(...) Over time, the influence of their evil and their lifestyle choices would change their appearance to the distorted, hunched over look. The Goblins look especially decrepit, but their unusual form is similar to Gollum's: living underground for so long has caused several adaptations to arise, such as pale skin, a hunched posture, and especially their big eyes. They still retain their Elvish blood, but they are essentially a separate species at this point.

‘You may well put your thinking cap on, if you’ve got one. It’s no laughing matter. No one, no one has ever stuck a pin in Shelob before, as you should know well enough. There’s no grief in that; but think-there’s someone loose hereabouts as is more dangerous than any other damned rebel that ever walked since the bad old times, since the Great Siege. Something has slipped.’

... as I think the idea is: Elves were said to be made from Men [with the internal chronology altered to allow this], plus some great 'immortal' orcs from the ranks of the Maiar.

I've always thought, particularly since Tolkien was in a real war, that he invented orcs because he needed an enemy that could be unequivocally evil and not very person-like so that his heroes could be unequivocally right to fight and kill them. The closest encounter a hobbit (the species of protagonist with whom the reader can most closely identify) has with a human enemy is the scene in Ithillien when a dead warrior from the south prompts Frodo to wonder about him as a person, why he left home, and if he would have preferred to stay there. (Apologies -- my book is in another state or I would give the exact quote!) That passage seemed so achingly personal to me, I wondered if it was an echo of Tolkien's own emotions during WWI. While I don't believe LOTR is an allegory of either world war, it seems impossible that somebody who experienced war could keep his thoughts about it from shaping the way he invented a war in his fiction. No real war can be satisfactory if it involves human enemies because most humans (even if they are required/persuaded to follow an evil leader, such as Hitler) are not 100% evil. Tolkien's sympathy for Gollum -- who had a tiny but real chance at redemption & joining the good guys -- and this nameless warrior from the south indicates that, to him, the concept of war that goes "They may not be totally evil but we have to fight them anyway because they are attacking us" is a very troubling one. I think Tolkien's love of old poems and sagas depicting glorious warfare was at odds with his compassion for real people. So -- much as he did when, unsatisfied with the "moving" of Birnam Wood in MacBeth, he created Ents -- I think Tolkien's dissatisfaction with real warfare prompted him to make a world in which glorious fighting was actually possible.

In that case, thinking too hard about orc families with wives and children would invalidate their purpose. I think biological reproduction must be happening, but that the thought of orc babies would have been unbearable to an author who positioned their species as an enemy whom it is always acceptable to kill. No people in Tolkien's world start evil, even if they become very evil later by their own choices; the fact that orcs are ruined elves allows that rule to still apply: they started out good but were pushed past the point where they could possibly be redeemed. Innocent orc babies who've never hurt anybody (even if they grow up to do so) would upset the concept, so that's why I think Tolkien didn't want to think about them.

Gwenhwyfar - http://newboards.theonering.net/...i?post=559593#559593

But it must be some Orcs/Goblins who could turn Elves/Men into Orcs and Goblins. Or did Sauron do everything by himself?

'We may assume, then, that the idea of breeding the Orcs came from Melkor, not at first so much for the provision of servants or the infantry of his wars of destruction, as for the defilement of the Children and the blasphemous mockery of the designs of Eru. The details of the accomplishment of this wickedness were, however, left mainly to the subtleties of Sauron. In that case the conception in mind of the orcs may go far back into the night of Melkor's thought, though the beginning of their actual breeding must await the awakening of Men.

When Melkor was made captive, Sauron escaped and lay hid in Middle-earth; and it can in this way be understood how the breeding of orcs (no doubt already begun) went on with increasing speed during the Age when the Noldor dwelt in Aman; so that when they returned to Middle-earth they found it already infested with this plague...'

JRRT, Text X, Myths Transformed, Morgoth's Ring

So he needed naturally occurring evil beasts, that were not always bad, but through choice of their own, but still had possibility for redemption and were part of the original creation of a Good deity. Not the kind of thing you can find at the local unemployment center.