Did Tolkien think orcs could be redeemed?

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s ancient history of Middle-earth from which “The Rings of Power” draws, Tolkien explains that only Ilúvatar (Tolkien’s version of God) can create life. And this has a major implication for his universe: No race of creature is inherently evil. Evil is a corruption of something that was once good. So orcs were created from elves who had been kidnapped and tortured by the Lucifer-like Melkor. Trolls are believed to be a similarly warped version of Ents, the trees that walk and speak. And Balrogs like the one that attacked Gandalf the Grey in The Two Towers are the Middle-earth equivalent of Lucifer’s fallen angels.

Of all the races in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy the orcs are the one group who seem utterly evil. Never in any of Tolkien’s books do we meet a single orc that is good, or who resists the commands of Sauron. Yet in The Silmarillion, Tolkien reveals that orcs are among Middle-earth’s greatest victims, because their corruption is a result not of their choice, but of Melkor’s torment and abuse. Long after they have become a species of their own, they remain trapped and in pain: “Deep in their dark hearts,” Tolkien writes, “the Orcs loathed the Master whom they served in fear, the maker only of their misery.” In a sense, perhaps they are the most universally evil of all the forms of life in Middle-earth because they are the most universally abused and imprisoned.

Grounding the idea of evil in corruption has major consequences for Tolkien’s way of thought. Most importantly, it undermines any attempt to separate life on Middle-Earth into heroes and monsters. Every creature exists on the same continuum between good and evil, and has the capacity to travel either way along it.