Chapter Text
Any Avar, Khaza, or Man you ask will tell you: the Orcs were graciously taken in by the people of the great City in Rhun. We were civilized by their great influence, and all has been well since. Permit me, please, to disagree.
For you to understand, I must tell you our history, both as we know it and as we have been told it.
Our history as understood by the Children of Aule and Iluvatar is extraordinarily simple: Melkor of old captured numerous Avari, and kept them in his dungeons, performing horrible experiments and tortures upon them, until he was able to strip them of their mortality, their beauty, their love of the natural world, everything that he felt was quintessential to being Elven, such that his changes bred true. Thus the Orc was born, an abomination of nature, to be hated, feared, or pitied, and he and his lieutenant Sauron used us as soldiers and laborers, unchanged in essence from our creation to their destruction, essentially evil and warped.
This presentation, I submit, is simplistic where it is true and actively harmful where it is false.
I admit that very little of our origins has survived the long ages, and that the broad outlines are true in their way. We may have been bred from elves; it is true that on most scales by which we measure the Children of Arda, we Orcs occupy that end farthest from the Elves. Our time in Rhun has shown that we may indeed die of old age, being possessed of lifespans slightly less than do those mortals descended of a mix of Elf and Man. The sunlight hurts our eyes, although we may build goggles to compensate; the sun burns our skin, as well, although we may build up a tolerance to it individually and over time. It is not so much that we dislike the natural world as it is that the natural world hates and fears us, undoubtedly because of the actions of all our race for the Ages that we served the darkness.
When my ancestors came to Rhun, broken and fearful in defeat, they knew only how to fight and forge and hunt. They also knew to fear Elves and Men. They did not know how to live without being ever driven by the whips of others. They did not know how to lead themselves. They did not know how to trust. On the long, hard journey across the trackless steppe, they found leaders of a sort, Orcs stronger in spirit than the rest, who had wielded some of the whips.
When they found the Rhunic city, those leaders urged attack. They and those who followed them never returned from the city walls. We had never made a habit of burying our dead - we had not been permitted to. We did not, then, seek their bodies. Perhaps it would have been better if we had.
The strongest Orcs of the able generations had died. An old mother took over, putting herself above us as something not quite divine. It was with her that Master-Smith Erwiikee treated, when we thought all that awaited us was extermination.
Then followed what is ordinarily called The Salvation of the Orcs.
I despise this term.
We had never been treated with kindness before, of any kind, and under the patronage of the Easterling Men, we learned what it was to have some autonomy, permission to relax and create and build a culture. But we were still naught but soldiers and laborers.
In our first years in Rhun, the first few generations, we learned to read and to write, and we began to keep our own, secret histories - for we did not trust that they would not be taken from us by the Children of Aule and Iluvatar, and rewritten to suit the purposes of their warchiefs, their kings. This was sensible; they did not trust us. They treated us like children, and ill-behaved children at that. To be considered equal to their least, we must needs excel above their best. Needless to say, this chafed for some, but seemed most natural to others, for what were we but Melkor's dogs, Sauron's mongrels, fang-toothed black-blooded violent idiots with nothing of goodness or glory in our past, in our blood? All of us that was good and civilized came to us in Rhun. So we were told by our so-kind masters, and so many of us believed.
We were not saved. We merely gained three races as master rather than a solitary being, and our leashes were made a little bit longer.