One of the most amazing things about Middle Earth is its vast array of languages, cultures and peoples. From the elves in their graceful clothes and long flowing hair, to the men in their high kingdoms and regal halls, and the dwarves wielding their axes hewn of the strongest steel and stone.
Each race is known for some kind of craft or another, with the elves of Gondolin and their beautiful swords, like Glamdring and Orchrist, or the dwarves and their chain-mail of Mithril so fine that it’s worth the value of The Shire itself. And for the humans it’s their suits of armor, with the soldiers of Edoras decked in golden helmets of crested horses, and the warriors of Gondor wearing silver splendor, embossed with the tree of Gondor on their chests, two halves of an age-old alliance.
But there is another race of beings famous for their armor in Middle Earth, a much more crude and misshapen kind: the orcs. Of course, orcs cannot all be classified under one bracket, there are the Uruk-hai, who bear the white hand of Sauron, and the Mordor Orcs, who directly enforce the will of Sauron and his great seeing eyes. And there were also a new kind of orc introduced in the Rings of Power during the World’s Second Age, orcs who seemed to be weakened by sunlight. These creatures are bread for cruelty and killing, and possess no such fine skill as metal-craft and weapon making, so where does their armor come from?
When looked at closely, there seems to be no specific distinction between the different armors and what they are adorned in for battle like there does among the human races. Other than marks like the white hand, there seems to be no specifically distinguishable features, no exact shapes like the dwarven geometrics, or the elven circles and swirls. In fact, there seem to be no order at all among the orcs battlements, no specific colors of fabrics used, simply a similarly mottled and mismatched appearance.
Most of their armor is slightly misshapen, whether to fit the mangled bodies beneath or to give them a more grotesque and threatening appearance during battle is unknown. But possibly the most interesting fact about the orc armour is that it is almost all rusted, as if it has been around for many long years, and has seen many great wars in its time. In fact, this is likely the exact reason that it looks this way: because it was pilfered from the bodies of soldiers who died eons ago.
Why would the orcs waste precious time trying to intimidate metals into armor, or craft fine blades and skills, when instead they could just ravage the armor of those who no longer needed it? Through the sheer malice of the creatures, the once beautiful armor has been corrupted and dissolved in the barren and acidic lands of Mordor, where the very air one breathes is poison to the lungs, as Boromir points out when he suggests that the fellowship cannot simply walk into Mordor to destroy the ring.
Therefore, the misshapen and mismatched armor of the orcs has been re-purposed and beaten and battered to the point that it no longer contains any of the life or beauty of those who made it. This, in a way, is representative of the orcs themselves, especially those known in history as the Moriondor, who are said to have once been beautiful elves that were twisted and corrupted by Morgoth.
The design decisions were largely made by those in charge of costumes at Weta Studios, who wanted to give the orcs their own distinguishable look, away from the other menacing beings of Middle Earth, like the goblins in the tunnels of Moria, or the Wildmen in their scraps and blunt spears. It was Weta who pioneered this idea of the orcs being thieves and pilferers of the battlefield, disrespecting the soldiers who had given their lives there, but it is very true to their characters, and true to the vision that Tolkien held in his original books, when he described the blunt and brutal weapons of the enemy, the sadistic pleasure they took in cruelty, and the lack of honor that they carried in a quick or clean death, instead preferring brute force, torture, and bashing skulls in with the thick end of a club, or a cleaver with a spike attached at the end.
Their very armor is meant to reflect their thuggish nature, and Weta really captured its essence by dressing them in tattered leather, black dull helmets, and basic but gruesome weapons that require no skill to wield. When watching the Peter Jackson adaptations closely, audiences may even see the hint of an old horse mane, or the faintest glimmer of an elven star on the caked and crusted metal of Mordor’s entire army.
