Q: Are Orcs, Trolls and Dragons immortal, unless killed?
ANSWER: There is no canonical answer to a question like this. Even if you wanted to cherry-pick answers from Tolkien’s unpublished writings you could structure arguments both ways as far as the Orcs are concerned.
Stone trolls apparently were not really living, but could they have been permanently animated if they were never exposed to sunlight? I suppose that depends on who enchanted them in the first place. Tolkien does not explain their origins.
People who want to go delving into The Book of Lost Tales for answers can at best only answer this question as it pertains to Tolkien’s mythology for England (The Book of Lost Tales) and not as it pertains to The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
There are hints that dragons might be of a mortal kindred, at least in that Smaug apparently ages. Glaurung also seems to age. However, their aging might be viewed as achieving full maturity just as elf children aged to full maturity and thereafter only aged very gradually because they were essentially immortal (as men perceived it).
If Orcs or Trolls bore any trace of human blood then they were indeed mortal because Tolkien had already decided that any elf-man union could only produce mortal children. It was by special grace of Ilúvatar through the Valar that Eärendil, Elwing, Elrond and Elros, and Elrond’s children were given a choice of kindred. All other half-elven characters mentioned in the stories were born mortal and died so.
If you take the point of view that Orcs were a mixture of fallen Maiar and captured Elves who had been corrupted by Melkor, and Tolkien’s later musing positing that there was a human mixture in the Elves is not canonical, then you are left with the question of just how far Melkor and Sauron could take them before they became something Ilúvatar would designate a different kind of creature in his thoughts. After all they were still what Tolkien considered to be Rational Incarnates (hence, his solution was to bind them to mortality with human blood).
If it were left up to me I would argue that they must all be mortal, even the dragons, for regardless of whether Melkor infused his servants with the spirits of Maiar or bred them from Maiar, he seems to have bred his Maiaric followers with other species. Such mixture would produce hybrid creatures like the half-elves, I believe, and therefore even if longeval they would have been mortal.
If you are interested in designing a game adventure that uses an ancient but not immortal evil creature, I think you can make it as ancient as you wish. Who is to say that an Orc cannot live for a thousand years or more? Elros lived for 500 years even though his years appear to have been extended by grace. It does not seem like Mithrellas’ children enjoyed especially long lives.
But certainly dragons lived for centuries if not for millennia. We have events from the lives of both Glaurung and Smaug to attest to their longevity.
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You believe hybrids between Maiar and other species to be mortal. What about Luthien? She certainly must have been immortal, since she could willingly give this up for Beren. Yet she was a hybrid from two immortal species.
It was because her parents were both immortals that Luthien was also immortal, but she was considered to be an elf, not a Maia, at least until the Valar had to decide her fate. We have to be careful about assuming Tolkien meant for everything that had unfolded in earlier tales would be carried forward. Still, lacking any other story all we really have to go by is Christopher’s version of events in The Silmarillion.
Given the prominence of the “Gift of Men” which was mortality throughout Tolkien’s Middle-earth philosophy, I always assumed that all races that were not specifically stated to be mortal (ie. not Men, Hobbits, or Dwarves, who also die of old age), were immortal. Otherwise the so-called “Gift” or “Doom of Men” was so generic as to not have to play such a huge role in the fiction.
But that is simply my own assumption.
Tolkien’s concept of creation was very Judeo-Christian, in that Middle Earth was created for the benefit of The Children of Ilúvatar: Elves and Men (Quenta Silmarillion, end of chapter 1). It may be helpful to look upon The Gift of Men as a key distinguishing characteristic between those favored races, rather than a characteristic of Creation as a whole.
Only the Ainur (Valar and Maiar) and Children of Ilúvatar were direct creations of Ilúvatar – the rest of Creation was a result of the Music of the Ainur – the Ainur’s variations on Ilúvatar’s initial theme. The only immortals we know of with certainty are the Ainur and Quendi (Elves). From that, I find it easy to postulate that only Ilúvatar could create immortals (Ilúvatar had to grant the Valar the power to offer immortality to the Half-Elven). All else was wrought by the Ainur, perhaps with mortality/perishability as a necessary fail-safe due to their lesser authority.
Technically it wasn’t the Music that made or enhanced anything. That merely foreshadowed what was to come. The Ainur (Valar) directly shaped Ea and things within it after the Music had ended. First there was the Music, then there was Iluvatar’s Vision, and then he created Ea based on the Vision. But each was different from its predecessor in some way. For example, Iluvatar introduces new things into Ea that were not foreshadowed in either the Music or the Vision.
I think it would be worth a thought whether orcs have diminished in greatness like all other creatures have. It would certainly be in line with an increasing percentage of human ancestry in the “evolution” of orcs.
Well, there is the Boldog commentary from Christopher Tolkien. Boldog was a recurring character J.R.R.T. eventually stopped mentioning. It’s not clear if he decided Boldog should be omitted from the stories or if Tolkien simply became too absorbed in other questions to keep adding Boldog. Boldog was supposed to be a great Orc leader/captain, probably a fallen Maia. But the character is anecdotal rather than canonical. He represented the earliest of the Orcs who were mightier in kind and spirit than their eventual descendants.
I have always wondered why Tolkien made so many of his creations at least ‘long-lived’ if not essentially immortal. It seems that every creature other than your run of the mill Man (and fauna) had an extended lifetime at the least. Even Hobbits (‘reaching 100 as often as not’). Any thoughts as to why that was?
Michael, how would a person approach a passage by Tolkien which seems all too definitive like in Morgoth’s Ring?
” Moreover, the Orcs continued to live and breed and to carry
on their business of ravaging and plundering after Morgoth was
overthrown. They had other characteristics of the Incarnates
also. They had languages of their own, and spoke among
themselves in various tongues according to differences of breed
that were discernible among them. They needed food and drink,
and rest, though many were by training as tough as Dwarves in
enduring hardship. They could be slain, and they were subject
to disease; but apart from these ills they died and were not
immortal, even according to the manner of the Quendi; indeed
they appear to have been by nature short-lived compared with
the span of Men of higher race, such as the Edain. “
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, if you just pluck Tolkien’s thoughts from among his various writings you can construct arguments either way. There is no definitive, canonical statement from Tolkien that addresses the question.
What does Immortality signify? A thousand years? ten thousand? (my def-anything that lives over 10,000 years is immortal.) Anyway to the topic. I was also under the impression that the Orcs lived short life spans(even by Human standards), although also, I have not seen a clear description. Dragons lived for centuries, and great Spiders? Shelob seems to have been thousands of years old. Trolls? I have no idea…although I assumed they lived longer than orcs.
I think the statement that a creature is immortal unless killed is slightly absurd. If a creature can be killed he/she/it isn’t immortal. The physical body just doesn’t succumb to old age or illness but it can be destructed. I always had a problem with the notion that the elves risked much more by going into battle than men/dwarves/hobbits, who would die anyway some day and leave the realms of the earth, which was their gift from God. Not so the elves. They risked to lose their most valuable asset, their ageless bodies, without being able to leave the realms of this earth.
If anything I see it as the opposite. The Elves risk LESS when they put themselves at risk. If they die they go (or should go) their spirit goes to Mandos to await being reborn. The spirits of Elves are immortal, meant to last until the world ends.
Those subject to the gift of men however only have a limited time on Middle-Earth, dying in battle is more of a tragedy because their potential to do things, great or small, is ended.
The quote from Morgoth Ring’s kinda defeats my idea, but I think the Silmarillion confirmed Orcs were perverted captured Elves. If the original Elf was immortal, wouldn’t the resulting mutation(Yrch!) also be immortal?
I think that, that may have been the case in the first few ages, but as with the elves there would have been fewer and fewer immortal orcs from all the wars that were waged. Most of the orcs in the the third age were probably descendants of men rather than elves. So they probably only lived for 50-75 years at the most. It is also probably why they couldn’t multiply faster.
Could*
I have always thought that Melkor’s corruption essentially voided the Creator’s warranty/gift of any creatures/beings corrupted and also their descendents.