* which is actually something that bugged me during the LotR movies. Orcs are made from debased and twisted elves, so shouldn't they be pale the way elves are? The Mordor orcs are kind of blue-green, which works pretty well for me, but the Uruk-Hai combine blue-green orcs with men whom I'm assuming are also pale skinned, since everyone in the West is, so why aren't they blue-green? This may be a sign that I put far too much thought into those movies.

Jackson muddled the pedigree for the Uruk-hai: is it Gandalf who says that Saruman has been breeding "Orcs and goblin-men"?

Actually the movies have generally muddied the waters when it comes to racist subtext with the Orcs. Not that Tolkien critics didn't try to identify Orcs with blacks prior to the movies (a vilified racially-identified Other) but for what it's worth, according to one of Tolkien's letters, Orcs are supposed to look like the "least lovely (to European eyes) of the Mongol types." So there you go, Orcs aren't black, they're...Mongolian?

(Actually, doing my Orc project it's been interesting to see how many different ethnicities/nationalities people have claimed Orcs represent. My favorite is Eskimos. Almost as "special," and quite ironic when included in the usual list of Africans, Asians, Arabs and so forth, is neo-Nazi Varg Vikernes' theory that the Orcs are vilified representations of his pre-Christian Norse forefathers.)