Origins 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 , 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: == Adaptations ==