Why Did Sauron Not Give Rings of Power to the Orcs?

Q: Why Did Sauron Not Give Rings of Power to the Orcs?

ANSWER: The answer to this question may appear to be obvious to some people but I think the question raises some interesting secondary points. Before we explore those secondary points let’s look at the obvious answer by recapping Sauron’s history with the Rings of Power.

Disguising himself as a “good” Maia, Annatar (“Lord of Gifts”), Sauron presented himself as a friend to the Eldar and emissary from Valinor. According to posthumously published material in Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, Galadriel did not recognize Annatar and suspected that he was not who he claimed to be.  But all we know from the various texts, including “The Tale of Years” in The Lord of the Rings, is that Sauron persuaded the Elves of Eregion (specifically Celebrimbor’s Gwaith-i-Mirdain) to work with him.

Sauron taught them the basics of “ring-lore”, the full purpose and extent of which Tolkien never really explained.  Elrond said that the Elves wanted to achieve healing, understanding, and making.  In one of his letters Tolkien said that the Elves wanted to heal the hurts of Middle-earth but also to create a Valinor-like paradise for themselves in Middle-earth.  Each of the Great Rings enhanced or magnified the powers of whomever wore it.  These Rings thus made it possible for the Elves to achieve their goal.

…They wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people, above wild Elves, dwarves, and Men, was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor. They thus became obsessed with ‘fading’, the mode in which the changes of time (the law of the world under the sun) was perceived by them. They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming – even though they also retained the old motive of their kind, the adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts…

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter No. 131

It was only later, after he made the One Ring to rule the others, that Sauron gained the ability to enslave the wearers of the other rings and learn whatever they had done with those rings.  The One Ring alone, therefore, would have been sufficient for Sauron to enslave the Ringbearers when they were elves.

Hence, Sauron’s original goal was to use the Rings of Power to ensnare and enslave the elves.  He already commanded the Orcs; they were his slaves or nearly so.  He didn’t need to use other devices to secure control over them.  Morgoth had effectively ruined the Orcs to the point where Sauron could become their master in Morgoth’s absence.  It’s conceivable (but not provable based on available texts) that Sauron’s ability to command and control the Orcs was improved by the One Ring. Perhaps he did not have completely effective control over them before the One Ring enhanced Sauron’s own power.

In section (I) of Essay VII in “Myths Transformed” (Morgoth’s Ring, Volume 10 of The History of Middle-earth), J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that “Sauron was ‘greater’, effectively, in the Second Age than Morgoth at the end of the First.”  Further on in that book, in a text Christopher Tolkien identified as “Appendix C to Quendi and Eldar, ‘Elvish Names for the Orcs'”, JRRT wrote:

It is true, of course, that Morgoth held the Orcs in dire thraldom; for in their corruption they had lost almost all possibility of resisting the domination of his will. So great indeed did its pressure upon them become ere Angband fell that, if he turned his thought towards them, they were conscious of his ‘eye’ wherever they might be; and when Morgoth was at last removed from Arda the Orcs that survived in the West were scattered, leaderless and almost witless, and were for a long time without control or purpose.

This servitude to a central will that reduced the Orcs almost to an ant-like life was seen even more plainly in the Second and Third Ages under the tyranny of Sauron, Morgoth’s chief lieutenant. Sauron indeed achieved even greater control over his Orcs than Morgoth had done. He was, of course, operating on a smaller scale, and he had no enemies so great and so fell as were the Noldor in their might in the Elder Days. But he had also inherited from those days difficulties, such as the diversity of the Orcs in breed and language, and the feuds among them; while in many places in Middle-earth, after the fall of Thangorodrim and during the concealment of Sauron, the Orcs recovering from their helplessness had set up petty realms of their own and had become accustomed to independence. Nonetheless Sauron in time managed to unite them all in unreasoning hatred of the Elves and of Men who associated with them; while the Orcs of his own trained armies were so completely under his will that they would sacrifice themselves without hesitation at his command. And he proved even more skilful than his Master also in the corruption of Men who were beyond the reach of the Wise, and in reducing them to a vassalage, in which they would march with the Orcs, and vie with them in cruelty and destruction. It is thus probably to Sauron that we may look for a solution of the problem of chronology. Though of immensely smaller native power than his Master, he remained less corrupt, cooler and more capable of calculation. At least in the Elder Days, and before he was bereft of his lord and fell into the folly of imitating him, and endeavouring to become himself supreme Lord of Middle-earth. While Morgoth still stood, Sauron did not seek his own supremacy, but worked and schemed for another, desiring the triumph of Melkor, whom in the beginning he had adored. He thus was often able to achieve things, first conceived by Melkor, which his master did not or could not complete in the furious haste of his malice.

The emphasis provided is mine.  Tolkien does not explain how Sauron achieved this superior control over the Orcs.  However, by the end of the Second Age Sauron is clearly benefiting from long-term use of the One Ring, which he made during the middle of the Age.  I don’t think we can or need argue that the One Ring gave Sauron control over the Orcs, but I do think it’s reasonable to say he was able to cement his control over them because of the One Ring.  It was through the One Ring alone that Sauron was able to corrupt the vast majority of the Numenoreans.

And yet Sauron gave nine Rings of Power to men, of whom three were Numenoreans (according to Tolkien).  If Sauron didn’t need to use the Nine to control the people of Numenor, what did he gain by handing out the Nine to any men at all?  We are told in “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” that the men who received the Nine became great kings and sorcerers. They used their Rings of Power to “make magic” and to dominate kingdoms among men.

Sauron therefore needed emissaries to go among Men and cow them into submission.  He didn’t need those kinds of servants among the Orcs.  Men must therefore have been harder to subjugate to his will.  In Numenor Sauron was in close proximity to the men he corrupted.  In Middle-earth men were scattered far and wide and they were not nearly as amenable to his influence as were the Orcs.

Hence, Sauron distributed the Rings of Power where he hoped they would achieve the most for him through agents.  The Seven failed to corrupt the Dwarves into his service, although Tolkien concedes obliquely that some Dwarves fell into evil.  He does not contradict his statements in The Lord of the Rings and “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” that the Dwarves could not be corrupted directly to Sauron’s service; but he leaves open the possibility that any Dwarves who fell into evil might be easier for Sauron to subjugate without Rings of Power.

When Gloin tells his story at the Council of Elrond he says that Sauron’s emissary (presumably either the Mouth of Sauron or one of the Ringwraiths) offers up three of the Seven Rings of Power to Dain II Ironfoot.  We know that dragons had destroyed some of the Rings and that Sauron had only captured the last of the Seven from Thrain a little more than 100 years before.  Why would Sauron feel compelled to offer Dain three Rings of Power?  Would he be able to negotiate with two other Dwarf-kings if he offered Dain only one ring?

This brings up the question of what happened to the other Dwarf kings.  We know the seven houses had united in a war against the Orcs to avenge the murder of Thror.  The Dwarves were thus capable of working together.  But the other six houses also rejected Thrain’s proposal that they reclaim Moria (in which they had no claim).  Durin’s Folk was thus left homeless.  In “Of Dwarves and Men”, an essay published in The Peoples of Middle-earth, Volume 12 of The History of Middle-earth, Tolkien suggests that the four eastern groups of Dwarves were the ones to fall into evil.  Hence, by the end of the Third Age we can infer that the Broadbeams and Firebeards of the far west were still “good” folk, perhaps because of their proximity to the Eldar and the Dunedain.  But they had long since lost their ancestral mansions.

We know from the appendices in The Lord of the Rings that many of those Dwarves had settled in Khazad-dum before it was destroyed by the Balrog.  I have long and often wondered if the kings of those two Dwarven peoples did not enter into some sort of arrangement with the kings of Durin’s Line.  That would make sense.  It would also help to explain why Sauron offered three rings to Dain.  While he might only have three rings left, it could be that Sauron was implying Dain could re-establish old alliances that would allow Durin’s Folk to become great again.  I’m not saying that Dain could have retaken Moria, because the Balrog had already destroyed the Dwarves’ civilization there more than a thousand years before when, presumably, Durin’s Folk was still strengthened by the descendants of the Broadbeams and Firebeards.

The Rings of Power that Sauron gave to his servants thus sealed feudal relationships between Sauron and those servants.  He needed no such relationships with the Orcs, who served as his soldiers.  They were already “his” in every way.  They gave up or lost their independence as Sauron reasserted his will over them.  The Rings were more than just symbols, they were tools of authority, and Sauron had in some way “perverted” them (according to Tolkien) after he took possession of them.  Readers argue whether this means Sauron literally changed the nature of the Rings but I think that’s the wrong argument.  If the Nine and the Seven were anything like the One Ring at all they must have been capable of acting with some measure of independence; they had “will” of a sort, and Sauron only need bend those wills to his purpose in order to pervert them.

Hence, the Nine and the Seven could be used to assume command and control over other beings, if those beings were vulnerable to such control.  Dwarves were not but men were.  And yet Sauron’s open offer of restoring three Great Rings to the Dwarves was an overture with strong implications.  Dain would in effect be accepting Sauron’s overlordship, at least politically.  Accepting the Rings would have been an acknowledgement of Sauron’s power.  And, again, Sauron needed no such special arrangement with the Orcs.

There were “rebel Uruk-hai” who had given their allegiance to Saruman.  We don’t know how Saruman came to recruit Orcs to his service but he did make his own Ring of Power after devoting many years of study to the lore of the Rings.  It seems reasonable that Saruman used his Ring to persuade one tribe of Uruks to switch allegiances.  If he persuaded them to accept him as an emissary of Mordor (presumably without revealing his ring) he could have used his enhanced power to increase his influence and control over them gradually as the years passed.  Tolkien implies that Saruman does exert his will over the Orcs from a distance when Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas observe hos difficult it is for them to overtake the Orcs who have seized Merry and Pippin: “There is some will that lends speed to our foes and sets an unseen barrier before us: a weariness that is in the heart more than in the limb,” Aragorn says.

I think the poor Orcs were simply in no position to resist the Maiaric wills of Sauron and Saruman, even though Sauron lost the One Ring at the end of the Second Age.  By that point the Orcs had already become his slaves and Sauron remained in rapport with the Ring even though he was never quite sure of where it was again.  That would be a testimony to Sauron’s power (compared to Saruman’s) and it would explain why Saruman fell so easily to Sauron’s will when they finally engaged via the Palantiri.  Saruman may already have made his ring, which could have left him vulnerable to Sauron’s influence, but maybe Sauron didn’t need any help in dominating (or maybe only intimidating) Saruman.

Saruman retained a measure of some independence and free will even while wearing his ring.  He was quite strong, stronger than Isildur (who succumbed to the One Ring’s temptation).  But Saruman could not fully resist Sauron.  And if Saruman could not fully resist Sauron then the Orcs surely could not, and therefore Sauron did not need to reinforce his authority over the Orcs via any special ringbearer.

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