e to the evils of World War I that Tolkien experienced along with Owen and Sassoon on the front lines. This instantly designates them as the one-dimensional ‘other’ that the fellowship have to defeat. The fellowship being small in number allows for personalization of the fellowship members, giving the reader knowledge of their names and ranks thereby creating an invested interest in their livelihood.
The fellowship and the Orcs relationship mirrors the “Us and Them” mentality in Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. At the time George Sherston enlists in the war there is a clear distinction between the higher class of officers and those who worked to be promoted to the rank of officer. The higher classes’ uniforms distinguished them from officers that were of lower class. Those of lower classes had cheaper yellow shirts and those of the upper crust were able to purchase higher quality material thereby visually representing class status in the midst of war. Those of lower ranks of the British WWI army are referred to as NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers), they are acknowledged only in large numbers and never given specific titles or names. This created a gap between the classes. Tolkien does not escape this mentality in his fantasy world between the fellowship and the Orcs. The Orcs are designed to be the lower, nameless class like the NCOs and the fellowship embody the personalized higher class officers. Just like how the officers condemned the NCOs’ ability to climb up the social hierarchy to become officers, so does the fellowship oppress the Orcs in their attempt to gain advancement in Middle-Earth. Tolkien is then continually enforcing the Orcs being lesser than the fellowship in a similar way in which he would have observed oppression of lower class NCOs.
Tolkien persists on the dehumanization of the Orcs through the hellish physical mutilation of the race. This is similar to descriptions of the tragic injuries endured by many soldiers in World War I as represented in the poetry by Owen and Sassoon. This only creates a clearer binary of good and evil in the fellowship’s interactions with them: clearly asserting the Orcs as separate from the heroes. The Orcs have been a threat militarily to the fellowship, but in Moria we are introduced to a ‘subspecies’ called the Uruks of Mordor, that are “large and evil” (Tolkien 338).
The Uruks are described as “man-high”, as having a “broad flat face,” and eyes like “coal” (Tolkien 339). In contrast from the dark features his “tongue is red”. By saying he is “man-high” disassociates the Uruk from the men making him an ‘other,’ and therefore removing any quality that could have granted the Uruks a characteristic a reader could relate to. As a result this pushes the fellowship closer to the ‘Us’ and the Orcs closer to the ‘other’. The physical description of the Orc’s face and eyes give us a demonic depiction and asserts them as “evil” (Tolkien 338). The Orcs are then repeatedly described in the same way Owen encapsulates the physical harm soldiers underwent in trench warfare. Wilfred Owen in “Dulce Et Decorum Est” focuses on the eyes to emphasize the “all blind” and “eyes withering” to illustrate the effects of gas ─ a new industrial, biological weapon introduced in World War I ─ on his fellow soldiers (Lines 6 & 19). The “incurable sores on innocent tongues” of Owen’s poem are seen in the Orcs in Moria through Tolkien directing particular attention to the red tongue (Line 24). The Orcs are the race that experience the physical consequences of violence unlike the fellowship that remain untainted physically from the violence they engage in with the Orcs in Moria.
Dwarf Mines turned World War I Trenches
The fellowship represents the high-class officers’ first experiences with the mutilated sights of trench warfare in their escape from the depths of Moria. “The Rear-Guard” by Siegfried Sassoon is a poem that incorporates the same experiences as those of the fellowship. His poem is from his own experiences in World War I on the Hindenburg Line in April 1917. The narrator of