It's the question Lord of the Rings viewers have been asking ever since Peter Jackson's trilogy came out: Why didn't Frodo and the Fellowship just ride eagles into Mount Doom?
The reasons are fairly simple. A flock of Great Eagles flying into Mordor would have immediately wrecked the secrecy the Fellowship strove for. Plus, the eagles just aren't a long-haul taxi service. However, if you still aren't satisfied with these answers — or you just crave more eagle action in your Middle-earth movies — then The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is here to tide you over.
This anime prequel from director Kenji Kamiyama focuses on the war between Rohan's formidable King Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox, Succession) and vengeful Dunlending Lord Wulf (voiced by Luke Pasqualino). The conflict takes Helm, his daughter Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), and the people of Rohan to the Hornburg stronghold, where they must weather a months-long siege and a brutal winter.
Desperation rises as the siege progresses, especially once Helm passes away. Forced into a leadership role she didn't anticipate, Héra makes a bold decision. She seeks the aid of a Great Eagle who lives high above the Hornburg, in the hopes of getting a message to her cousin Fréaláf (voiced by Laurence Ubong Williams) and his army at Dunharrow fortress.
Against all odds, the plan succeeds. After Héra implores the eagle for help, it brings the late Helm's helmet and armor to Fréaláf. He then wears it in his army's assault against Wulf's forces. The image of him in Helm's armor, silhouetted against the moon, is enough to make Wulf's men turn tail, thinking they've seen a ghost. None of this would have been possible without the help of the eagles! And while we don't get full-on eagle riding, we do get messenger eagles — a new use for them onscreen in Middle-earth.
Eagles aren't originally present in J.R.R. Tolkien's description of Helm and Wulf's war, which spans about a page and a half in The Lord of the Rings' Appendices. (Likewise, Héra herself is expanded from an unnamed bit part to a lead role.) But for screenwriters Phoebe Gittins and Arty Papageorgiou, Héra's reliance on an eagle wasn't just a nod to the eagles' usefulness as plot devices. It was also a key character beat for her in her journey to becoming a leader.
"It was super important that Héra really earned that moment," Papageorgiou told Mashable.
The eagle's involvement was an idea passed to Gittins and Papageorgiou from Kamiyama and producer Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote The Lord of the Rings films. (Gittins is also her daughter.)
"We approached [the eagles] as embedded storytelling," Gittins told Mashable. "We knew that it was a storytelling device that [Kamiyama and Boyens] wanted to use. So how do we make it believable that this a course of action Héra would take?"
Gittins and Papageorgiou laid the groundwork of the eagle moment from Héra's first scene, in which she summons a fledgling and offers it meat. The sequence establishes Héra's love of the natural world and her connection to the eagles, but there's a further symbolic kinship between her and the eagle. Like it, she's a fledgling at the start of her journey. She'll have to grow leaps and bounds by The War of the Rohirrim's end if she is to become the leader her people need.
Which brings us to the moment at the end of the siege, when Héra decides to find the eagle (fittingly, the fledgling from the start, all grown up). It's a last-ditch attempt, but there are no other options. No messenger birds can make it out of the Hornburg, but this eagle may just be the one bird Wulf's men can't shoot down.
For Gittins and Papageorgiou, Héra's willingness to reach across entire species in order to save her people spoke volumes about her character, and really solidified who she was as they worked on the film.
"What type of protagonist were we going to have in this film?" Papageorgiou said. "It wasn't a war lord.
Added Gittins: "It was someone who had the strength to ask for help."
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is now in theaters.
