Eagles in Middle-earth

• 1. Introduction

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  Eagles in Middle-earth can span thirty fathoms across, a wingspan Tolkien gave to Thorondor, the greatest of all the birds. In his invented world, these creatures are sapient and can speak.

  Yet when one of these same eagles rescues the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, it also serves him rabbit for supper. The eagle had already told him he looked rather like a rabbit himself.

  That contradiction runs through every appearance of Tolkien's Great Eagles: are they messengers, predators, or a storytelling device Tolkien came to distrust? Across three ages of his legendarium, and decades of argument among scholars, the answer keeps shifting.

• 2. Nature and Standing

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  Tolkien spent much of his career as a professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in Old English as a philologist. Best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he also invented the Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Orcs, Trolls, and Eagles of Middle-earth.

  Where Elves are good and fully sentient, and Orcs are evil, Tolkien placed the Eagles somewhere in between, alongside the other peoples of his world. The scholar Tom Shippey notes that the narrator of The Hobbit calls them, in his own words, "not kindly birds." In his earliest writings, Tolkien avoided the question, describing spirits that entered the world at its creation as "many lesser spirits, both great and small." He admitted such creatures, including the Eagles and Huan the Hound, had been "rather lightly adopted from less 'serious' mythologies."

  After The Lord of the Rings was finished, Tolkien built a more precise hierarchy of beings for his world. At the top were the incarnates, Elves and Men, who possessed souls called fëar and could speak. Below them were the Valar and Maiar, angelic spirits able to take animal or human shapes. They could communicate by thought as well as speech, while ordinary animals could not speak at all. For a time Tolkien considered the Eagles as bird-shaped Maiar. But the published Lord of the Rings had already stated that Gwaihir and Landroval descended from Thorondor. That ruled out true descent from the Valar and Maiar. In notes his son Christopher dated to the late 1950s, Tolkien settled the question. He decided the Great Eagles were animals taught language by the Valar and raised to a higher level. But he added that they still had no fëar, or souls.

  That thin distinction between animal and spirit would follow the Eagles from Beleriand's mountains to the fires of Mount Doom.

• 3. First Age Guardians

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  Manwë, the ruler of the sky and Lord of the Valar, watched over Middle-earth from his halls upon Taniquetil, the highest mountain in Valinor. Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles carried him news from Middle-earth. The Valaquenta describes these birds more broadly as "all swift birds, strong of wing." When Eagles first appear in the main narrative, Manwë has sent them to settle in the mountains north of Beleriand. There they watch over Morgoth and aid the exiled Noldorin Elves "in extreme cases." Thorondor ruled these Eagles under the title Lord of the Eagles.

  When Turgon built the Hidden City of Gondolin, Thorondor's eagles became his allies, bringing him news and driving off spies and Orcs. Their watch tightened after Tuor arrived, helping Gondolin stay hidden longer than any other Elvish kingdom in Beleriand. When the city finally fell, the Eagles protected fleeing survivors from the Orcs pursuing them.

  The Eagles fought beside the armies of the Valar, Elves, and Men in the War of Wrath, at the close of the First Age. Earlier, when winged dragons first appeared, "all the great birds of heaven" gathered under Thorondor's command over Eärendil. Together they destroyed most of the dragons in an aerial battle.

  Thorondor's eagles had defended Beleriand for an entire age. The next age would ask their kind to keep watch over a different mountain, on an island far to the west.

• 4. Watchers of Númenor

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  On the island of Númenor, three Eagles guarded the summit of the holy mountain Meneltarma, appearing whenever anyone climbed toward it. They stayed in the sky throughout the Númenórean "Three Prayers" ceremony. The people called them the "Witnesses of Manwë," believing he had sent them from Aman to watch over the Holy Mountain and the whole land.

  In the capital, Armenelos, a pair of eagles always occupied an eyrie above the tower of the King's House. That presence lasted until the reign of Tar-Ancalimon and the coming of the Shadow to Númenor. Further north, many eagles nested in the hills around Sorontil.

  When the Númenóreans began openly speaking against the Ban of the Valar, Manwë himself took the form of eagle-shaped storm clouds. These were called the "Eagles of the Lords of the West," sent to reason with or threaten them.

  Manwë's storm-cloud warning is the last direct intervention this account gives for the Second Age. By the next age, the Eagles' watch had moved back to Middle-earth's own mountains.

• 5. Rescuers of the Third Age

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  By the end of the Third Age, a colony of Eagles had settled in the north of the Misty Mountains, opposing the goblins nearby. Their relationship with the local Woodmen stayed only cool, since the eagles often hunted the Woodmen's sheep. When goblins and Wargs cornered Thorin's company, the Eagles swept in and carried the dwarves to safety on the rock known as the Carrock. After spotting goblins massing in the mountains, a great flock of Eagles later fought in the Battle of the Five Armies.

  In The Lord of the Rings, these same Misty Mountains Eagles helped the Elves of Rivendell and the wizard Radagast gather news about the Orcs. Gwaihir the Windlord carried word to Isengard and pulled Gandalf from the top of the tower there. He rescued Gandalf a second time from the peak of Celebdil, after Galadriel asked the Eagles to search for him.

  Toward the end of the book, Gwaihir returned with his Eagles in great numbers. They reached the Battle of the Morannon in time to help the Host of the West fight off the Nazgûl. After the One Ring was destroyed, Gwaihir, Landroval, and Meneldor pulled Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee from the slopes of Mount Doom.

  Tolkien, however, worried about how often he could ask his readers to believe in this kind of rescue.

• 6. A Risky Machine

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  The Tolkien scholar Jane Chance describes the Eagles' habit of arriving just in time as a deus ex machina, a device meant to create what Tolkien elsewhere called a eucatastrophe. Marjorie Burns counts three separate times when Tolkien leans on this same device across his books.

  The screenwriter Brad Johnson, writing in the magazine Script, argues that the Mount Doom rescue is a complete surprise to the audience. He writes that the sudden appearance of the Eagles "takes the audience out of the scene emotionally."

  Tolkien recognized the risk himself. In one letter he wrote, "The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness." He added that a Great Eagle landing in the Shire would be absurd. It would also make Saruman's later capture of Gandalf incredible, and ruin the account of his escape.

  Tolkien built real limits around his Eagles, but scholars have kept searching past the mechanics for what the birds might mean.

• 7. Mythic and Biblical Echoes

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  A devout Roman Catholic, Tolkien once called The Lord of the Rings "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work," rich in Christian symbolism. The scholar Tom Shippey notes that Tolkien mostly avoided direct references to Christianity in the book, so it would not read as allegory. Shippey points to one exception: the moment an Eagle-messenger sings to Faramir about the destruction of the One Ring. He writes that here "Revelation seems very close and allegory does all but break through."

  The Eagle sings: "Sing now, ye people in the Tower of Anor, for the realm of Sauron is ended for ever, and the Dark Tower is thrown down. Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard, for your watch hath not been in vain, and the Black Gate is broken, and your King hath passed through, and he is victorious."

  Shippey identifies this as written in the style of Psalm 24 in the King James Bible. It echoes that Psalm's own line, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, for the King of glory shall come in."

  The scholar E. L. Risden draws a different Christian connection, describing the Eagles' rescue of Frodo and Sam as a "ritual rebirth." He calls the rescuing bird "a symbol of the spirit," the traditional symbol of John the Evangelist.

  In Norse mythology, eagles belonged to the god Odin, who once escaped Jotunheim back to Asgard disguised as one. Marjorie Burns sees the same pattern in Gandalf, who repeatedly escapes his troubles by riding on an eagle. She notes that the Eagles, like Tolkien's Dwarves, Dragons, and Trolls, all carry traces of Norse influence on his invented world.

  Tolkien drew these birds from myth and scripture alike, but the eagle on the page began with an actual painting of a very real bird.

• 8. Beyond the Page

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  Tolkien painted an eagle perched on a crag, an image that appears in some editions of The Hobbit. Christopher Tolkien said his father based the picture on a painting by the Scottish artist Archibald Thorburn, showing an immature golden eagle. Christopher found that source image in Thomas Coward's 1919 book, The Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs.

  The Great Eagles first appeared in "The Fall of Gondolin," the earliest Middle-earth tale Tolkien wrote, in the late 1910s. In these early drafts, ordinary birds could only fly within the lower layer of sky above the earth. The Eagles of Manwë, by contrast, could soar "beyond the lights of heaven to the edge of darkness." The eagle-shaped storm clouds over Númenor became one of Tolkien's recurring images for the island's downfall. They reappear in his unfinished time-travel stories, The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers.

  In 1957, a studio pitched Tolkien the first scenario for an animated film of The Lord of the Rings. He turned it down over several major changes to the story. His biographer Humphrey Carpenter recorded that the script dispensed with "virtually all walking" and had the Company of the Ring "transported everywhere on the backs of eagles."

  According to the fantasy artist Larry Dixon, the digitally animated eagles in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy were modeled on a stuffed golden eagle. He had supplied that eagle to Weta Workshop. In 2013, two large sculptures of the trilogy's eagles went up at Wellington Airport. Each had a wingspan of 50 ft and weighed 2600 lb. They were taken down in 2025.

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

  The Wellington sculptures came down in 2025, fourteen years after players first met Beleram in War in the North.