modern man origins(?)
I had this theory in mind for a while and I wanted to share it with people who knows more than me about it.
I don't think it would trigger any rule and I promise it's not trolling or a low effort post
so, Tolkien thought of Arda not as a different planet, but the earth itself in a very distant past.
There's no recollection of that past because all the fantastic and magical things that populated it slowly disappeared, in a tendence for the world created by Eru Lluvatar of constantly falling apart, and going from beautiful to mundane as time passes.
So where the modern human beings come from? From the last, the ugliest and the most imperfect creation of the last era: the orcs.
All the beautiful races, graced by the guardians of creation, born from magic and who even willed themselves in existence are gone, destroyed by their own might, and all that's left behind of those times, the only thing that lasted, among all the stuff that was carefully crafted and had his place in the order of things, it's an imperfect abomination from the most perverse guardian.
And they have written it in themselves, in their very instinct lies the gospel of Sauron: craftiness, technology, a natural drive for violence and domination that suppresses every other form of life.
Once the original Men were gone, the orcs followed one of nature's iron rule, and occupied their role in the habitat.
Unfortunately, they are not the original Men, so their attempt at being them soon goes haywire, because they weren't conceived to occupy their niche, or any other: they are like unsupervised devices, abruptly abandoned by their creator, and left to perform the task they were instructed to carry out, like the brooms army in Fantasia.
Is it a theory that has ever been proposed?