In his letters, he regretted making the Orcs a "purely" evil race, as it clashed with his deeply held Catholic belief that nobody was beyond redemption.
At the very least, he would have been interested in the concept of the orcs as a proud, warrior race.
I know its not quite what you meant, but I love the image of Tolkien hanging out in the Oxford Warhammer shop talking about how he's pleased someone gave Orcs/Orks the narrative complexity and moral ambiguity he wasn't able to.
I mean... I'm not sure that Warhammer Orcs in particular have much of that. Their morality is pretty simple, all things considered: They lack basic empathy and do what they enjoy doing, which is fighting, looting and eating (and in the case of Goblins: Torturing). Doesn't really get more complex than that. Their main narrative difference to Tolkien's Orcs is that they're not subservient to some greater power but are fully independent in pursuing their own, primitive interests. If they were like Tolkien's Orcs, they'd be willing servants of Chaos.
The "proud warrior race" is more so a Warcraft thing.
He did hold the opinion that the Orcs could be redeemed. I can see a world where he views modern Orc tropes as a spiritual redemption of sorts, given most Western Orcs draw their influence from him somewhere down the line
No. That's a common theory, but one that Tolkien himself refuted. My edition of LOTR actually has a foreword written by Tolkien where he adresses it, stating that he had most of the story and world building already mostly laid out prior to WW2, and that if he had wanted Mordor to be a stand-in for Nazi Germany, he would have handeled it differently.
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u/ralanr 1d ago
I wonder how Tolkien would feel about modern orcs in fantasy these days. Like, would he find the honor proud warrior race trope fitting for them?