parthenogenesis or cloning. Uh. You know, he writes that this could work well, especially when you're thinking about the shrinking habitats that works have during their times of decline. But this would also mean that all orcs would inherently need to be female, which also might work with the fact that there's never any

mention of male and female orcs. Orcs are kind of presented as sexless, even though they're you know, they're they're described with with male terminology. I mean, maybe we're just talking about on all female species. Maybe we're just getting the story told through the like paternalistic lens of how how the men and the elves view things could be.

And speaking of elves, another thing that he brings up is, Okay, if we go back to this other origin store, the idea that that that more goth or milk, or that they they basically like tortured the elves uh in order to make orcs, well, he points out that, Okay, well if you just because you if you were to torture a bunch of elves and break them and like and so forth and then have and breathe them, you're still

gonna you're not gonna produce orcs. You're gonna produce more elves, um, you know, and then certainly they could have you know, the dark Lord could use this technique over time to you know, encourage orc istra rates that you know, and you know, adapt to a hellish dungeon environment. But this would ultimately require periods of evolutionary time that are far beyond anything we're presented within the Middle Earth timeline. No. I mean, yeah, this is a more mythological way of

imagining how traits are established in a species. You know, it's it's it's kind of a magical lamarchianism, yeah, and any rights that. Ultimately, Tolkien was of course more concerned well, certainly with with linguistic aspects of everything, like what does it mean that Orcs have a language that or speak while they speak in a more primitive tongue, you know,

that sort of thing. But then also Tolkien was more concerned with theological ramifications like what happens to the soul of the elf if it is made into an orc? You know? Uh, so there's this whole line of thinking as well. So all of this was far more on Tolkien's brain as opposed to you know, evolutionary biology. But what if everything in Middle Earth is actually a mushroom? Like absolutely everything, even the ants mushrooms? Uh, I'll have

to carry that with me on the next reread. Oh, I want to come back to I want to come back to NTS this October because I've got a I've got almost kind of like an evil int thing i want to do. Oh that sounds promising to me. So let's see. At this point, we've talked about, you know, Orcs as a as a problem faced by the other species of Middle Earth. We talked about problematic aspects of

of of the work as a fictional creation. We've talked about the problems with Orc reproduction or figuring out exactly what Orc reproduction consists of. But I understand you have you have one more or problem for us here, Joe. Well, so this only relates to Hobbits and Orcs in a completely arbitrary way. But it's actually I think it's maybe the most delightful of all the things that we're going

to talk about today. Alright, let's do it. So if you're a puzzle nerd, there's actually gonna be a puzzle that you can pause the episode to try to solve. And this is going to be the Hobbits and Orcs problem. Now, my main source here is a cha after in the Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, which is just the jolliest of reads. But it's actually more interesting than you might expect. That that sounds incredibly dry, It's only somewhat dry.

But specifically, I'm looking at a chapter on problem solving by Laura r. Novic who is at Vanderbilt University and Miriam Bassock, who is at the University of Washington. Both are psychology professors who study cognition and problem solving. Now, the study of problem solving is actually a really fascinating field or combination of fields. It's highly relevant to our lives, and I would say, to be fair, it encompasses. It encompasses actually at least two main questions that are very

different from one another. One is a question primarily for mathematics and computer science, and this is the study of problem solving algorithms, such as those for search or sorting, and the study of which methods are actually the most efficient at solving different kinds of problems. The other question is one for psychology and cognitive neuroscience, which is, regardless of what methods are actually the most efficient, what do

our brains tend to do? You know, when a human is faced with a problem, what kinds of algorithms and methods do we actually use in practice. So where do the orcs come in? Well, one puzzle that has been used to study human tendencies and problem solving is known as the Hobbits and Orcs problem, and it's a variation on the classic river crossing puzzle. Robert, have you ever

done one of these? Where you know you've got a you've got a wolf, and a sheep and a cabbage all together on one side of a river, and you've got to figure out how to get them across. Do you know what I'm talking about? Oh? I don't. I don't have a strong memory of this. Now, Okay, well here's this version. Okay, we're gonna go to the Brandywine River, the one that that separates I believe, bree from Buckland.

Now at the Brandywine River, on the north side of the river, you've got three hobbits and three orcs, and your goal is to get all six creatures across the river to the other side. Now, there's a boat that you can use to ferry them across, but there are a couple of major limitations. First of all, the boat can only hold two creatures at a time, and there always has to be at least one creature at least one Hobbit or Orc in the boat in order to row it. So you can't send the boat across the

river empty. Second, you can never leave hobbits in a place where they are outnumbered by orcs, or of course, the orcs will eat them. And now your goal in this problem is to figure out what sequence of steps you can use to get all the Hobbits and the Orcs to the other side of the river without breaking any of the rules. Now, it's not necessary, but if you do want to pause the episode here and try to solve the puzzle yourself, go for it. I'll give you a hint that it can be solved in what's

usually considered fourteen steps or fourteen stages. Okay, so I'm not going to eat out all of the steps to the solution here, but you can look it up and find it online. If you're stumped, I'm sure just google it. It'll come up. Um. One reason this particular puzzle is useful for studying problem solving is in studying what's known

as the hill climbing heuristic. Now Here, Novik and Bassok described the hill climbing heuristic as a problem solving technique in which quote at each step the solver applies the operator that yields a new state that appears to be the most similar to the goal state. In other words, you know what you're end goal looks like, and at each step you do whatever it is that appears to get you into a state that looks more similar to

the goal state. So if your goal is to get to the highest altitude, at each step you just try going uphill, hence hill climbing. Now, studies in cognitive psychology show that we use the hill climbing heuristic a lot.

Uh Novic and Bassak site the example of Chronicle McGregor an armorade in two thousand four, who found that people naturally use the hill climbing heuristic in a task that involved sorting coins into a particular order, what you probably do is just like keep moving the coins in a way that makes them look closer to the final order

they're supposed to be in until you get there. In the context of the Hobbits and Orcs game, hill climbing would mean that at each stage you just try to find whatever legal move will get the most creatures to the goal side of the river and off of the starting side of the river without breaking the rules, and studies have found that people do use the hill climbing heuristic to generate steps when solving the Hobbits and Orcs problem,

and for the most part it works. But also two studies by Thomas and Greeno, both in nineteen seventy four found that people hit a major roadblock around step number seven or eight in the game because, as an Ovic and Bassac right quote, the correct move at this point in fact, the own a non backtracking move is for one Hobbit and one Orc to take the boat back

to the original side of the river. So essentially, while it must be done in order to complete the puzzle, it looks counterproductive because the only way you can finish the puzzle is to cause a temporary net migration of creatures to the wrong side of the river. It's a necessary step, but it actually ends up looking less similar to your goal state than the step before it did, and the studies by Thomas and Greeno both found that

people really get hung up at this step. It was the step of the problem where both the probability of a of a player making an illegal move and the time taken to decide on the next move suddenly go way up compared to other steps, and Novid can Bass talk about how these studies highlight one of the inherent weaknesses of the hill climbing heuristic. Sometimes in all kinds of problem solving scenarios, you have to move backwards are

laterally in order to reach your end goal. Like actual mountain climbers know this in a quite literal sense, you can't always reach the highest peak just by going straight up. A lot of times you have to go back down to reach a path that can actually be ascended. Other times you reach what's known as false peaks, which are places that seem like the peak as you're ascending until you get there, and then you realize that you are only at the local highest altitude and there's actually a

higher peak just over here. And this means that it really pays to think about what problem solving methods you're using without realizing it, whether and whether those methods are the best suited to the kind of problem you're facing. Uh the hill climbing hereist, it can be very useful for problems in which the solution space could be represented as a kind of single peak, like one mountain and

an otherwise flat plane with an unobstructed slope. If the solution spaces like that, then basically, yeah, you just keep trying to go uphill until you get to the highest point.

But hill climbing can be ruinous for problems where the solution space could be represented as kind of like a a landscape with multiple different hills and peaks and valleys, because if you just keep trying to go uphill, what you're gonna do here is end up climbing to the top of whichever hill is closest to your starting position, and then you'll just be stuck there because even if you know there's a higher peak you have to get to,

you have to go downhill to get to it. So I think what this means for our lives is if you're stuck on a task, it can be really useful to ask yourself, am I inappropriately trying to use the hill climbing heuristic? Do I actually need to temporarily move further away from my goal in order to actually get there?

And in myself. One thing that immediately came to mind as an example of where I find myself doing this is, Uh, sometimes when I'm writing, I'm I'm working on a paragraph or a page or something that just does not feel right, Like, I know it is not going right, and I'm trying to fix it by tinkering around with word choice and junk like that, when in actuality, the best path to my goal be, of course, to just delete what I

have and start over in a different way. Yeah. Sometimes, I h I think I encounter this when I'm when I'm when I'm painting, Like if I'm working on a miniature, and like you reach that point where I mean, I guess with the miniature, it's it's sometimes harder. I mean, yeah, you can, you can just paint over everything and apply a new base pay code. You can use something to

to strip the existing paint off of it. But like, like, sometimes you're kind of continuing to work with the same problems that you've created for yourself on a you know, as far as a particular detail and the figure goes Yeah, you're stuck on the local hill when what you really need to do is go all the way down and find a different hill. Yeah, probably like get a new figure and a new copy of the same figure and

begin again. Yeah. Yeah. Um. Now, some ways around this in computer science can involve algorithms that insert various kinds of random leaps or random steps in sampling to make sure that you're actually moving toward the global solution rather

than the local solution. And in a way, I think this is this is sort of the algorithmic way of characterizing what we would call outside the box thinking, you know, thinking that lands on strategies that may take you pretty far away from the local peak in order to possibly find out that there is a much higher peak somewhere else, and a certain amount of randomness or willingness to be apparently counterproductive at least for the moment, can go a

long way. And this is clearly what's been found like in in these studies using the Hobbits and Orcs problem, because it's like people really get stuck at the part that the part that they have the hardest time figuring out is the part where you have to move multiple pieces away from your in state in order to actually

get there. Coincidentally, I think the dangers represented by the hill climbing heuristic are actually played out in literal topography in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, for example, I recall in Ollership of the Ring there's a lot of frustration about the straightest paths to more door being blocked, such as when they try to they try to go across the Red Horn pass of Kara Dress and they're blocked by bad weather, forcing them to backtrack and go

a different way, even though you know they probably should have backtracked earlier, but they're they're stuck trying to go this way because it's where they already are. And I can't recall another specific passage, but it seems like they're similar. Similar problems in the two Towers, you know, like uh Frodo and Sam having to go down to go up, or having to go back to go forward and so forth. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm remembering that now. So anyway, keep the Hobbits and Orcs in mind. If you're stuck on

a problem, consider are are you hill climbing? Are you refusing to send your Hobbit and Orc back across the river even though that's what you have to do? Yeah, it's interesting. I don't think i'd heard of this before, um, but now now, I guess I'll think of all problems in my life as being uh ones where it works might potentially eat me, or one where you're the Orc and you're gonna fill up on Hobbit and ruin your dinner. You don't want to do that, all right, Well, we're

gonna go ahead and call this, uh this episode here. Um. Obviously we didn't get to, you know, get into everything about orcs within Tolkien's creations or within creations that you know come in the wake of the Lord of the Rings. Uh. So we would love to hear from everyone out there if you have particular thoughts on on anything here related to Tolkien scholarship, to you know, how we use orcs

and popular culture. You know what, what what, why we're fascinated by them, what we should be doing with them, etcetera. We you know, we're always open to hear from everybody. Uh. We're always happy to be corrected as well. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcast and wherever that happens to be. Uh. Just rate, review and subscribe. Those are great ways to

help out the show. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio Do Sir Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.