The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  (ii)

  The Eagles

  Unlike wolves, who have played the villain in any number of folk and fairy tales, from Aesop to the Reynard the Fox cycle to Brer Rabbit to modern-day stories of the type parodied by Saki’s ‘The Story of the Good Little Girl’ (e.g., ‘The Three Little Pigs’), eagles appear in surprisingly few well-known myths and folktales. There is the story of the eagle sent by Zeus to carry off Ganymede the Trojan to be his cup-bearer (a tale which gave its name to the Inklings’ favorite pub, The Eagle and Child, whose street-sign illustrates the scene). There is also the grimmer story of another eagle, also sent by Zeus, which each day rips out the liver of the bound titan Prometheus as punishment for his having helped mankind against the Olympians’ wishes. Descending from the level of myth to gossip, Sir Thomas Browne reports the old story that an eagle killed the Athenian playwright Æschylus (author of Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, d. 456 BC) when, mistaking the great man’s bald head for a rock, it dropped a turtle on it from a great height.12

  Further west and slightly later, this emblem of the King of the Gods came not unnaturally to be identified with the Roman emperor and thence with the empire itself. The imperial eagle was carried on the standards of Roman legions and later adopted in heraldry by all those who claimed to be the heirs of the Caesars: the Holy Roman Emperors of the Middle Ages and later the Emperors of Austria, the German Kaisers, and the Russian Czars (‘Kaiser,’ ‘Czar,’ and ‘Tsar’ simply being the German, Russian, and Polish equivalents of ‘Caesar’). Indeed, so prevalent was this usage that it is said one of Nostradamus’s predictions about ‘an eagle rising in the east’ was taken in World War I as a sign of victory by superstitiously minded advocates of virtually all the combatants.

  Meanwhile, Christian iconography associated the eagle with John the Evangelist, Tolkien’s favorite apostle.13 Tolkien also seems to have been influenced by the medieval bestiary tradition (from which he drew the inspiration for at least two of his poems written in the 1920s, ‘Fastitocalon’ and ‘Oliphaunt’), with its curious and characteristic mix of allegorical significance and realistic detail – although much of the latter strikes a modern reader as decidedly fantastic. Bestiary lore (accurately) ascribed fantastically keen eyesight to the eagle: thus Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls [circa 1378–81], a literary work that combined the bestiary tradition with that of courtly love, described the eagle as ‘the ryal [royal] egle . . . That with his sharpe lok perseth the sunne’ (lines 330–331).14 The idea that eagles could look at the sun without blinking, which derives from the Bestiaries,15 made its way directly into Tolkien’s text (cf. p. 206: ‘eyes that could look straight at the sun unblinking’). Similarly, Chaucer describes the eagle as King of the Birds, a title Tolkien notes was later bestowed upon the eagle-lord of our story (cf. p. 229).

  Outside the rather arcane bestiary tradition and Christian iconography (in, for example, The Book of Kells [eighth century]), however, eagles seem not to have figured greatly in the medieval imagination. While the eagle remained of great heraldic significance, medieval romance favored the hawk or falcon, those familiar birds used in the noble art of falconry, over their grander cousins.16 Aside from American Indian traditions, there seems to have been little fairy-tale or folklore resonance to eagles, other than the widespread folk belief that eagles carry off lambs and even sheep (used even today by many ranchers to justify the illegal poisoning and shooting of protected endangered species). Tolkien incorporates this enduring superstition directly into his text, putting it into the mouth of the Lord of the Eagles himself: ‘they will think we are after their lambs – or their babies. And at other times they might be right.’ Interestingly enough, this alarming statement was toned down in the revisions, with the ‘Ganymede’ element being taken out before the First Typescript (where it’s simply the lambs they’re after – cf. Marq. 1/1/56:11 and 1/1/37:10–11) and the lambs changed to sheep in the page proofs (Marq. 1/2/2 page 116). Perhaps Tolkien wanted to emphasize the size and majesty of these great birds; perhaps he wanted to give another example of the divisions between the good peoples of the story (thus laying the groundwork for the wood-elf episode and Siege of the Lonely Mountain that were to follow). Still, he makes it clear that, while not ‘kindly birds’ (as the published text puts it), they are nevertheless foes of evil who put a stop to the goblins’ ‘wickedness’ whenever they can.

  Indeed, far from being Children of Morgoth (as has been the case with most of the other races the hobbit has encountered since leaving his home, always exempting the elves and elf-friends), a long-established tradition in Tolkien’s work going back to The Book of Lost Tales portrays eagles as the messengers of Manwë,17 guardians of Gondolin, bitter foes of Melko. We are told that Manwë created the eagles himself (1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, HME IV.23; cf. also the 1930 Quenta, HME IV.102), who thus stand in direct opposition to Melkor the Morgoth’s forces. It was ‘Sorontur King of Eagles’ who delivered the message of banishment to Melko after the Two Trees were destroyed and the Silmarils stolen (and told him of the murder of his herald by the Valar):

  and between that evil one and Sorontur has there ever since been hate and war, and that was most bitter when Sorontur and his folk fared to the Iron Mountains and there abode, watching all that Melko did.

  —‘The Theft of Melko’, BLT I.149.

  Sorontur (better known by his Gnomish name, Thorndor, and its later form Thorondor) and his eagles actually nest in Thangorodrim’s upper regions, ‘out of the reach of Orc and Balrog’ (‘Sketch of the Mythology’, HME IV.23), the better to keep watch on Melko’s doings. From here he witnesses Fingolfin’s duel with Melko and sallies forth to mar the dark lord’s face and rescue the fallen elvenking’s body (‘The Lay of Leithian’, lines 3608–3639; HME III.286–7). Later the eagles move their eyries to the Encircling Mountains surrounding Gondolin, to help guard this last elven refuge against Melko’s spies (‘Sketch’, HME IV.34). While they cannot prevent the fall of the city, the eagles do save the refugees from fallen Gondolin as they battle goblins and a balrog in a mountain pass in a scene strikingly similar to that in The Hobbit but predating it by more than a decade:

  . . . Now Galdor and Glorfindel held their own despite the surprise of assault, and many of the Orcs were struck into the abyss; but the falling of rocks was like to end all their valour, and the flight from Gondolin to come to ruin. The moon about that hour rose above the pass, and the gloom somewhat lifted, for his pale light filtered into dark places . . . Then arose Thorndor, King of the Eagles, and he loved not Melko, for Melko had caught many of his kindred and chained them against sharp rocks to squeeze from them the magic words whereby he might learn to fly . . .

  Now when the clamour from the pass rose to his great eyrie he said: ‘Wherefore are these foul things, these Orcs of the hills, climbed near to my throne; and why do the sons of the Noldoli [the Noldor] cry out in the low places for fear of the children of Melko the accursed? Arise O Thornhoth [‘eagle-folk’], whose beaks are of steel and whose talons swords!’

  Thereupon there was a rushing like a great wind in rocky places, and the Thornhoth, the people of the Eagles, fell on those Orcs who had scaled above the path, and tore their faces and their hands and flung them to the rocks of Thorn Sir far below . . .

  —‘The Fall of Gondolin’ [c. 1916–17]; BLT II.193.

  The eagles even found their way into the story of Beren and Lúthien, rescuing them from certain capture after their escape from Morgoth’s halls. Their entry into the story is a relatively late one, however – the unfinished ‘Lay of Leithian’ breaks off just at the point where Beren loses his hand, and the eagles enter in only via a pencilled rider to the outline for the three unwritten cantos that were to conclude the poem:

  . . . Thunder and lightning. Beren lies dying before the gate. Tinúviel’s song as she kisses his hand and prepares to die. Thorondor comes down and bears them amid the lightning that <?stabs> at them like spears and a hail of arrows from the battlements. T
hey pass above Gondolin and Lúthien sees the white city far below, <?gleaming> like a lily in the valley. Thorondor sets her down in Brethil.

  —HME III.309.

  Tolkien himself felt that the eagles were a dangerous device, apt to be overused as a deus ex machina; he deplored their ubiquitous appearance throughout the first movie script for a potential Lord of the Rings movie sent to him in 1958 (JRRT to Forrest J. Ackerman, June 1958; cf. Letters p. 271).18 Indeed, in The Hobbit they appear only twice and in The Lord of the Rings only three times, with two of those episodes being off-stage (the rescue of Gandalf from Orthanc and the retrieval of his body from atop Zirakzigil).

  Close examination of the Silmarillion texts shows the danger: the more times Tolkien re-wrote the stories, the more new episodes featuring the eagles worked their way in. Thus in the 1930 Quenta not only are all but one of the previous references intact19 – Manwë’s sending forth the Eagles, Thorondor’s maiming of Morgoth and rescue of Fingolfin’s body, the rescue of Beren and Lúthien before the gates of Thangorodrim,20 the removal from Thangorodrim to the Encircling Mountains to help ward Gondolin and guard the cairn of Fingolfin, their intervention at the pass on behalf of the fugitives of Gondolin – but we are also told that Melian summoned Thorondor to bear Lúthien to Valinor after Beren died (1930 Quenta, HME IV.115) and that the eagle-king aided in Fingon’s rescue of Maidros when he hung chained to the cliff-face of Thangorodrim (1930 Quenta, HME IV.102) – the latter tale seems to have entered in via the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’; cf. HME IV.23).

  Clearly, Tolkien was fond of his eagles and found it difficult to keep them out of each of the major stories that make up the Silmarillion cycle. When he was asked to add colour illustrations to The Hobbit for the first American edition, one of the five watercolours was devoted to a beautiful painting of an eagle of the Misty Mountains.21 They also appear, of course, on the dust jacket – where they are placed in opposition to Smaug the dragon – and in the black and white interior illustration ‘The Misty Mountains looking West from the Eyrie towards Goblin Gate’, which serves as a tailpiece to Chapter VI (DAA.158, H-S#110 & #111).

  Given Tolkien’s continued interest in the eagles, it is odd that in The Battle of Five Armies the wargs and goblins each count as a ‘people’ for purposes of the tally yet the eagles do not. Perhaps there are simply too few eagles present to be described as an ‘army’ (as seems to be the case with Beorn/Medwed: doughty though he be, there is but one of him), but the designation is made all the more curious by the importance of the role they play in the combat, which is strikingly similar to that described in the passage from ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ quoted above.

  The most unusual feature of the whole eagle scene, however, is the unusual shift in point of view away from Thorin & Company for four paragraphs – an entire Ms. page. For the most part, Tolkien is careful to stay with his main characters; the only similar shifts occur late in the book when the story divides between the dwarves and hobbit inside the Lonely Mountain and the dragon flying around outside before he flies away to attack Lake Town. The dramatic excellence of the cutaway shows that he was right in departing here from his usual practice, but we should not fail to notice how unusual it is, nor to give Tolkien credit for abandoning a favorite point-of-view when doing so will advance the story’s dramatic impact.

  Finally, we should note the mythic resonance of Bladorthin’s parting words to the eagles on p. 229 in what became the early part of the next chapter. ‘May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks’ sounds fanciful, but in Tolkien’s cosmology it has concrete aptness. His myth of the Sun and Moon, derived largely I believe from Egyptian cosmology (including the journey of the sun-boat through the Duat or Underworld from west to east each night), and his various geographical writings and drawings that make up the Ambarkanta or Shape of the World (reproduced in The Shaping of Middle-earth, HME IV) specify that in his subcreated world the atomosphere is divided into several discrete layers. The lower of these, Wilwa (later renamed Vista) composes the lowest level, the air that we breathe. Wilwa is furthermore subdivided into Aiwenórë or ‘Birdland’ and Fanyamar or ‘Cloudhome’. Above this lies a region variously called Silma, Ilma, and Ilmen at different stages in the mythology’s evolution. Silma/Ilmen is glossed ‘Sky, Heaven’ and defined as ‘The region above the air . . . Here only the stars and Moon and Sun can fly’ (HME IV.241). We are specifically told in the Ambarkanta that ‘From [Wilwa >] Vista there is no outlet nor escape save for the servants of Manwë, or for such as he gives powers like to those of his people, that can sustain themselves in Ilmen . . .’ (HME IV.236). The wizard’s words thus obliquely tie into the cosmology of the created world and reaffirm that the Great Eagles are indeed the eagles of Manwë, either spirits incarnated as birds or their (mortal) descendants, just as the wargs are descended from spirits of evil that had taken wolf-form. The eagles and the wargs neatly counterpoise each other, and each play in our story what had already by 1930 become their ‘traditional’ roles in the stories that comprised Tolkien’s legendarium: the one to threaten the heroes and the other to intervene when all hope had been lost and deliver them from evil, almost as a visible grace. Deus ex indeed.

  Chapter VII

  Medwed

  The text continues on from the middle of the same page (manuscript page 77; Marq. 1/1/7:1), but at a slightly smaller indentation. This, and a skipped line with a short (1½ inch) horizontal line centered in it between this and the preceding paragraph, seem to indicate a slight pause in the composition – probably no more than a single night, but nevertheless marking a separation point that later grew to become a chapter opening.

  The next morning he woke up with the eastern [> early] sun in his eyes. He jumped up to look at the time, and go and put his kettle on – and found he wasn’t at home at all. So he sat down again, and wished he could have a wash, and a brush. He didn’t get toast, nor tea, nor bacon. Only cold mutton. And after that he had to get ready for a fresh start. This time he was allowed to climb on an eagle’s back and cling on between the wings. The air rushed over him, and he shut his eyes. The dwarves were crying farewells and promising to repay the Lord of Eagles if ever they could; then off went fifteen eagles into the air.

  The sun was still close to the eastern edge of things. The morning was cool, and mists were in the valleys & hollows and twined here & there among the peaks & pinnacles of the mountains. [But soon >] When Bilbo opened an eye to peep they [> the eagles] were already very high up and the world was far away, and the mountains falling back behind them into the distance. He shut his eyes again and held on tighter.

  ‘Don’t pinch’ said his eagle. ‘You need not be frightened like a rabbit.TN1 It is a fair morning, and little wind. What is finer than flying.’ Bilbo would have liked to say ‘a warm bath, and breakfast on the lawn afterwards’TN2 but he said nothing at all, & let go his clutch just a teeny-weeny bit.

  After a good while the eagles must have seen [far >] the point they were making for even from their great height. They began to go down circling round in great circles. For a long while they did this, then Bilbo opened his eyes again. The rough feet of the mountains were left behind. The earth was much nearer now, and below them were trees, oaks and elms probably, and wide green lands, and a river running through it all. But cropping out of the ground, right in the path of the stream which looped itself round it, was a rock – almost a hill of stone, like a last outpost of the mountains, or a large piece cast miles into the plain by some giant among giants. Now quickly down to the top of this the eagles swooped one by one and set down their passengers.

  ‘Farewell’ they said ‘where ever you fare, till your homes [> nests > eyries] receive you at the journey’s end’. This is a polite thing to say among eagles.

  ‘May the wind under your wings bear you [as >] where the sun sails and the moon walks’ said Bladorthin, who knew the correct answer.TN3

  And so they parted. And though the Lord of the Eag
les became king of the [> all] Birds in after days and wore a gold crownTN4 ([added: made] of the gold given him by Bladorthin in remembrance), Bilbo never saw them again.TN5 But he didn’t forget them.

  There was [a] flat place on the top of the hill of stone, and a well worn path with many steps leading down it, to the river side, and a ford of huge boulders which led across to the grass land beyond the river. There was a little cave (a wholesome one) with a pebbly floor at the foot of the hill opposite the boulder-ford. Here the party gathered and discussed what was to be done.

  The text continues without a break, but I interrupt it at this point to give the First Outline – at any rate, the earliest surviving one. Merely a brief, sketchy list of reminders to himself that Tolkien jotted down on a loose sheet of paper (Marq. 1/1/23:1),TN6 it records episodes and some details that would occur in upcoming chapters.

  Medwed the bear.

  Mirkwood & .

  disappearance of Bladorthin.

  Long wanderings of the dwarves.

 

  [spring >] Long Lake

  by the elves.

  swans Mirkwood