As you may be able to deduce from my avatar, I am a great fan of the Orcs of Moria and of the Misty Mountains. So it was with trepidation that I read that the Mountain Orcs were under the heading of 'independant civilizations'. What does this mean? Will I be able to play as my favourite race or not?

By the way, if there is a thread for asking questions, I have overlooked it and am very sorry. If I am posting in the wrong place, please move/trash this thread. Thanks.

You will not be able to begin a game as a minor civilization in random map games, but you will be able to begin, for instance, as the forces of Sauron, and ally yourself with them to the point where you will gain control of the mountain orcs.

In scenarios, a designer can design the game so that you can play as the orcs of the misty and grey mountains.

Also, may I ask why you have placed that red rune over our avatar? What file did you change when you made this image - did you paint over our eye or something?

Excellent. What about multiplayer games?

I did - it looked too busy with the rune and the eye, and I wanted to keep the rune to introduce an element of customisation.

Is there anything wrong with that?

AFAIK, no orcs inhabited Moria, and they were just send there to
1. Kill Balin and his dwarves
2. Kill the fellowship
I think this because of a qoute of Galadriel (not entirely a qoute, something i vaguely remember

Wasn't there a small civilisation in Moria?

Actually the Orcs had occupied Moria - this is one of the reasons why they had the Dwarf Goblin Wars! Azog killed Thror when he entered.

Well said, Gilluin. The Orcs of Moria were, I believe, a community of uruks from all over who had found their way there and just kept on breedin'... they worshipped the Balrog, and Sauron decided that as the more Orcs there were in Middle Earth the better, what was he to lose? He knew that they weren't ordered enough to pose a threat to him, but he sent spies to keep an eye on them anyway, and to suggest things like 'block the High Pass when the Last Alliance comes through', but using motives that would appeal to the Morian Orcs.
That is my belief.

But anyway, what about multiplayer?

What applies to random map games also goes for MP so you'll have to gain control over them first.

Re: the avatar. Just ask next time you want to use some of our artwork. It's all original.

Alternatively if you truly want to "customize" your avatar you could just make an original as well.



Black_op speaks the truth about MP.

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Well, I am not so sure about that ... where did you read that Moria Orcs were Uruks? I thought they rather were the contrary of Uruks ...

The masses were probably normal orcs, but no doubt their elites were uruk. For example, the Orkish chieftain, tall as a man, that fights against the Fellowship in Mazarbul, was no doubt an Uruk. I think it's explicitly said that there were "black Uruks of Mordor" (which IMO doesn't mean they had come from Mordor, but rather that that's where the Uruk-hai originated).

By the end of the TA, pretty much every Orkish community would have Uruks in charge.

I agree with this, but one thing to keep in mind is that regular orcs come in various sizes and just because one is man height doesn't mean it is an Uruk. There is mention in HoME and LoTR of Orcs of large size well before Uruks came about. I don't expect it was any different for the mountain orcs of Moria. Although I don't discount the possibility that there were indeed Uruks there and Azog himself may have been one!

The word 'uruk' just means 'orc' in Orkish (Black Speech). When I refer to 'uruk-hai', I am talking about the larger, black-skinned breed. When I refer to 'uruks', I am talking about the original orcs.

Re: the avatar again
I will do so. I just need to alter an av I made elsewhere.

Ok, fair enough, but Tolkien himself made the distinction, he used orcs and goblins when he meant the lesser orcs, and he used uruk usually as "black uruks of Mordor" referring to more elite, thick-skinned, orcs that were usually leaders and good withstand the sun more than other orcs.

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I quite agree with Adam here ... Uruks, Orcs and Goblins, although somehow similar, were not the same ... as if you compared pre-First Age Orcs and post-First Age Orcs ... or Druedain, Hobbits and Numenoreans ... all presumably belonging to the Race of Men, but rather different.

O_o Hobbits belong to the Race of Men?

And Tolkien specifically stated (look at the preface to The Hobbit) that goblins were exactly and completely the same as orcs. But yes, there are some hazy lines over 'uruk' - Gandalf refers to 'black Uruks of Mordor' to talk about 'large and evil' orcs in Moria, but in the Appendices (and/or The Silmarillion) he says that 'uruk' was the orcs' name for themselves. So that's rather ambiguous.

You know, I've done a ridiculous amount of work on this Ardaquenta. It just strikes me now - half the articles are mine...

We appreciate it and hope more will follow in your wake, keep it up

Actually, there's no reason to believe that. Uruk, as a Black Speech word (which is not Orkish), is only attested referring to the Uruk-hai. The original Elvish word meant simply "orc" (and before that, "horror"), but it didn't necessarily mean the same in Black Speech. For this reason, I think that when Tolkien writes that there were 'black Uruks of Moria', he referred to Orcs of Uruk-hai race.

Heh, then I guess I could be completely wrong. What does it say exactly?

And yes, 'goblin' and 'orc' mean exactly the same. Tolkien used 'goblin' in The Hobbit because the narration didn't originally take place in Middle-earth (where Orcs had already existed for some 20 years by the time The Hobbit was published), and 'goblin' was more readily understandable for English speakers. In The Lord of the Rings, 'goblin' (I think; I don't have the English version!) appears only once, as a pejorative word that the Mouth of Sauron uses to refer to the halflings.

Rationalizing this, I'd say 'goblin' represents a dialectal hobbit word for 'goblin', that wasn't Westron, and that Bilbo used in his original tale. Much like the word 'hobbit' itself.

Indeed, but after the battle of Azanulbizar, both sides were battered so much that they both abandoned Moria.


I doubt that. Why would they run away screaming and in fear if they would worship the Balrog? As stated above, I don't think they kept on breeding in Moria, because they left it, probably for Gundabad.


Indeed, and Uruk-Hai means Orc-People. Uruk Hai was just a name for a horde of orcs or something like that. The kind that Saruman "made" were (other than showed in the movie) just Uruks, or so I believe. Saruman DID do something though. He mixed the race of men and goblins (another time they appear in LOTR, Sukkit, next to the time in Moria. The movies weren't so wrong, but they thought orcs and goblins were different races), where the southener that Frodo sees in Bree is an exemple of.

Ah, but it says (somewhere) that evil things again began to breed in the deep places of the world. The Dwarf/Goblin wars were quite a long time before the War of the Ring - two centuries or more.

If God (or his nearest equivalent to non-Christians) appeared in front of you, would you run away in screaming and in fear? For the second point, see above.

This isn't confirmed anywhere - it's a suspicion of Treebeard's. 'Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!' Although I too thought that he mentioned goblins, or goblin-men.
The uruk-hai, interestingly, never refer to themselves as 'the uruk-hai' - always 'the fighting uruk-hai'. This seems to support the bit about 'a horde of orcs or something' - perhaps the fighting uruk-hai are different from the worker uruk-hai? - the fighting orc-division and the worker orc-division?

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do not share your opinion, but do not have time to argument my point ... ...
As for their worshipping the Balrog, I think that Orcs of Moria did not worship the Balrog, but he was their Lord, their Master, the same way he was when Morgoth was still the President of Angband Inc.
The Balrog of Moria operates some kind of power over them and they have the obey, because of fear, the same way they obeyed the Balrogs in the First Age and Morgoth before he Fell.

Well a lot of my opinions have come from ElendorMUSH, and there the Morian Orcs have a shamanistic religion devoted to the Balrog. There you go. The whole thing is basically an enigma upon which we can but speculate, as Tolkien wrote almost nothing on the Orcs of Moria.

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Well, I am not sure Elendor MUSH = JRR Tolkien ...
and althought Tolkien did not write much about the Orcs of Moria and the way they worshipped (if ever they did so), he wrote quite a substancial amount of works about First Age Orcs under the rule of Morgoth. My opinion is that it must not have changed over the years ... Balrgos were not worshipped, but incredibly feared by the hords of Orcs in Moria. Maybe they worshipped (is that a correct word for Morgoth?) Melkor in a way ... but that is not sure.
In essence, I don't think there was much difference between Orcs of Moria and Orcs of wherever else in Middle-Earth regarding this matter.

About the worshipping part: I believe that two orcs that argue in Mordor, the two that Sam and Frodo overhear, really want to have the 'good old times' back. That is, the time before Sauron bossed them around and they could do their own: a little plunder here and there, but no war. So it's likely they don't worship him, it's just that if they don't work for him, they would be considered against him, and thus a potential target (=dead).

The same could be applied I think, to the Balrog.

Hmm, there indeed are two classes of orcs. The snaga's (I don't think it's a name of an orc, because in LOTR there somewhere was stated THE snaga), and those who called themselves the Uruks (Also in LOTR: a battalion of heavily armored Uruks from Mordor).

I agree with Drashkurz. They probably did worship the balrog. I mean, look at gollum. Tolkien stated directly in The Choices of master Samwise (Two Towers) that Golum worshipped Shelob. Somehow I don't thing it was because she was kind to him. It is far more likely that he was scared to death of her and what she could do to him. Even if you wouldn't run away screaming from your god, your god is (hopefully) not a 5 meter-tall monster with a flaming whip and a red-hot sword.

I believe you are wrong. Gollum didn't really worship Shelob, he pretended to go and fetch her some food, so she would let him go. It wasn't his intention in the first place to actually return. She got in handy when Gollum tried to get rid of the Hobbits. He USED her, to gain the ring. I wouldn't certainly try to use a god.

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As said previously, I agree with Mithrandil, but I totally disagree with Drashkurz and Radagast ...
the Gollum/Shelob issue cannot be seen as follower/god ...
Gollum does not believe in anything ... except maybe in the punishment he will receive from Sauron or Shelob ... He only sees Shelob as a mighty animal ...

Glad to have loyal followers

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You are welcome ... after all, Mithrandir was the greatest of the Istari, and Radagast was a mere farmer in comparison !!!!

Please note that your dear Mithrandir would either be dead or a prisoner of Saruman without Radagast's (my ) intervention on the part of the eagles. he was just as critical to the story as Boromir was!

And none of it would have mattered if B&L hadn't broken Melkor's stranglehold on the hope of the world

Also, Radagast, yes, it was you who got Gandalf out of that mess, but you also got him into said mess

You have a point.

Goblins are exactly the same as Orcs. It says so in the Hobbit:
Orc is not an English word. It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated to goblin (or hobgoblin for the larger kinds). Orc in the hobbits' form of the name given at that time to these creatures, and is not connected at all with our orc, ork, applied to sea-animals of the dolphin-kind.

No, that does mean they're different, if not very.



(My emphasis) What this statement means is that Goblins are a type of Orc, perhaps the majority of Orcs, but that the larger types, called Hobgoblins in the Hobbit and Uruks in LotR, are still Orcs but are not (colloquially) called Goblins.

If we speak of sub-breeds of different races, using the term 'goblin' to refer to the smaller kinds of Orcs, distinguishing them from their larger bretheren, is a perfectly valid and Tolkienian use of the term.

My opinion on this has always been that "goblin" represents a purely dialectal word for "orc", used only in the Shire, and that Bilbo used in his book, while Frodo would have used the standard Westron word for "orc". I don't think it's reasonable to assume that "goblin" would be a general word for the small orcs, since it's never (IIRC) used in LotR in that way. In my opinion it's better to dismiss the words "goblin" and "hobgoblin" altogether. And as far as I know there's no basis to assume that hobgoblin = uruk either, because all of this is an a posteriori rationalization, and Tolkien didn't think of any of this when he was writing The Hobbit (in his legends he always wrote "Orc").

Very true, Beren. The term Goblins is specifically used for the Orcs of Moria. I realise there are differences just as there are different Trolls. My point is that generally, Goblin differences are greatly exaggerated. Especially by people like Peter Jackson. He takes too many things literally. For example: Sauron is a flaming eye in the movie, just because he was refered to as The Eye. It is no more diffeent than Saruman being a hand.

Frodo does literally see the Eye (or an impression of the Eye), in Galadriel's mirror in the book. The question I guess is whether or not the Eye that Frodo sees and Sauron's actual eye is an actual manifestation or object, or merely a metaphor. Sam also claims that the "[dark] Tower has an Eye in it" (RotK, VI, 2, I think). This still leaves the possibility that the Eye is a metaphor.

One thing that we do know, and this is different from the movies, is that Sauron has an actual humanoid figure, as well as any other manifestations (including possibly the Eye) that he might otherwise possess. Gollum in particular has seen Sauron, and recalls that the Dark Lord has only nine fingers, the tenth presumably being the one that Isildur cut off. So, whatever the Eye is, it is not the physical form of Sauron's body, or at least not the only form that Sauron can take.

Read this article, I think it might help:
http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/default.htm?h...auronshape.html