Flying to Mordor is a Terrible Idea

Let's kick Fantasy's deadest horse

Why didn’t the Fellowship just flew the Eagles to Mount Doom?

Why didn’t the Allies just took a plane to Berlin and shot Hitler?

It’s more complicated than that.

Bilbo woke up with the early sun in his eyes, by J. R. R. Tolkien

The “Eagle Problem” is as old as The Hobbit, in which, for the first time in public writing, they are used as deus ex machina (or as eucatastrophe, depending on who you ask) to rescue Bilbo and the dwarves from goblins. But at that point the Eagles are, for the reader, a new fantastical species, whose existence is justified by being fresh and interesting, simply. The Eagles appear again at the end, turning the tide of the Battle of Five Armies, but they do not prevent the battle from being costly — Fili, Kili, and Thorin are killed — and therefore the sense of consequence is kept. Their “saving the day” is no more ludicrous than Bard, a character who had not even been named, killing the dragon.

More challenging is The Lord of the Rings. The sometimes joking, sometimes serious criticism is that the Eagles could have solved the conflict in no time: all the Fellowship of the Ring had to do was to fly to Mordor and drop the One Ring into Mount Doom. The book would be over in five pages (or five pages plus all the time spent on walking, singing, and Tom Bombadiling).

I find this complaint kind of condescending. It reminds me of people who say “horror movie characters are so dumb”, “how come no one notices Clark Kent is Superman”, and “Indiana Jones makes no difference in the plot of Indiana Jones”. It is that smart-ass, pedantic, look-how-smarter-than-the-writers-I-am attitude.

This may be Substack, but it is still the internet. So let us fight pedantry with pedantry and take a look at what the books actually say about the Eagle Problem.

Background

First, take a look on the geopolitical scene of Middle-earth at the time Frodo arrived in Rivendell:

• Sauron cannot be beaten by feats of arms: the Dark Lord has a large army of orcs, reinforced by men of Harad and Umbar. Their force is large enough that, by The Return of the King, Sauron is able to siege Minas Tirith, which almost succeeds, and simultaneously wage war at the North¹. Also, Mordor is surrounded on all sides but East by mountain chains. Good luck invading that.

• The Free People are on decline: the elven kingdoms of Mirkwood, Rivendell, and Lothlórien are a shadow of their former self, such that there will never be another Great Alliance. The knights of Rohan are valiant, but as of the time of the Council of Elrond it is doubtful they would even fight. Gondor alone stands against the Enemy, but even they are not strong enough to defeat Mordor.

• Eagles and Men are not really on talking terms: even proponents of the “Eagles can’t carry the Fellowship around because they’re busy with Eagle stuff” theory often fail to point this out. In The Hobbit, the Lord of the Eagles refuses to carry Bilbo and the others near where Men live, mentioning how the woodsmen living East of the Mountains shoot them with bows. Eagles interacting with the Free Peoples is a relatively rare occurrence; and one to cast suspicion on spying eyes.

• Sauron can see far and wide, but not everything: I know, I know, Sauron is not a giant flaming eyeball. Still, his will and gaze wander far, and he has the Palantír and many other dark arts to increase his sight. It is almost impossible to hide from the Dark Lord — if he knows where to look.

• Sauron cannot conceive that one would dispose of the Ring: Sauron assumes that anyone who gets possession of the One Ring will try to keep it or use it against him. Ultimately, he is right: Frodo fails to destroy the Ring, and it is doubtful if anyone could have done differently. Still, Sauron cannot imagine that one would abdicate possession of the Ring, let alone try to destroy it.

• Sauron already knows the Ring has been found, that a hobbit named Baggins has it, and, shortly after the Council of Elrond, that it was at Rivendell: the Nazgûl follow Frodo almost to the doorstep of Elrond. Even though the Wraiths were washed away by the river, it would not be long before Sauron heard news of them. So when the Fellowship begins its journey, Sauron has a good idea of where the Ring is — the thing he does not know is where it will be heading.

With that in mind, let’s move to number two…

What to do with the thing

Fellowship of the Ring devotes an entire chapter, The Council of Elrond, to making sure the heroes (and the reader) are all on the same page. After all the backstories are given — where has Gandalf been, who is this Boromir dude, how Strider is actually Aragorn is actually the lost heir that everybody knows about — they discuss the pressing question: what to do with the One Ring?

Some options offered, in descending order of sanity:

• Ship it to Valinor. But the road to the West is closed, and even if an elf volunteered to carry it in his one-way-trip to the Undying Lands, it is doubtful the Valar would take it. Doing so would go against their whole “leaving Arda” policy.

• Keep it in Rivendell, or some other secure location. But “the might of Elrond is in wisdom not in weapons”². Where else then? The most secure stronghold in Middle-earth is Minas Tirith, and Return of the King makes it abundantly clear that the Enemy is more than capable of bringing it down.

• Throw it at the sea, never to be found again. But there are creatures swimming the Sundering Seas, and not all are good. Even if the Ring could be made to be lost forever, Sauron would endure in Middle-earth. Best scenario, this only postpones the real problem: how to defeat the Shadow.

• Use it as a weapon against Sauron. But the Ring is a power so great and so terrible that even if one could use it against its master, the Ring would corrupt him, and thus put a new Dark Lord in place of the old³.

• Give it to Tom Bombadil. But would you really trust anything to Tom Bombadil?

Since the Ring can be neither kept, nor wielded, nor disposed of, there is one path left: destroy it. As established, this move is so alien to Sauron’s mind that it is almost genius in its sheer suicidal courage: instead of taking the Ring to Gondor and weaponizing it — instead of doing what Sauron himself would do — they would walk straight into danger, taking the Ring to Mordor.

But how? Gather the biggest army they can and open way to Mount Doom by force? No, because remember: Sauron cannot be defeated by feats of arms. The only way is to sneak the Ring into Mordor, in uttermost secret. That is why there is only a handful of people in the Fellowship of the Ring, instead of a battalion. If Sauron finds out where they are heading, he is just going to place soldiers around Mount Doom and wait for the Ring to come straight to him. Secrecy is the key word here.

So that is the plan and the reasoning. Now…

Where do the Eagles fit in?

Here is what Mr. Hypothetical Pedant Nerd could suggest:

• Hey, doesn’t the Eagles kind of nullify the “Sauron can’t be beaten by force” thing? Victory through air power and stuff?

Not really. Sauron has his own air force: the Fell Beasts. Irrespective of how they would fare in a fight against the Eagles, the time of the scramble would be the time for Sauron to realize that, if the Eagles are involved (since Eagles and Men are not really on talking terms), they are probably carrying the Ring. Thus Sauron would fortify the Cracks of Doom and send all his forces — possibly even himself — to recover the One.

• But the Eagles could still carry the Fellowship part of the way, right?

They could — I doubt Gwaihir would object to helping — but 55-meter wide giant birds flying across the sky goes against the whole secret mission thing. There is no way for an Eagle to take flight without Sauron knowing; and, as said above, if the Eagles are involved, Sauron would deduce they are carrying the Ring.

Say the plan was to carry the Fellowship from Rivendell to Lothlórien. Once they landed every orc in a ten-mile radius would be marching towards them. There is, of course, a chance that Sauron may still not figure out they are heading to Mordor, and a chance that the Fellowship may still evade their enemies for the time needed to reach Mount Doom. But that is risking the main ingredient of the plan — secrecy — for a chance.

• Ok, so why not use the Eagles as distraction? Flying to Gondor, for example, making Sauron think the Ring was there, while the Fellowship sneaks by foot into Mordor?

That’s… a surprisingly helpful suggestion, Mr. Hypothetical Pedant Nerd. However, this tactic would only work after the Fellowship was near Mordor. Since, as per above, they have to travel by foot, the journey would take months⁴. Deploying the Eagles before this would be a waste of Eagle-power.

Long before the Fellowship can get anywhere near the Black Gate, however, Frodo and Sam part ways with the others, who thereafter know little of their whereabouts. Meaning there is no way of knowing when Frodo reaches Mordor, and no way of knowing when to deploy the Eagle-distraction-maneuver.

Besides, convincing Sauron that the Rings is going Southwest, and not Southeast, is redundant. As we said above, the Dark Lord cannot fathom the idea one would try to destroy the One Ring, so he already believes it to be going either to the Sea or to Gondor.

• Now I’m out of ideas.

That’s okay, Mr. Hypothetical Pedant Nerd. You were just a rhetorical device born from a fragment of my mind.

In short: secretly sneaking the Ring into Mordor is the only viable plan. And flying the Eagles anywhere breaks the plan, unless they are not actually carrying the Ring, in which case they are redundant.

The ACTUAL Eagle Problem

The actions of the Eagles during the Lord of the Rings are perfectly coherent with what the book tells us of the War of the Ring. That doesn’t make them good characters, though.

People, I fear, got the question backwards. The Eagles’s interventions (or lack thereof) are not illogical occurrences that make no deductive sense but make the story better. They are logical occurrences that make perfect deductive sense given the premises; but they make the story worse.

Tolkien himself said that “The Eagles are a dangerous ‘machine’. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness.”⁵ Not, perhaps, sparingly enough. In The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, their deus ex machina-ry⁶ is balanced by the eucatastrophic feeling they invoke:

I knew I had written a story of worth in ‘The Hobbit’ when reading it (after it was old enough to be detached from me) I had suddenly in a fairly strong measure the ‘eucatastrophic’ emotion at Bilbo’s exclamation: ‘The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!’

The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 89

In The Silmarillion, however, the Eagles are a game of diminishing returns. First they rescue Fingon and newly-one-handed Maedros; then they rescue Fingolfin’s body; then they rescue Hurin and Huor; then they rescue Beren and Luthien. It gets old fast, specially since the latter two have the Eagles appear not in the ending, but at the beginning or middle of the story.

In-universe, all of these rescues are selective and limited blessings from the Valar, who were mostly letting the Eldar face the consequences of their actions alone, as was their desire leaving Aman. But from the reader’s perspective, each appearance of the Eagles is less striking than the last. The Silmarillion is the place where they come most close to looking like “Middle-earth’s aerial taxi”.

That is not to say the mentioned scenes are bad. They are all, in fact, moving and poignant. Luthien cradling Beren’s unconscious body, two lovers alone before the gates of Hell, and then carried up in the air, away from peril, fire, and smoke. Thorondor scarring Morgoth and saving Fingolfin’s body, so that the High King could be buried atop Gondolin. The despair of Fingon, ready to kill his best friend, and the saving of them both that comes in answer to what’s very close to prayer.

All moving and poignant — in isolation. When seen alongside, each becomes a little less special, as if the Prince would wake Snow White up three times with three kisses. Tolkien’s Legendarium takes its power, in great part, from repeating patterns, which makes sure every action carries with it the weight of history. But in the case of the Eagles, the repetition makes the instances less weighty. It is perhaps the only part of Tolkien’s works in which looking at the whole makes the parts smaller.

1. Unfinished Tales, “The Quest of Erebor”

2. The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, “The Council of Elrond”.

3. This is one of the most commented-on aspects of the Lord of the Rings, the reason why, back in the good old days of the Cold War, people liked to interpret the Ring as a metaphor for the H-Bomb, much to Tolkien’s dismay. Today someone will probably interpret it as a metaphor for A.I., much to Tolkien’s posthumous dismay.

4. As per Appendix B of The Return of the King, the Fellowship of the Ring left Rivendell on December 25th, 3018, and only reached Lothlórien on February 16th of the next year.

5. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 210

6. In the bad sense of deus ex machina, as a sudden and unwarranted narrative device. Whether all deus ex machina is like this is matter for another Post.