I’m re-reading LOTR (I think for the 3rd time…definitely the first time in 25 years or so). I’ve always thought that the best scenes are the ones where the bad guys take the stage and get some dialog. But what strikes me is that the dialog of the orcs is so .. banal. (Two main scenes are the orcs taking Merry & Pippin to Isengard, and between Shagrat and Gorbag in Cirith Ungol).
They go on patrol, call each other “lads”, share rumors, get communiques from HQ (“Nazgul uneasy…increase watch on stairs”). They’re suspicious of favoritism (“the Nazgul are His favorites now”) and have sardonic nicknames for their superiors (or “The Bosses”) - Shelob is “Her Ladyship” and the Nazgul are “shriekers”.
In other words: their conversation sounds like it could take place in any army barracks in our time. Full disclosure: I never served in the military, but Tolkien did. It feels like he patterned orc behavior after that of the common British soldier he fought with. (I don’t know of any letters he wrote confirming this.)
From Tolkien’s own letters, it wasn’t the orcs that he modeled after the soldiers of his aquaintence during WWI; it was, in fact, Samwise Gamgee and the like.
My “Samwise” is indeed (as you note) largely a reflection of the English soldier—grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself.
However, I’m sure in his imagination he realized that enlisted soldiers all over had a distinct culture that would apply to orc grunts. I am sure he fancied (correctly) that Germany’s troops were the same as his own nation’s privates and sergeants, or the American doughboys.
There’s just a commonality to the plight of the enlisted trooper, regardless of nationality.
In one of his letters, he does mention that he cleaned up the orcs’ speech considerably for publication, and that they actually talked in much the same way that orcish-minded folks still do.
Orcs were originally elves that were captured by the dark powers and tortured. They turned these elves into an twisted form of life. They were then bred to be evil: