Where the Sun Sails and the Moon Walks: About Tolkien's Eagles

There comes a time in the life of every reader when he's re-reading his favorite book for the twenty-seventh time and he comes across a plot hole. This is the final test of a book: whether it can withstand the self-doubt of a reader's dedication. It forces you to be introspective, to decide whether you can still see yourself in the story you love, or loved.

A famous hole has been pointed out in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings since almost immediately after its publication. Don't worry: I won't spoil the ending here. The argument concerns the giant eagles who live upon the peaks of Middle Earth. They're smart, they can talk, and they sometimes help the protagonists out of sticky situations by carrying them away on their backs.

The plot of The Lord of the Rings is this, in oversimplified terms: Frodo, our protagonist, has possession of the Ring of Power, the greatest weapon of the tyrant Sauron. Sauron is ready to take over the world unless Frodo destroys the Ring, which can only be unmade where it was forged: in Mount Doom, a volcano in the heart of Sauron's territory. So Frodo and eight companions must travel by foot to Mount Doom, while every step brings them closer to danger and every day sees more people killed by Sauron and more allies become his devoted slaves.

The million dollar question is this: why did the journey have to be on foot? Gandalf, the wizard even non-Tolkien fans know and love, is a friend to the Eagles, and even calls them to rescue him at one point. Couldn't he ask the Eagles to fly them to Mount Doom? Shouldn't the Eagles want to help out, since Elrond and Gandalf make it clear that Sauron is trying to conquer absolutely everybody, which includes the Eagles on their lofty peaks?

I wouldn't give this criticism time and energy if it weren't a reasonable one. Now, perhaps you've read or heard my theories about the division between high fantasy and sword and sorcery. Read carefully: this question encompasses the entire divide between the two, as well as many other ideologies. I'll have to divide my reply into two parts: what the question misunderstands about Middle Earth, and what the question misunderstands about the Earth we all inhabit.

There are several reasons for the Eagles to withhold their services. The first and grittiest is that it's not their job. Elrond makes sure to say that only those who freely decide to take the quest must accompany Frodo, and the Eagles don't show up. I don't think that this is because, in Dungeons and Dragons mentality, Gandalf forgot they were in his inventory. Rather, the Eagles prove themselves quite capable of knowing what's going on and responding to it when they choose to do so.

Equally importantly, we're specifically kept from seeing exactly what Sauron can do on his own. My generation's audience, which has forgotten that a hidden monster in a book is scarier than the gory reveal provided in IMAX special effects, is also prone to forget that a character may have been able to do more things than they showed in the movie. Sauron's un-Ringed form may look like just a big, red eye, but Tolkien and even Jackson indirectly let you know that he's still the most fearsome person in Middle Earth. It's more impressive, not to mention less anal-retentive, not to tell you exactly how. As far as the Eagles are concerned, those key critics fail to notice that the Eagles only enter Mordor airspace after the Dark Tower has fallen (well, I guess there have to be some spoilers). To do so beforehand could have meant anything, because unlike the modern know-it-all, the Eagles weren't going to underestimate the man whom everyone fears will conquer the world. Flying over his wall would have been the quickest way to tip him off, especially since, because he is an eye rather than anything else, the only thing we have to know about Sauron is his ability to see threats coming. And since, if he had gotten his Ring back, he would have been unstoppable, our favorite Dark Lord could have considered this surprise air mail.

No, careful reading of the book tells us that the quest had to be in secret, carried out by the lowliest people in the most unlikely way, in order to avoid Sauron's all-seeing Eye. But even this wasn't the issue Tolkien took with the question of flying the Eagles.*

Tolkien called the Eagles a 'dangerous machine,' and why not? It would have been so easy to end his story about seven hundred pages earlier by flying the Ring to Mount Doom, and the book would not have been worth reading. "'Nine Walkers' and they immediately go up into the air!" he says to this suggestion. To him, the essence of the story was not the fact that good wins in the end, but the struggle that good must undertake to get there. Hence he needs "a long and arduous journey, in secrecy, on foot, with the three ominous mountains getting nearer." It is, quite literally, a journey toward the thing most feared, requiring the utmost courage because of its slow, dangerous way. If the matter of the story lay exclusively in its resolution, then the action would do nothing but appeal to voyeuristic thrill-seekers and narcissists. Instead, it speaks to people interested in actual courage to see the Ring in the hands of Frodo, a small, peaceful person who has no place in war.

I must stress again that the whole difference between high fantasy and cheap action lies in this question, and that it's a distinction that plays into every day of your life. You don't have to change what you read. Just understand that the world isn't quantified into what we can see; money, science, power, and all other numbers don't dictate another person's usefulness to you. Without these barriers you may discover what ominous mountains are on your horizon, and whether you, too would fly toward them without the slightest idea what awaits you there.

'I will take the Ring,' he said, 'though I do not know the way.'

Elrond raised his eyes and looked at him, and Frodo felt his heart pierced by the sudden keenness of the glance. 'If I understand aright all that I have heard,' he said, 'I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will... Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it? Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know it, until the hour has struck? 

-The Fellowship of the Ring

*Quotes here are taken from #210 of the collection of Tolkien's letters.

In Defense of Linguistic Prescriptivism

Those of you who know me know that one of my biggest hobbies is linguistics. I'm not fluent in anything but English, but I regularly dabble in many different languages, trying to sort them out like fluid puzzles. It helps me realize how cloistered we unilingual (read: American) folks really are, especially when I see variations on the most basic parts of human syntax.

Like anything else, language is bombarded by various colorful and interesting opinions about how it should be used. You've heard some of them. Perhaps you think everyone who moves to your country should learn to speak your language, or perhaps you think it's wrong for the supermarket express lane to indicate its use for fifteen items or less rather than fewer.

I'm concerned with both of these issues, but my real beef is with the latter. After all, I could find enough well-informed people to nod their heads if I chose to rail about how closed-minded America is, and how much smarter we could become if we tried to become bi- or tri-lingual. What bothers me is how many well-informed and well-intentioned people condemn the practice of regulating grammar. The most prominent modern linguists divide their practice into two schools:

linguistic descriptivism - the method of studying language by observation and analysis, focusing on what people actually say and how their brains construct meaning

linguistic prescriptivism - the method of meddling with language in pursuit of better communication; for example, teaching that the double negative, "We don't have no milk," is less logical than a single negative, "We don't have any milk." (This example was actually the result of English scholars trying to standardize the many foreign influences that had worked their way into English grammar. They decided to condemn the double negative because, for lack of a better preference, it was inconsistent with classical Greek logic. Many world languages and recognized dialects of English, such as Ebonics, use it.)

Now, in all of the post-1950 books and all of the blogs I've read on the subject, descriptivism is the way to go. Actually, people can be quite nasty in their dislike of people who want to influence language by way of standardizing it (see Tom Scott or Steven Pinker). They have good reasons: everyone has, at some point, been leapt upon by a grammar Nazi who wasn't even part of the conversation. But beyond this, professional linguists and hobbyists are almost universal in their wish for language diversity. The fact that English, Mandarin, and Arabic are devouring endangered languages at a rate of one every three months is, to us, as great a tragedy as the loss of endangered species to habitat destruction. After all, language diversity is the best display of the potential range of human thought, without which we waste countless opportunities for creativity and understanding.

My friends, the direct opposite of this is standardization.

Yet it's possible to take all of this too far. Grammarians who speak about correct versus incorrect speech don't always have a reason beyond having learned a rule out of context in middle school, but it's worth listening to those who speak about useful speech. Whether or not I think it's correct to mention ten items or less, "fewer" is a word that creates additional associations in the brain. With scarcely any more effort, we become conscious of two ways in which quantity is divided. This is the kind of linguistic variation that speakers ought to pursue, and precisely what universal standard languages are beginning to weed out. My dream is not a limiting prescriptivism, by which immigrants must learn English and clods spend all their time worrying about the differences between "affect" and "effect," but a prescribed expansion of language. Let us create new terms and understandings! You don't even need institutional authority to do that, as any dialect could show you.

My formula for linguistic prescriptivism is a simple one, and these are its components:

1. Become proficient in at least two kinds of grammar. These don't necessarily need to be of two different languages. For example, you may have noticed that you write differently from the way you speak. This is especially true if you write a lot, or if you use tone significantly to express meaning. But if you're aiming not to be bilingual, but to examine your own English more closely, make sure you can find many potential deviations in the way you communicate.

2. Use standard grammar as a starting point. This point is where I'd like to draw the most ire from descriptivists. Communication affects individual thought, but its strength is tested better in group situations such as, for example, whether an entire community can understand each other. This is standard grammar. Descriptivists and I have it backwards; their logic implies that language is a piece of individual property which adjusts to fit group standards. Pinker supports this with his thesis that each infant creates language from scratch. But I prefer to think that language is a body of collective reasoning that each individual adjusts for himself. To me, this fits better with the examples of deaf individuals who, passing the adolescent window of rapid linguistic development, never develop the logical processes that neurologists associate with language. We all have to start from somewhere, and that place is the group of reasoning skills we get from hearing people communicating using rules that were decided before we were born.

3. Use your own reasoning to experiment. Do you think you can express yourself better? Do it! Here's an example: I think it's more efficient to refer to a hypothetical individual as someone of your own gender. Instead of "he or she," I say "he." If I were a woman, I'd say "she." That's nowhere in any English rule book I know, but it doesn't make me any harder to understand. And it's how language has always evolved.

4. Be respectful of other people's speech. You are never "right," and they are never "wrong." It can be counterproductive to tell someone that you speak better than he, when his rules make just as much sense to him as yours do to you. And if that ain't enough reason, courtesy is right.

5. Don't be afraid to talk about speech. I worry about descriptivists making the same mistake about "politically correct" fanatics: in taking the underdog's side, they refuse to speak objectively about any of the underdog's issues. In this case, people who think a certain dialect should be given higher esteem may refuse to hear any merits of the mother language, or even any valueless comparisons of the two. This is just a way for elitists to take the high road. Don't stifle communication! Act on a microscopic scale: talk to your friend about why you say "fewer" when he says "less," or vice versa. Don't do it to change him; do it to help the two of you understand each other better.

Please tell me your thoughts. This theory of mine is in its infancy, and still highly disorganized. I'd love to hear feedback from anyone, whether you think you know more or less than I do.