The Lord of the Rings: “From now on meat is back on the menu!” – Do Orcs and Uruks go to the restaurant?

“From now on meat is back on the menu!” – It’s a phrase that has been driving “Lord of the Rings” fans crazy since 2002. Early on in “The Two Towers,” some orcs come up with the idea of ​​eating Merry and Pippin. However, Uglúk, the Uruk-hai, forbids them and ultimately even kills the orc Snaga. The Orcs and Uruks can then feast on Snaga’s lifeless body.

In this respect the sentence makes sense, everyone knows whose flesh we are talking about here. The very word “menu” causes astonishment, as it doesn’t fit into the world of orcs and Uruks.

“Be a guest here, be a guest here, we serve without haste!”

The suspicion is that this one word allows us to participate in a part of the life of the Orcs and Uruks that has otherwise always been swept under the carpet. Do you know any restaurants? Maybe they even eat in restaurants? Do they pay? Do they tip well?

Even more likely, there is a canteen here to feed all the hungry Orc and Uruk mouths. But even with such mass processing, there would have to be a menu from which the dark creatures can choose freely.

By the way, this isn’t a translation error; in the English original, Uglúk says “Looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys”, which also immediately makes you think of a restaurant menu. However, this formulation comes solely from the film “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”, JRR Tolkien’s novels never mention Uruk menus.

Lots of opinions, but no clear truth

Since no Mordor spin-off for “The Bear” has been announced yet, we have to be content with speculation. Neither director Peter Jackson nor screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens have commented on this sentence, but the actors of the orcs and the Uruk Uglúk have.

In the interview with Thrillist, the three men also gave three possible explanations for the mention of a menu, which of course are only subjective opinions.

For Nathaniel Lees, who played Uglúk, the mention of a menu here is hardly strange, which is why, when asked, he simply explains that by murdering Snaga, Uglúk expands the list of available dishes, i.e. the menu, to include another food, namely meat has.

Stephen Ure, who starred as the orc Grishnakh, considers the menu to be just one of various examples of inappropriate expressions in the “Lord of the Rings” films.

There are a lot of things that don’t really make sense. Of course they wouldn’t know what a meal plan is. […] There are a lot of clunky things in there. This is Philippa Boyens. She puts in all these things that don’t make sense. She was brought on board because she was the Tolkien expert. I can recognize the lines that Philippa wrote. For example, in the third film, where I play Gorbag, and when I finally come up from the big orc fight that starts because of the mithril vest, and Elijah [Wood als Frodo] If I want to kill you, I say: “I’ll let you bleed like a stabbed pig!”

Stephen Ure

The murdered orc Snaga was played by Jed Brophy. He doesn’t want to rule out the possibility that menus are talked about more often in Middle-earth. He also points out that Uruk-hai are a cross between orcs and humans, so perhaps there is a touch of humanity in this sentence.

In the same interview, Brophy also revealed an interesting trivia fact: When the “menu” scene was supposed to be dubbed, the actors of the orcs and uruks were not present. In the English original it was Andy Serkis (Gollum) who voiced all the Orcs and Uruks in this scene!