269 From a letter to W. H. Auden

[Auden had asked Tolkien if the notion of the Orcs, an entire race that was irredeemably wicked, was not heretical.]

12 May 1965

With regard to The Lord of the Rings, I cannot claim to be a sufficient theologian to say whether my notion of orcs is heretical or not. I don't feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief, which is asserted somewhere, Book Five, page 190, where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sons and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable.....

One of my troubles is that I was just sending into press a revision of my translation of Gawain together with one of Pearl when a desperate problem of U.S.A. copyright fell on me, and I must now devote all the time I have to produce a revision of both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit that can be copyrighted and, it is hoped, defeat the pirates.