A Song of Middle-Earth, by Way of Russia: “The Orcs Marched out of Mordor”

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Here’s the latest from Zoya, a singer with the prominent Russian band Leningrad (Russian lyrics here). It has over 350K page views, though it was just posted today (or yesterday Russian time)—I try to focus the posts in this thread on relatively prominent works, since my goal is in part to offer a sense of how some people over there are perceiving things.

The meaning is not completely clear on the face of the song, and as best I can tell, the band members aren’t themselves particularly pro-Ukrainian—they are more cynical and realist than ideological, it seems to me (see this song, which I blogged a month ago). But “orc” appears to be a common reference to Russian soldiers by Ukrainians and other critics of Russia, though some say it also has other deeper meanings.

The orcs marched out of Mordor

In the last dawn

They were singing songs together

The fighting orcs.

About fate and about the foreign land

And about their mothers at home

And about the orc’s cudgel

With which to kill the elves.

Let the whole world be in ruins—and fuck everything else

Let the whole world be, yes, in ruins—and fuck everything else.

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