J. R. R. Tolkien “explains” why the Eagles didn’t just fly the Ring to Mordor

UPDATE: It’s fake. The video below is a J.R.R. Tolkien impersonator impersonating J.R.R. Tolkien. I thought it was real, and I was wrong, and that’s embarrassing. But at least the laughter was real, which hopefully counts for something.

“The Eagles are coming!” So say several characters over the course of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, to mark the coming of the Great Eagles of Middle-earth, who are ever on hand to turn the tide of a battle that seems lost. At the end of The Return of the King, they swoop down to rescue Frodo and Sam after they’ve tossed the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, which is erupting something fierce.

Of course, that led to a debate among fans: if the Eagles could fly into Mordor this whole time, why didn’t they just carry the One Ring to the cracks of doom in the first place? That could’ve made Frodo and Sam’s lives a lot easier.

As it happens, author J.R.R. Tolkien has weighed in on this very issue. Naturally, he got asked this question a lot, whether in correspondence with friends or by randos at the pub. And he always gave the same answer: “Shut up.”

That’s hysterical. I love how much time Tolkien spends on the setup before getting to the simple two-word punchline. A storyteller indeed.

And of course he’s right. In recent times, the internet has aided in the explosion of nit-pick criticism, with places like Cinema Sins reducing a movie or TV show to a list of perceived plot holes, as if that’s the most important thing about a work of art. But the instinct was clearly always there, it was just waiting for its moment.

Yeah, but why didn’t the Eagles just take the One Ring to Mordor?

However, I am a child of the age of nit-pick criticism, so I do still have a canonical answer for why the Eagles didn’t just take the Ring to Mount Doom. I wish I could be as classy as Tolkien and just shrug it off, but I’m weak; it’s the Gollum in me.

Anyway, the whole point of having Hobbits escort the Ring to Mount Doom was that they were less corruptible than powerful figures like Gandalf and Galadriel, who refused to handle the Ring lest it turn them to the Dark Side. The Eagles, too, are powerful beings, descendants of the Eagles sent by the Valar Manwë — a figure many times more powerful even than Sauron — back during the First Age. They would have become evil Eagles like that.

Plus, Sauron was looking for the forces of good to pull something like that. He expected Gandalf or Galadriel or Gwaihir the Eagle to put on the Ring, and then he would have corrupted them. He never thought that seemingly unimportant people like Frodo or Sam would handle it, and thus wasn’t looking for them.

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