Even Tolkien was never really sure where orcs came from

polygon.com:

This week’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power delves into the deepest of Tolkien lore and the far-flung dawn of sentient life on Middle-earth to touch on a question not even the professor himself could answer: Where do orcs come from?

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power episode 6.]

Many plot threads collide in “Udûn,” the third-to-last episode in the first season of Rings of Power — most notably for our purposes, Galadriel comes face to face with Adar, the elf-like being whom the orcs besieging Ostirith call father.

“When I was a child,” she tells him, meaning a very, very long time ago, “I heard stories of elves taken by Morgoth; tortured, twisted, made into a new and ruined form of life. You are one of them, are you not? The Moriondor. The sons of the dark. The first orcs.” To her, orcs are “a mistake, made in mockery” of life.

Adar replies that he prefers to be called an “uruk,” and insists that his “children” have no master, no longer work for Sauron or Morgoth, and deserve their own place in the — well, not in the sun, exactly. “Each one has a name,” he counters her, “a heart. We are creations of the One, Master of the Secret Fire, the same as you. As worthy of the breath of life and just as worthy of a home.”

With this scene, Rings of Power is picking up a puzzle box not even Tolkien solved: The origin of orcs. But before we talk about the lore at work here, let’s define some of those very Middle-earth terms Adar threw out there.

“Uruk” is a sound familiar to anyone who remembers the menacing uruk-hai of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It simply means “orc” in the Black Speech of Mordor, which is another way of saying it’s what orcs call