For my money, this is one of the best moments in the trilogy, if only for the haunting implication that orcs understand the concept of a menu. There will come a blog post where I consider the idea that orcs have a cultural memory of a more civilised existence. Where I wonder if maybe they are good people who have been woefully misrepresented in a history told by its victors. But it is not this blog post.
Check out “The Last Ringbearer”[1] for an alternate take on the LotR mythology where the orcs aren’t monsters but instead citizens of the renaissance state of Mordor.
Basically Tolkien never could come up with a good way to have orcs with metaphysics he liked. He didn't believe a free willed being could be inherently evil, so at times he wrote that orcs had no free will and just did what Sauron wanted, essentially ants. Other times he thought that didn't fit and had them as people in a cruel situation who ended up cruel, but that was also unsatisfying for him. There isn't really one canon answer as to what an orc is.
So common it's rather endearing when authors bother to point it out. E.g. in the Afterword (though probably better as a preface) to Greg Egan's Dichronauts, he says in a note on the translation: "If you could listen to the speech sounds used by the characters in this novel, not only would you hear no words in your own native language, you would not hear any of the proper names employed in the story ... Words such as "smile," "laugh," "groan," and so on are used to indicate the nature of the emotions that elicit these acts, rather than any anatomical or phonetic similarities to human utterances and gestures. ..."
