You Can’t Take the Eagles to Mordor — Part 2

No, I'm not drawing runes on it.

I was thinking further about the suggestion that Gandalf meant the Fellowship to fly to Mordor (which makes no sense, since if they were going to do that, why not have the eagles pick them up in Rivendell?). What would be the reason to tell everyone that you were going to walk all the way to Mordor, if you meant to get carried by the eagles at some point? And if you had to travel to a certain place from which to fly the eagles, well, then it would be like taking a airplane.

That’s when I realized that for considerations of space, Tolkien left out the pre-boarding announcement that Bilbo, Gandalf, and the Dwarves received before getting on the eagles in The Hobbit. Fortunately, a scrap of parchment with the faint remains of runic characters was separately discovered. Scholars have determined that these were ancient eagle runes, written with an ink derived from the blood of shrews, voles, and mice.

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Gandalf Didn’t Mean It That Way

Gandalf knew what he was doing

Recently, I’ve seen a post going around Facebook about the supposed “eagle plot hole” in The Lord of the Rings. It turns out to be not-so-recent, as I found it was posted on Reddit more than a year ago. And it’s wrong.

Since this is my first, and hugely belated post about fantasy or science fiction, let me provide some bona fides. I am not some newbie who got into LOTR because the movies came out. When I first read LOTR there were exactly 0 movies. Ralph Bakshi’s animated film was yet to come out.[1] I was the sort of kid who was writing in Tengwar in my mid-teens (and, oh, that was a very long time ago). In addition to decades of reading science fiction, I’m also trained in Medieval Studies, inspired in part by Tolkien.

Old school, hard core Tolkien fan.

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!