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But who exactly were the Orcs? Were they based
on actual beings? Since the action of the stories is set in the remote
past, there is a strong case for believing that they were Neanderthal
men who fought for supremacy against Homo sapiens in Western Europe
during the last Ice Age.
The Neanderthals were distant cousins of modern man,
differing from us as the mammoth differed from the elephant, both
descending from a strain that originated in East Africa about half a
million years ago. They drifted apart and gradually became two distinct
types. The Neanderthals colonised Europe, while our ancestors migrated
to Asia. Then about 50,000 years ago, modern men arrived in Europe and
found that they had company. It was the first and only time that we
shared the planet with another human species.
It does not seem to have been a happy encounter. More
than a century ago, H.G. Wells gave a glimpse of the conflicts of our
ancestors and the Neanderthals in his frightening short story ``The
Grisly Folk.''
``The steps of the humans were dogged. The legends of
ogres and man-eating giants that haunt the childhood of the world may
descend to us from those ancient days of fear. Generation after
generation, that long struggle for existence went on. Thousands of
fights and hunts, sudden murders and headlong escapes there were amidst
the caves and thickets of that chill and windy world.''
Then, very suddenly, about 35,000 years ago, the
Neanderthals vanished. Their fossils exist in plenty from before that
time, but none after it. The long war appears to have been won. In the
words of Paul Pettitt, senior archaeologist at Oxford University's
Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, their disappearance ``may have been the
result of modern man's first and most successful deliberate campaign of
genocide.''
Incredibly, some academics believe that humans and
Neanderthals co-existed peacefully. Humanity's warlike record surely
belies this idea. It has been estimated that in the past three and a
half millennia of recorded history, only 280 of those years have been
free of major wars. How, in competing for the sparse hunting grounds and
riverside caves of the barren glacial landscape, the two species could
have refrained from conflict is hard to imagine.
Other events in Tolkien's stories could surely not
have been invented. The evil dragon Smaug, in The Hobbit, sleeps
in a cave on a huge pile of stolen treasure. Although intelligent, he
makes no attempt to sell it or trade with it; he just sits on it.
Astonishing to relate, there is a precedent for this
kind of animal behaviour. Long ago there existed a giant bird that
scientists have called Titanis. Larry Marshall, of the Institute of
Human Origins at Berkeley, California, calls it ``the most dangerous
bird that ever existed.'' Shaped like a ostrich but about 12 feet tall,
it would run faster than a horse, striking down its victims with talons
before ripping them apart with its hooked beak.
True, it was not green, it couldn't fly, and it did
not exhale fire. But it did, at least according to Herodotus,
have a great love for gold and precious stones. Like Smaug, these
animals sat on heaps of it.
Ancient tales, he says, spoke of a people called the
Arimaspians who lived in Scythia in the Crimea. They were at constant
war with these ``gryphons'', fighting and dying to recover from them the
hoarded gold. It is a similar story to the eleventh labour of Hercules,
who had to kill the ``dragons'' that guarded the golden apples in the
Garden of Hesperides.
What matters is not whether these stories were true,
but that ancient peoples believed them and that they became legends.
Hence the inspiration for the journey of Bilbo and the Dwarfs to Smaug's
lair under the Lonely Mountain.
Whether he intended to make it clear or not,
Tolkien's stories are clearly set in the last Ice Age, a bleak period
100,000 years long. When the Noldor sailed to Middle Earth in pursuit of
Morgoth, they encountered what seems a vivid description of a glacial
North Atlantic: ``...vast fogs and mists of deathly cold, and the
sea-streams were filled with clashing hills of ice and the grinding of
ice deep-sunken.''
Some things never change. Sauron is described as ``a
sorcerer of dreadful power, master of shadows and of phantoms, foul in
wisdom, cruel in strength, misshaping what he touched, twisting what he
ruled, lord of werewolves; his dominion was torment.'' There is a
familiarity here to the way political leaders always talk about each
other in times of conflict.
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