Thank you, Oshun! I didn't have Halloween in mind at all when I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but it was rather an appropriate day to post it on, wasn't it? The clocks went back the same day and ever since then it has seemed much darker...

Thank you. It is certainly one of the most enduring of Morgoth's evils. After the War of Wrath, the Noldorin thralls in Angband are freed and so are the thralls of Sauron after the War of the Ring, or at any rate many of them, but neither Eonwe nor anyone else seems to have managed to do anything to free the orcs. Although I've once come across a fan fiction in which Aragorn made the attempt.

Yes, the most despicable, I think. So horrifying that Tolkien later regretted having invented this theory about the origin of orcs, although I am not sure he ever convincingly replaced it with any other explanation.

Thank you very much for reading and reviewing!

Thank you very much, Elfscribe!

I hadn't expected that I would ever write a companion piece to "Star People". But suddenly, there it was--and written about the same time of year as the first...