Title: Gradations
Fandom: Hobbit, LotR, Silmarillion
Rating: G
Length: 400
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zana, Morgan, and sundry others for thought-provoking discussion.
Summary: Rank among the servants of the Enemy in four drabbles



For all that Morgoth was an agent of ruin and chaos, his mind was one of strict and rigid hierarchy, order, place, especially as regarded that which and those who did his bidding and worked his will. His was the supreme, pre-eminent, unquestionably ultimate authority, the foremost power. Willing allies, the maiar he gathered to him (spirits of indeed no small might: balrogs and dragons, minds of cunning skill and subtle, quick, keen perception, audacious devisors) were little less than he, but still, less, beneath, beholden to his desires, subject to his will, however much latitude might be given them.


The unwitting allies — deceived, cozened, coerced, compelled — were lesser yet, though largely allowed autonomy in things that did not touch on the greater plans of their betters. In those ranks counted the Men of the South and East, the Haradrim and Khandrim, the folk of Rhun and further distant from the West. Morgoth - and later Sauron - assumed a great deal about these people, not least of which was the depth and nature of their commitment to the cause of darkness. The annals of the Elves are scant and not unbiased on the subject of the Enemy’s subjugation of those lands.


Of the orcs, goblins, trolls, fell beasts, wargs and other spawn of greater servants (Shelob’s lesser decedents the most notable, but not the only), they ranked themselves with jealous ferocity. Azog and his ilk, little removed from tormented Elven forebearers, stood high by virtue of cunning, strength and favor in the Enemy’s eyes. (Well for the fate of Middle-Earth that the line fell to Aüle’s Children before the gates of Erebor.) [71] These were feeling beings, thinking, breathing, in some manner born, capable of growth and change, and all the more frightening for that. But true choice was not given them.


Last, and most certainly least, were the vast ranks of foot-soldiers, clods of mud shaped into weapons, sterile, mindless, without will or desire or spirit of their own, animate only as infinitesimal motes of Morgoth’s malice and desire to conquer the troublesome, persistent striving of Eru’s children (Elves, Men, and most certainly Dwarves), lacking even rudimentary processes of life or thought. Clockwork midges, whatever their apparent size, made, not born, or grown, or properly created as complex, feeling beings. Without Morgoth’s (later Sauron’s) will to drive them, they would swiftly disintegrate back into the elements from whence they were assembled.