preaching to the choir here. it’s one of my LOTR pet peeves, along with pipeweed/weed confusion, actually. it’s trying to be clever by advocating for a shorter, worse story. it’s terrible.
2 Likes
yes, i’m very familiar with it. : )
I can’t remember if the books addressed this but in the movies the eagles outnumber the flying Fell Beasts and in fact were instrumental in taking them down in the final battle.
In the very least Tolkien should have added a line of dialogue in Elrond’s council explaining WHY they couldn’t enlist the eagles for the job, just as Gandalf explained why they couldn’t just toss the thing into the depths of the ocean (another reasonable suggestion).
2 Likes
That is movies only. In the books, their only involvement is rescuing Gandalf from Orthanc and after his bath in Moria and picking up Frodo and Sam at the end.
This sets out the various arguments fairly well:
Bottom line is, as previous posters have already pointed out, it appears Tolkein simply didn’t think about the Eagles as being elements of his story that he could use in that fashion.
They are almost literal dei ex machina.
2 Likes
They also show up a couple of times in The Hobbit, so clearly they seem OK with the idea of doing Gandalf a solid now and then.
If the question “why couldn’t the eagles deliver Frodo and the Ring to Mordor, or at least help shave a few hundred miles off his perilous journey?” is a question that has occurred to countless thousands of fans over the years you’d think it would have occurred to the guy who spent years of his life actually creating this fictional world.
There may well be a reasonable answer to that question (i.e., “the eagles would be instantly corrupted by the Ring’s power and eat Frodo”) but the way the books are written we never get that answer because the question isn’t even raised in the first place.
2 Likes
Also Gandalf and the rest of the wizards are basically demigods. Immortal in stronger ways than the elves, quite powerful but not all knowing. Who knows how many times he has done a solid for the eagles in the past.
1 Like
Again, deus ex machina. They rescue the company from the goblins and wargs and deposit them on the plains before they go off to see Beorn. They don’t carry them all the way to the Lonely Mountain.
Somehow that omission never gets quite as much discussion as the Ring to Mordor business.
They also turn up at the Battle of the Five Armies, again just as everything looks lost.
Well, you assume that he’s a professional writer of fiction there. He wasn’t. He was creating a mythology to explore stuff he was interested in and when you look through all the various revisions and drafts (I always feel a bit sorry for Christopher Tolkein, he’s done amazing work annotating and researching his father’s writings), he was thinking about quite a few other things.
I think we can allow him a minor blind spot. He fairly evidently could not conceive that anyone would think that the Eagles (physical embodiments of divine will on earth) could be used in that fashion and would need an explanation of why that couldn’t be done.
Their literal (and possibly divine) purpose is to turn up in extremis. Not to act as a taxi service.
2 Likes
I can accept that as “the eagles don’t particularly care about the Dwarves’ cause, so taking them even as far as they did was a pretty decent favor (and one that was never proffered to Frodo).”
In the case of the One Ring though the fate of all Middle Earth, including the Eagles’ territory, hung in the balance. No reason to shy away from getting involved.
1 Like
So why do they show up at the Battle?
Oh, I agree it seems obvious if you think of the Eagles as characters with an actual existence outside of the occasions when they are brought out of their box.
It seems Tolkein didn’t. I suspect if Tolkein had been a better writer he would never have introduced them in the first place - or maybe he would given that he was exploring various elements of divine grace and traditional plot devices from fairy-tale and myth.
But it’s fairly obvious that initially at least he wasn’t particularly burdened with a sense that his fiction should have realism or indeed continuity.
The Eagles had a clear role and didn’t exist outside of that.
I suppose the bottom line is that, hard as it may be for fans to accept, Tolkein was not a very good writer of the kind of fiction for which he is best known. Or alternatively, the kind of fiction for which he is best known is very, very difficult.
Which may be why so many people who embark on it, either turn out Tolkein-pastiche or burn out without finishing (GRRM and Rothfuss, I’m looking at you).
Personally, I think his shorter works show him in a much better light. Things like Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wotton Major or Gawain and the Green Knight (well, not so much shorter in that case but constrained by being a translation).
My personal favourite is probably the Letters to Father Christmas he did for his kids.
Just such lovely little pieces of art for a father to make for his children. So many lovely details and real sense of whimsy.
2 Likes
It should also be noted the eagles weren’t servants, they were creatures of power in their own right with their own motivations. In particular, at least in their origins, they were emissaries of Manwë and he had some very strict rules on what could and could not be done in Middle-Earth. For example, the Istari, who were peers of Sauron, were forbidden to directly confront him. The destruction of Beleriand had left the Valar a little gun shy about their dealings in Middle-Earth.
2 Likes
(and @LurksNoMore) I was mostly kidding about it, especially with the eagles. Please don’t take it too seriously. I love all the Middle Earth stories and continue to devour them as the new background stories come out.
That said, the Istari were sent to Arda specifically to counter the evil of Sauron. They had one job, and the Ring was central to their mission. It is, at the very least, sloppy that Gandalf didn’t recognize it for what it was.
As for the eagles, yes, that in particular is a joke. I mean, there’s no story there if they just swoop in and drop the Ring in the fires of Mt. Doom. But they already are a deus ex machina in the stories. From the perspective of the Fellowship, and especially Aragorn, finding out about the eagles would have been upsetting. I could see him turn to Gandalf and say something to the effect of, "You had a fucking air force this whole time!?!
The time to use them was immediately after the Council of Elrond. The Nine were out of action for weeks after the conflict at the Ford of the Bruinen. Fell beasts existed, presumably, but they were unguided without the nazgul and the eagles greatly outnumbered them. Considering the Ring was an existential threat to all Middle Earth, I would expect the great eagles to be all-in on the mission.
1 Like
That one, I’m less troubled by. I mean, it makes total sense that they would give Smaug a very wide berth. Literally about the only single natural being in the whole of Arda that could destroy them completely in an afternoon. Nope. That’s a no-fly-zone.
3 Likes
Tolkien obviously had no experience in growing it. The climate in Oxfordshire (which most of us should know is the influence for The Shire) isn’t good for growing most tobacco plants, there are only about four months of the year where the ground isn’t too cold for the plants to grow.
There was an attempt to grow tobacco in the UK, but they didn’t use Nicotiana tabacum. What they had successfully used also had a reputation for being mildly hallucinogenic, so I doubt Tolkien would have approved of that either.
https://www.talkingdrugs.org/illicit-tobacco-growing-in-17th-century-england
1 Like
i kind of figured, but as i mentioned, it’s a topic that makes me twitchy 
that’s a good point about the window of opportunity after the Ford of Bruinen, but i think Tolkien explained in his letters later that Eru just didn’t work that way.
2 Likes
he was just an avid pipe-smoker, i guess, not a gardener, haha.
3 Likes
I don’t think anyone really wanted a version of Lord of the Rings in which the Eagles fly Frodo straight to Mordor and end the whole thing in an hour or so. We just want a version of Lord of the Rings in which it’s clearly explained why that seemingly obvious solution isn’t a viable option.
4 Likes
I’m completely with you there. I was discussing The Hobbit with my son the other day (he’s writing an essay on it for school) and we even discussed Gandalf’s motivation for going after Smaug. There’s the overall good vs evil thing (I mean, Gandalf dropped out of the Fellowship to fight a balrog, right), but it is also nearly prescient that the events of The Hobbit allow Big Evil™’s most devastating, immediately-mobile force to be taken out of the picture, clearing the way for a mission to Mordor to destroy the Ring.
Frankly, all that would be needed for the Council to rule out the eagles mission is rumors of another dragon awakening in “The East.”
1 Like
Flashback to this
where they actually grow some tobacco plants - in Northumberland. Although I agree that this does not mean you could do it in a profitable way.
1 Like
Need to reread the books. It really has been too long.
I know a Tolkein scholar who couldn’t make it through the Jackson movies. I wonder what his take on this will be.
4 Likes
Jackson’s rationale for skipping “The Scouring of the Shire” was particularly egregious, especially since many consider it to actually be the more important of the “endings” in LOTR.
3 Likes
