Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

sean-crist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 213 posts

Re: Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

#151

Post by arcatek »

bargl wrote: post #130
dageshi wrote: post #50

Crows. http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Crebain If crows can be sent into the world to hunt for the ringbearer they can certainly patrol the skies around Mordor. Crows spy the eagles entering Mordor and forces are dispatched to counter them.

It is also much easier to spot a flying object from the ground then a ground object from the air. This is why recon is so hard when looking for something from the sky. It is even easier to locate object in the air from the air. So effectively to piggy-back on your suggestion crows in the air would be able to see other avian creatures and report on their location faster than they could spot 2 creatures sneaking throug…

Yeah, but assuming X different eagles, with each one a 'dummy' bearer, it would be much more difficult to kill the right one.

Or Sauron could still think that it's Aragorn trying to be a hero and killing him in face-to-face.

Re: Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

#152

Post by arcatek »

meerita wrote: post #51

I still ask myself why Elrond didn't just push to the lava the human king when he refused to drop the ring. Knowing the pain, the evil of the matter, letting him go freely with the ring just made this story a bit silly.

It's called politic.

Re: Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

#153

Post by Steuard »

zeteo wrote: post #49
orourkek wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but the author's note about the Council of Elrond is extremely convincing. If Tolkien wanted to strike this plan as a possibility, he could easily have added 1-2 lines into the Council talks where they discuss (and refute) every plan they can think of. In the end there's nothing concrete in Tolkien's work that refutes the 'eagle plan' as viable. Suggesting fan-fiction and/or 'the unknown' as proof that it's…

I would venture that there were many possible alternate decisions at various points in the plot, and discussing all of them thoroughly was not necessarily a literary enhancement. The "eagles plan" itself is fan fiction, and refusing to accept more "fan fiction" in response to it is a bit disingenuous.

I understand the point you're making here, and I've certainly seen plenty of "fan fiction" theories taken far too seriously in discussions of Tolkien. But for my own pride's sake, I would attempt to draw a distinction between those "fan theories" and the sort of analysis that we used to do on the Tolkien Usenet newsgroups (including rec.arts.books.tolkien, which inspired this article: I was involved in conversations with the article's author on this topic back in the '90s).

The attitude adopted by much of the r.a.b.t community was a deliberate echo of Tolkien's own: we treated Middle-earth as an independent "sub-created" world (to use Tolkien's term from "On Fairy Stories") which ought to have "the inner consistency of reality". In such a vast imagined history, there are obviously huge gaps in our knowledge where Tolkien never told us what happened or why. But in a few rare cases when those gaps are closely connected with the story that Tolkien did tell, we can make a strong case for a unique consistent way to fill the gap (or at least a "very likely" answer).

One of my favorite examples of this was a longrunning collection of debates related to the blades that the hobbits got from the Barrow Downs and their effects on the Nazgul. I won't say we reached consensus, but after years of related discussions quite a few of us had reached the conclusion that those weapons had some sort of enchantment making them especially dangerous and frightening to the Ringwraiths. And then, unexpectedly, a previously unpublished excerpt from one of Tolkien's essays was quoted in Hammond and Scull's Reader's Companion that explicitly confirmed our conclusion (and much of the related evidence that we had gathered). It felt for all the world as if a scientific theory that I had helped develop had just been confirmed by experiment.

It's that sort of thing that encourages me to think that we were one step more rigorous than fan fiction. [And shameless plug: I still maintain the newsgroups' FAQ site. It doesn't say much about the Eagles question, but here's the full story on the barrow blades that I mentioned: http://tolkien.slimy.com/faq/History.html#BarrowBlades ]

Re: Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

#154

Post by ssmc »

javajosh wrote: post #101

Clearly the answer is #11, and there are two ways to see this. First (and most evocatively, I think) is the drug metaphor: the effects of the Ring are cumulative, and they also grow stronger in proximity to Orodruin. We can model the Ring as an involuntary opioid dispenser that is certainly harming Frodo's body cumutively. But, even more sinisterly, it's dosage is increasing in proximity to Mt. Doom. Clearly, if Frod…

So you're implying that the strength of the Ring is a function of only distance?

I would say the article more then discusses the fact that it's a function of distance AND time.

Re: Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

#155

Post by philh »

A few nitpicks:

> it is simply a hole in the plot of an otherwise excellent book that the issue is never brought up. This is not to say that LoTR is in any way a bad book

In a small way, it does say that.

> When Sam carries Frodo on his back, he is surprised that Frodo is unexpectedly light: "...he had expected to share in the dreadful dragging weight of the accursed Ring. But it was not so." (III, 268). At least with regard to weight, the Ring affects the Ringbearer much more than the one carrying the Ringbearer. It is not unreasonable to speculate that this is true not only of mere weight, but also of the degree to which the Ring affects the will.

Isn't Sam basically immune to the ring anyway? He's not necessarily a good canary for this test.

> If the eagles had carried Frodo in, he would not have had time to build up the strength of will to destroy the ring.

Frodo didn't have the strength of will to destroy the ring. A steelman objection would be "...the council would have expected that Frodo would not have time to build up...", but the council could use roughly the same reasoning as this article to dismiss it.

Re: Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

#156

Post by Steuard »

zeteo wrote: post #117
orourkek wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more of a plot hole than fan-fiction. The article is an exhaustive look at provable (written) arguments that can refute the eagles as a possibile solution to the Mordor trip. The author is trying to prove that the plot hole is, in fact, a plot hole by nature of it being plausible. Using other possibilities to refute a possibility goes against the spirit of the article, where the author looks for concrete facts t…

Fan fiction fills up spaces that were not covered in the original story. The pros and cons of airborne travel into Mordor are one of those spaces. The author of the article is just as entitled to speculate on this point as anyone who responds to him.

To be a bit more succinct than my previous reply, I think there is a legitimate distinction between "making up content to fill up spaces not covered in the original story" (i.e. fan fiction) and "reasoning out as much as you reliably can about what filled up those spaces, and no more".

Fan fiction is creative writing, more or less by definition: inventing new details is fine unless they conflict with the original story (or even if they do). The author of this article is very explicitly trying to avoid "making up" an answer: he's searching for evidence only within the original story that could constrain the answer to a question relevant to that story. They're both games for fans to play, but at least to my eye the two are worlds apart.

Re: Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

#157

Post by dbbolton »

jackalope wrote: post #90

One merely has to refer to RFC 1149[1] to determine why this solution is obviously unacceptable: "Avian carriers can provide high delay, low throughput, and low altitude service." "...only guarantees best effort delivery, loss of a carrier can be tolerated." "...storms can cause data loss." "Audit trails are automatically generated, and can often be found on logs and cable trays." And probably most important: "Securi…

But is it fitting to apply the findings of trials with real world birds to the sapient Middle-earth eagles?

Re: Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

#158

Post by zeteo »

Steuard wrote: post #153
zeteo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would venture that there were many possible alternate decisions at various points in the plot, and discussing all of them thoroughly was not necessarily a literary enhancement. The "eagles plan" itself is fan fiction, and refusing to accept more "fan fiction" in response to it is a bit disingenuous.

I understand the point you're making here, and I've certainly seen plenty of "fan fiction" theories taken far too seriously in discussions of Tolkien. But for my own pride's sake, I would attempt to draw a distinction between those "fan theories" and the sort of analysis that we used to do on the Tolkien Usenet newsgroups (including rec.arts.books.tolkien, which inspired this article: I was involved in conversations…

Filling gaps is a perfectly fine exercise, and can even lead to consensus when the gap is small and you take years of discussion to fill it. The question of Sauron's anti-air detection and defense capabilities within Mordor, and of the Council of Elrond's confidence in assessing these capabilities, is much larger, vaguer and conducive to controversies. Not to mention that the character most likely to propose using the eagles (Gandalf) was also the most aware of any possible impediments (e.g. Sauron being able to conjure storms and blinding lights at a moment's notice etc.).

Re: Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor? (2000)

#159

Post by zeteo »

Steuard wrote: post #156
zeteo wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fan fiction fills up spaces that were not covered in the original story. The pros and cons of airborne travel into Mordor are one of those spaces. The author of the article is just as entitled to speculate on this point as anyone who responds to him.

To be a bit more succinct than my previous reply, I think there is a legitimate distinction between "making up content to fill up spaces not covered in the original story" (i.e. fan fiction) and "reasoning out as much as you reliably can about what filled up those spaces, and no more". Fan fiction is creative writing, more or less by definition: inventing new details is fine unless they conflict with the original sto…

Except the evidence in the original story is clearly insufficient, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We know nothing of Sauron's capabilities to detect and confront airborne intrusion into Mordor or about Gandalf's assessment of these capabilities. Assuming Sauron could not see or bring down the eagles and that Gandalf was aware of this fact is, from this point of view, adding new elements to the story and therefore fan fiction.
Post reply on HN