The Misty Mountains: Eagle's Eyrie (Patreon)

• Names: The Eagle’s Eyrie; The Great Shelf

• Synopsis: Middle-earth’s megafaunal Great Eagles dwell in the eastern Misty Mountains. They collaborate with Rivendell to monitor Wilderland as a kind of aerial police force. One of Tolkien’s drawings suggests the Eyrie is east of Goblin-town. 

• Filming location: Not strictly depicted in Jackson’s films

Habitats in The Hobbit can be split into places whose denizens awkwardly nestle into them and ones whose inhabitants define their space. The Eagles’ Eyrie falls into the latter category. A roost for giant eagles in the Misty Mountains, the Eyrie is “a lonely pinnacle of rock at the eastern edge of the mountains.” It’s seemingly tailored to the Great Eagles’ existence, as the Lord of the Eagles sits on his pinnacle while “two of his guards” perch on “rocks at each end.”[1]

Like real eagles, Tolkien’s Great Eagles fly around mountains searching for prey. Unlike their real-life counterparts, these eagles are fucking huge and rescue hobbits and wizards from mortal danger. They’re imperious creatures, serving as Middle-earth’s police force — a Royal Eyrie Force, if you will. Their presence at the Battle of the Five Armies only confirms this impression. The eagles are there to ensure victory for the right people.

Their habitat reflects their intimidating nature. The eagles live in “the pale peaks of the mountains,” among “moonlit spikes of rock sticking out of black shadows.” Like many ostensibly noble forces in The Hobbit, they’re frightening and dangerous to unprepared adversaries. When they spot goblins, although they “did not love [them], or fear them,” the eagles “swooped on them and drove them shrieking back to their caves.” The book even specifies “Eagles are not kindly birds. Some are cowardly and cruel.” 

Anthropomorphized fauna are rare in Tolkien. The Fellowship of the Ring has a strange aside where a fox muses about hobbits, but otherwise, Middle-earth’s wildlife mostly lacks intellect and sentience. This largely stems from Tolkien’s evolving mythology. His treatment of wild animals as unensouled came later in his mythology, after The Lord of the Rings’ publication. As the theology was unsettled, the eagles are a strange residual trace of an unfinished mythology.

Yet the eagles are a defining aberration of Tolkien’s work. They rescue The Hobbit’s Company from goblins and participate in the Battle of Five Armies, while in The Lord of the Rings they rescue Gandalf from Orthanc and then, most infamously, save Frodo and Sam from an erupting Mount Doom. Nerds and critics (but I repeat myself) have analyzed the eagles’ role as deus ex machina ad nauseam, to the point that anybody reviving the discourse can morally be hurled from the heights of Gundabad.

Criticizing the eagles as a deus ex machina is a mistake. Middle-earth is haunted by the divine. And more pertinently, Frodo and Sam’s problems aren’t magically solved by the eagles. Their stories continue beyond that. The eagles aren’t remotely a story-breaking taxi service. They’re divine intervention with all the unknowable horror that entails.

Tolkien even had the eagles descend from Thorondor, an Eagle associated with the Vala Manwë. For a while he hoped to make the eagles into Maiar, but at that point he had already made the Eagles Thorondor’s descendants. They lack souls, and yet they’re agents of the divine (yes, this makes deus ex machina slightly more literal).

In a way, the Great Eagles are angelic figures, cops for the divine. They even refer to non-hostile beings as “prisoners.” What we get with them, then, is another instance of the Misty Mountains maintaining the holy and divine in Middle-earth. The Royal Eyrie Force reminds goblins and dwarves yet again that the Valar never fully leave Middle-earth.

[1] The Hobbit, “Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire”