Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lore cast,

the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing it to the very first description of the great eagles.

And by very first, I mean, the first time in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, in the novels that he wrote.

Now, of course, the Eagles have

been around since the Silmarillion and play an important part in his legendarium. But this is the

first time that a young reader who had picked up the Hobbit, let's say in 1940, would have

heard about these creatures.

This is the very first time.

And in this episode, we're going to go over some of the descriptions and some of the ways that Tolkien presents these very important creatures in his legendarium to a young

reader or a new reader, if you're an adult.

And of course, I find all of this very interesting,

and we'll get into it in this episode as we go through this section of the Hobbit. But every time

the Eagles come up, the thing that pops into my brain is the question, and I know this isn't a

Hobbit thing, this is a Lord of the Rings thing, but why didn't the Fellowship use the Eagles to just fly the ring to Mordor?

This is always one of those critiques that gets floated around on the internet.

And there's very good reasons for that.

And we're going to go into the background of the Eagles and answer this question in more detail in the bonus episode this week.

But in the meantime, there's a fun response.

And I've debated how to present this because this is supposed to be J.R.

Tolkien's response to the question.

Now, this isn't actually.

And I could have presented this as, here,

...