Toward the end of The Rings of Power season two, episode four, the series brings us a beautiful and deeply emotional scene that meditates on some truly powerful themes. The elf Arondir, an Ent, and an Entwife find and offer one another forgiveness for wounds dealt, and a moment of peace arrives in an otherwise ominous season as healing rains fall. It’s an incredible sequence and one of the most Tolkien-esque we’ve ever seen on screen to date. Lurking in the backdrop of this momentary lightness, however, in its shadows, some might say, is the specter of darkness. But, here, specifically, that darkness takes the form of The Rings of Power‘s orcs. The orcs are directly responsible for the Ents’ pain and Arondir’s, past and present. And still, the juxtaposition of their presence against the idea of forgiveness and serenity invokes one of the most complicated series of questions that The Rings of Power has proposed for itself. Are the orcs deserving of healing? Can they find forgiveness? And should they get to know peace?
It’s clear we’re meant to share in the heartbreak of the Ents as they mourn the destruction of their forest. And we undoubtedly do. The Ents’ pain manifests as grief in broader strokes, over the destruction of nature, and grief in more emotional strokes, over the loss of family. It’s great pain and all too resonant in both regards. It feels impossible not to ache with the Ents as they recount sundering and felling, burning and snapping. The Entwife Winterbloom wails in pain when Arondir speaks of the orcs to her. And her husband, the Ent Snaggleroot, tells Arondir, “Winterbloom nourished many of those trees from seed and sprout. Do not ask her to speak more of it.” In short, Winterbloom and Snaggleroot appear to us as grieving parents. Winterbloom has lost children.
But intended by the narrative or not, this invocation of children in the scene evokes another grief for another set of children. Indeed, grief for the culprits of destruction themselves, the orcs. After all, The Rings of Power has taken great pains to link the orcs, or Uruk, as they prefer we call them, with the idea of children. The character of Adar’s very name, which means Father in elvish, reminds us constantly that at least one figure sees the orcs as children. And so when there is mention of offspring and a conversation about orcs at once, the concept becomes especially highlighted. In this case, the scene with the Ents sets up a fascinating dichotomy: that of trees as children and orcs as children.
It might be easy in this moment of great grief when a tearful Ent is discussing its burned offspring to imagine trees as children and the great injustice done to the forest by the orcs. It is harder, it seems, to do so when it’s a single tear in Adar’s scarred face. But ultimately, The Rings of Power presents the question, is an elf felling an orc different than an orc felling a tree?
The Ents say that the orcs were “maiming and murdering as they marched.” And that is wince-inducing. But not so long ago, it feels quite certain that orcs were saying the same thing about Galadriel and the elves. When season one of The Rings of Power began, the elves seemed quite sure they had meaningfully eradicated the orcs. Galadriel even says, “To the ends of the earth we hunted Sauron.” (Orcs implied.) And Elrond asks Galadriel, “Do you truly believe seeking [Sauron] out will satisfy you? That one more orc upon the point of your blade will bring you peace?” The implication here is that there have been quite a few on the point of that blade already. And that some portion Galadriel’s peace has been won by spilling that blood, the blood of Adar’s children, in great quantities.
Though Galadriel is not at peace, she has known it. As have Ents. And that’s what allows them both to mourn the loss of it. The Ents grieve the destruction of their forest, their home. They wish for it to be untouched; they wish for it to be left alone. They wish for it to be able to heal to its fullest form and them with it. But, ultimately, that’s what the orcs seek as well on The Rings of Power, though blindly. Their entire journey has been about finding a home where they can settle, rest, and stop the long journey of enduring, knowing that they are finally safe. They are on a quest for a peace they have never tasted.
The orcs here have hurt nature, and it is easy to empathize with nature being so hurt. But are the orcs not too part of nature, though nature turns its back on them? Adar tells Galadriel, “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.” Adar essentially tells Galadriel that he and the orcs are a part of nature and that they, too, have “a heart, a name.” The presence of orc babies in season two of The Rings of Power further underscores this. Does an orc baby breathe its first breath desiring to fell a tree? Probably not. But an orc baby does not ever know the peace the Ents and their tree children know. From an orc’s first moment of existence, the very progenitor of nature, the sun itself, shuns them, burns them as aberrations. And so, why should the orcs take nature into their hearts? One might even propose that without ever fully having known peace, it is quite difficult for Uruk to understand the ways in which their ruination of it deeply wounds.
For the orcs, there’s a very real sense of generational trauma in place, a perpetuating cycle of abuse. Sauron lays it out for us in episode one of The Rings of Power season two. He tells Adar and the orcs, “You have nowhere else to turn. The Valar will never forgive you. Elves will never accept you. Men will never look upon you with anything but horror and disgust, a corrupted and ignoble race-worthy only to be hunted and slaughtered.” After which, of course, Sauron turns and slaughters an orc. But he’s right, and every race in Middle-earth comes together together to make the narrative true. The orcs do maim and murder, but it is all they have ever known and all they have been shown. And what better outcome waits for them? To be maimed and murdered instead? No one has ever offered peace to the orcs on The Rings of Power save Adar. And choicelessly, that peace cannot come peacefully, because no one in Middle-earth will permit it.
The Ents have the protection of allies, the shield of their innocence. We mourn for them, for the pain the orcs have wrought on them as the forest burns. But in the subtext, the truth remains that the orcs do not have that; they have never had it. No one except Adar has ever promised an orc that time will make their lives better. And this picture invites us to mourn for the orcs, too. Would they have burned this forest if they had a safe place of their own? The Rings of Power tells us the orcs likely would not have.
But, despite it all, Adar plants a seed in the ground and prays to Yavanna, the Valar who watches over growing things, the very Valar who created the Ents, to protect his children. And are the orcs not growing things? Should the gods not protect them as they do the trees? Should the orcs, who are, too, children, Adar’s children, their parents’ children, who have children of their own, not then also deserve to know peace?
Isildur asks of the Ents, “Think they know what peace is?” But the Ents do know that, and it’s critical that they do. The knowledge of peace gives them precious hope and allows them to feel forgiveness. But the Orcs do not know what peace is. And perhaps, if they did, things would be different. And, indeed, if The Rings of Power has the courage of its convictions, new bark will come to cover old scars for the orcs (and Adar!) as well in the space of the series.
We’ll keep our fingers crossed. Forgiveness, as they say, takes an age, but eventually it arrives.