“There’s a huge plot hole in Lord of the Rings! The eagles could have just flown the ring to Mordor and dropped it in the volcano! The whole movie/book could have been resolved in like 5 minutes!”
You’ve probably heard this hoary old chestnut before. It’s been circling around for decades. It’s got all the traits for a great little meme: It has the aura of cleverness and it attacks something popular.
It’s also complete bullshit.
(And it almost universally indicates that the person uttering it will have absolutely nothing of value to say about The Lord of the Rings.)
Basically, this “plot hole” boils down to two questions.
First: Is it actually a viable solution?
Second: Should it have been talked about at the Council of Elrond?
DOES IT WORK?
Most people treat this as if it were some sort of “slam dunk”. But there are several reasons why the Eagle Solution either definitely won’t work, probably won’t work, or may not work:
(1) There are no Eagles in Rivendell. Although movie-Gandalf has the ability to summon them with his skills as a butterfly whisperer, that’s not an ability he demonstrates in the books. So you’d have to go and get them and then bring them back (a journey almost as long as trekking to Mordor in the first place).
(2) Even then they might say “no”, in which case you’ve wasted a lot of time. (In fact, they would probably say no, as any perusal of their characterization in the novels would suggest.)
(3) On the one hand you’ve got the dangerous temptation of carrying the Ringbearer a couple hundred feet off the ground (splat); on the other hand you have very powerful creatures (on an order similar to Gandalf). Gandalf specifically warns against this mix of power-and-temptation multiple times throughout the novel.
(5) Bad Shit happens every time Sauron gets line-of-sight on Frodo. Flying the Ring into Mordor would automatically mean putting it in Sauron’s line-of-sight.
(6) You’ve also got Saruman’s crebain spies, which become more difficult to avoid if you’re flying.
(7) On top of all this, we have absolutely no idea what aerial defenses Sauron might have had before he was killed. Endless arguments can be had one way and the other about the effectiveness and/or location of the flying Nazgul or the efficacy in catching the Eagles, but for all we know the Eye could have blasted the Eagle straight out of the sky.
Quite a few variants of the “just have an Eagle do it” scenario will usually be proffered at this point in an effort to mitigate some or all of these problems with the plan. (Have the Eagle just carry Frodo. Blindfold the Eagle. Walk most of the way to Mordor and then just fly the last little jaunt. Et cetera.) But these efforts basically admit that there are inherent problems with this plan, which brings us to…
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DISCUSSED!
Here the claim is made that “every possible plan is discussed” at the Council of Elrond except for using the Eagles. Therefore, even if it isn’t viable, it’s a plot hole that it wasn’t included on the agenda.
But this argument is based on a false premise: That every possible plan was discussed at the Council of Elrond.
That’s not actually true. It feels true because Tolkien is, in fact, a very good storyteller. But the reality is that there are lots of plans that aren’t considered. For example, the Fellowship could instead head straight to the sea coast and sail to Gondor. This would have cut weeks off their travel time and avoided the threats of Saruman, the Misty Mountains, and Moria entirely.
My point here isn’t that “they should totally hit that ocean!” (There, are in fact, as many problems with that plan as there are with the Eagles plan, starting with Mordor-sponsored pirates and going on from there.) My point is that the Council of Rivendell wasn’t written to serve as an exhaustive checklist of every single option that could conceivably be taken. It would be a dreadfully boring scene if it was.
Rather, Tolkien includes a few such discussions in order to dramatically hit the beat of “we discussed other options”. (He also uses most of those bits to simultaneously establish other important bits of exposition.) But once that beat has been established, Tolkien moves on to the next dramatic beat.
People think they discussed every option because Tolkien makes you think that through effective storytelling. But there are lots of options that aren’t explicitly raised in the text itself, and there isn’t any particular reason why every single option should be encyclopedically rejected in the text.
THE FUNNY BIT AT THE END
With that being said, this is pretty funny:
But it’s as much a meaningful critique of Lord of the Rings as this is:
Bald Eagle photo by Keven Law. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.
THANK YOU! I’m sick of hearing people use this as an excuse to denigrate LotR. There are plenty of good reasons for people who have the inclination to hate various works of fiction (like the lack of female characters who do much of anything, notably) without inventing some that are spurious.
I love the comments posted beneath the second video you linked. Especially these:
“You stupid dwarf!!! Can’t you see??? We needed this quest to get rid of him *pointing at Boromir*, and put him *pointing at Aragorn* at the throne of Gondor, and make him *pointing at Gandalf* white magician. And it supposed to be a reason for Elves to leave this fucking Middleearth and to make them *pointing at hobbits* to lose some weight!!! Gods know they need it… AND IT COULD HAVE BEEN EPIC!!!”
“Boromir: It’s a good thing we didn’t have to trek thousands or miles or anything. One of us could have died!”
“*dungeon master storms out of the room*”
What’s the point of blindfolding the eagle (besides being hilarious)?
I believe the idea is either
(a) if it can’t see the Ring, it can’t be tempted by the Ring; or
(b) it wouldn’t agree to do it if it knew they were flying into Mordor
Those videos and this topic reminds me so much of DM of the Rings it hurts.
If you haven’t read it, here it is:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612
How about that video about “They’re Taking the Taters to Isengard!”?
I would worry about blindfolding a flying creature. Especially with the topology of Morder. The ring trapped on top of a mountain doesn’t seem to necessarily improve matters.
Another thing that isn’t brought up is the importance of stealth. I believe Gandalf is quite clear that the only reason that the approach taken (sneak into Mordor) has a chance is Sauron can’t contemplate his enemies taking this approach. Flying an Eagle towards Mount Doom could result in all sorts of unfortunate effects.
Heck, if it is the book Sauron (who was clearly embodied) then he could just camp out at Mount Doom. That would be a serious problem for anybody given his ability to change into powerful and deadly forms.
More accurately, Gandalf makes it clear that *destroying the Ring* is the one thing Sauron would never contemplate the heroes doing. (Side note: I’m pretty sure that following the destruction of Numenor, Sauron lost the ability to change his shape.)
It is entirely possible that, yes, getting one of the Eagles, say, Gwindor, if I recall my names right, to fly with the Ring in his claws and drop it into the Cracks of Doom at Orodruin would have been a quick and effective solution to the problem of destroying the Ring. Yes, there are many things that could go wrong, possibly more or possibly less than with the plan the Fellowship followed.
But most importantly, whether the eagle plan would or would not have been a better solution to that singular problem… it wouldn’t have been a story. We wouldn’t have met nearly so many characters, seen so much of the world. While LotR comes off to many people as more a travelogue & history than a novel (not entirely unjustifiably, I would say), with the eagle plan, there would be at most 1/3 as much of a novel, and while it could include almost as much travelogue by describing what the eagle flew over… but there would be no such novel. Frodo wouldn’t be tested by the Ring, there would be no chance for Gollum to strive towards redemption, for Theoden to throw off the cloak of debilitating magic Saruman shrouded him in through Wormtongue, for Eowyn to pine for the life of a warrior maiden or find love, and so on.
I would have liked to have seen the Elves donate a boat or two and brought Frodo down to Gondor in style. Certainly every boat can’t be used for their trip west and such a trip would most likely be safer and faster than the land-based trek. Elves wouldn’t even have to sail them all the way up river if they really didn’t want to get involved.
Even if the boats wouldn’t work because of the pirates or whatever it might have made a nice diversion to attract that big eye in Mordor for awhile.
Justin, I’m afraid your fan brain is over-ruling your logic on this one.
Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor?
http://www.sean-crist.com/personal/pages/eagles/index.html#:~:text=%22It%20is%20way%20too%20risky,the%20nature%20of%20the%20threat.
@Nathan:
Sean Crist’s conclusion is: “To mind, the strongest argument that there is nothing to rule out the “eagles” plan, and that this is simply a hole in the plot, is that the matter is not discussed at the Council of Elrond. Every possible plan is discussed…”
I refer you to the article above which handily refutes Crist’s “strongest argument.”
The premises of Crist’s argument are false.
Here is Tolkien’s own answer as to why they didn’t fly to Mordor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Uz0LMbWpI. It’s short and quite amusing. His answer is not any of the ones you listed, Justin.