Eagles in Middle-earth

In J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, the Eagles or Great Eagles are immense birds that are sapient and can speak. The Great Eagles resemble actual eagles, but are much larger. Thorondor is said to have been the greatest of all birds, with a wingspan of . Elsewhere, the Eagles have varied in nature and size both within Tolkien's writings and in later adaptations.

Scholars have noticed that the Eagles appear as agents of eucatastrophe or deus ex machina throughout Tolkien's writings, from The Silmarillion and the accounts of Númenor to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Where Elves are good, and fully sentient, and Orcs bad, Eagles amongst other races are in between;<!--

Appearances

First Age

Throughout The Silmarillion, the Eagles are associated with Manwë, the ruler of the sky and Lord of the Valar. It is stated that "spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles" brought news from Middle-earth to his halls upon Taniquetil, the highest mountain in Valinor, and in the Valaquenta of "all swift birds, strong of wing". Upon their first appearance in the main narrative, it is stated that the Eagles had been "sent forth" to Middle-earth by Manwë, to live in the mountains north of the land of Beleriand, to "watch upon" Morgoth, The Eagles were ruled by Thorondor, "Lord of the Eagles", and "mightiest of all birds that have ever been". When Turgon built the Hidden City of Gondolin, the eagles of Thorondor became his allies, bringing him news and keeping spies and Orcs away. The eagles' watch was redoubled after the coming of Tuor,

Second Age

On the island of Númenor in the Second Age, three Eagles guarded the summit of the holy mountain Meneltarma, appearing whenever anyone approached it, and staying in the sky during the Númenórean "Three Prayers" religious ceremony. The Númenóreans called them "the Witnesses of Manwë", believing he had sent them from Aman "to keep watch upon the Holy Mountain and upon all the land". Another eyrie upon the tower of the King's House in the capital Armenelos was always inhabited by a pair of eagles, until the days of Tar-Ancalimon and the coming of Shadow to Númenor.

Third Age

By the end of the Third Age, a colony of Eagles lived in the north of the Misty Mountains, as described in The Hobbit. These Eagles opposed the goblins; however, their relationship with the local Woodmen was only cool, as the eagles often hunted their sheep. Later, having seen the mustering of goblins in the Mountains, a great flock of Eagles participated in the Battle of the Five Armies.

In The Lord of the Rings, the Eagles of the Misty Mountains helped the Elves of Rivendell and the Wizard Radagast to gather news of the Orcs. Gwaihir the Windlord carries news to Isengard, rescues the wizard Gandalf from the top of the tower there, and again rescues Gandalf from the top of Celebdil after searching for him at Galadriel's request. Gwaihir and his Eagles appear in great numbers towards the end of the book. The Eagles similarly arrive at the Battle of the Morannon, helping the Host of the West against the Nazgûl, while Gwaihir, Landroval, and Meneldor rescue Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee from Mount Doom after the One Ring had been destroyed.

Analysis

Origins

thumb|Tolkien based his painting of an eagle in The Hobbit on this 1919 illustration of an immature [[golden eagle by Archibald Thorburn. of an immature golden eagle, which Christopher found for him in Thomas Coward's 1919 book The Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs.

The Great Eagles appeared in "The Fall of Gondolin", the first tale about Middle-earth that Tolkien wrote in the late 1910s. In Tolkien's early writings, the eagles were distinguished from other birds: common birds could keep aloft only within the lower layer of the space above the Earth, while the Eagles of Manwë could fly "beyond the lights of heaven to the edge of darkness". The eagle-shaped clouds that appeared in Númenor formed one of Tolkien's recurring images of the downfall of the island; they appear, too, in his abandoned time-travel stories, The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers.

Sentient beings

Tolkien faced the question of the Great Eagles' nature with apparent hesitation. In early writings there was no need to define it precisely, since he imagined that, beside the Valar, "many lesser spirits... both great and small" had entered the Eä upon its creation; and such sapient creatures as the Eagles or Huan the Hound, in Tolkien's own words, "have been rather lightly adopted from less 'serious' mythologies". The phrase "spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles" in The Silmarillion derives from that stage of writing. next were self-incarnates, the Valar and Maiar, "angelic" spirits that "arrayed" themselves in bodily forms of the incarnates or of animals, and were able to communicate both by thought and speech; In the last of his notes on this topic, dated by his son Christopher to the late 1950s, Tolkien decided that the Great Eagles were animals that had been "taught language by the Valar, and raised to a higher level—but they still had no fëar [souls]." Marjorie Burns comments that the "threat of being eaten [by the Eagle] is so dominant" that the Hobbit Bilbo, who the Eagle described as being rather like a rabbit, is afraid of being torn up and eaten; he is relieved that he is not to become their supper, "but rabbit is precisely what the eagles do bring them for supper".

Norse mythology

thumb|The Norse god [[Odin, like Gandalf, was associated with eagles. A bird with a hooked beak beside Odin (named as houaz, "the high") on a bracteate from Funen, Denmark]]

In Norse mythology, eagles were associated with the god Odin; for example, he escapes from Jotunheim back to Asgard as an eagle. Burns remarks the similarity with Gandalf, who repeatedly escapes by riding on an eagle. She comments that Tolkien's Eagles, like his Dwarves, Dragons, and Trolls, all signal Norse influence on his stories.

Deus ex machina

Burns notes that Tolkien uses the Eagles three times to save his protagonists: to rescue Bilbo and company in The Hobbit; to lift Gandalf from imprisonment by Saruman in the tower of Orthanc; and finally, to save Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom when they have destroyed the One Ring. The Tolkien scholar Jane Chance describes these interventions as a deus ex machina, a sudden and unexpected mechanism to bring about a eucatastrophe. The screenwriter Brad Johnson, writing in Script, argues that this last deus ex machina instance is a complete surprise to the audience, and undesirable as the sudden appearance of the Eagles "takes the audience out of the scene emotionally". Tolkien was aware of this problem, recognising the risky nature of the mechanism; in one of his letters, he wrote:

Biblical messenger

thumb|upright=0.8|Scholars have linked the Eagles [[Christianity in Middle-earth|to Christianity, as an Eagle is John the Evangelist's traditional symbol.

Adaptations

Different adaptations of Tolkien's books treated both the nature of the Eagles and their role in the plots with varying level of faithfulness to originals. The first scenario for an animated motion-picture of The Lord of the Rings proposed to Tolkien in 1957 was turned down because of several cardinal deviations, among which Tolkien's biographer Humphrey Carpenter recorded that "virtually all walking was dispensed with in the story and the Company of the Ring were transported everywhere on the backs of eagles".

According to the fantasy artist Larry Dixon, the digitally animated eagles in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy were based on a stuffed golden eagle he had provided to Weta Workshop. Two large sculptures of the eagles from the trilogy were installed in Wellington Airport in 2013, each having a wingspan of and weighing . They were removed in 2025.

In the 2011 video game The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, an eagle named Beleram acts as a supporting character, aiding the players in battle.