Are There Female Orcs in Middle-earth?

Q: Are There Female Orcs in Middle-earth?

ANSWER: Yes, there are female Orcs in Middle-earth. The Lord of the Rings does not specifically mention female orcs but their presence is implied. For years readers had to employ logic to show that there must be female Orcs by citing passages such as where Tolkien said “for the Orcs had life and multiplied after the manner of the Children of Iluvatar” in The Silmarillion; also, Aragorn speculates that Saruman has cross-bred the races of Men and Orcs (and there are somewhat ambiguous references to half-Orcs in The Lord of the Rings).

However, clear and definitive proof was finally made available to the public with the disclosure of the contents of the Munby letter, which was sold at auction in 2002. In the letter, Tolkien concedes to Mrs. Munby that there must indeed have been female Orcs.

The fact that Azog is the father of Bolg in The Hobbit also implies that there must have been female Orcs.

Some people (including me) have discussed whether Orcs might have raped and cross-bred with Elf-women. In fact Tolkien himself wrote at one stage that the Orcs raped Elf-women but he did not retain this explicit language throughout his later writings. Some readers draw upon essays and notes published in The History of Middle-earth to argue against the idea of such sexual activity but they do not take into consideration the inconsistencies between Tolkien’s personal musings and his stories.

Careful readers will keep in mind that there is no true “Middle-earth canon”. Picking and choosing between the various texts to support particular points of view leads to what Tolkien scholar Carl Hostetter has labeled “conflation and circularity”. In other words, it is a logical fallacy to use an absence of denial on Tolkien’s part to argue that something must have been “true”.

Hence, so far as Orc-women are concerned Tolkien appears to have been completely consistent in either describing normal sexual behavior among Orcs or implying it; and the Munby letter only agrees with what appears in the published stories. We can thus be more certain and definitive in saying there were indeed female Orcs than we can be concerning either the origins of Orcs or their ability to cross-breed with Elves and Men.

Female Orcs Will Appear in Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Although not canonical with respect to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the Amazon TV show is set in the Second Age and includes female orc characters. The show’s female orcs won’t be a point of contention with fans of the books who may nit-pick over other details about Middle-earth.