The Flying Horses - what are they?

[Persephone]

Well, I am referring to the flying beasts that the Nazguls used in ROTK. What kind of magical beast are they? There seems to be no known name for their kind. Oh, and were they created by Morgoth you think?

 

[YayGollum]

Hm? Corrupted giant eagles, assumedly. Not messed with by Mel, since I'm pretty sure that I read that Sauron raised them. A deliciously evil corruption, since the giant eagles were always a thorn in the sides of evil types. Those things in the movies were nothing like how I pictured them.

 

[Persephone]

Do you think, since Sauron and Saruman were quite chummy, that Saruman may have anything to do with their breeding then? Like the Uruk-Hai?

 

[YayGollum]

Ack! No. Saruman and Sauron weren't that chummish. Those Uruk-Hai types were something that Saruman most likely had lots of fun with making, since he was the one most interested in humans. Besides, I got the vibe that those things had been around since before Saruman even showed up on Middle Earth.

 

[Mike]

Flying horses?

You must have been watching the Rankin-Bass ROTK again, haven't you?

(If you don't know, the "fell beasts" were pictured as horses with wings in that cartoon, except for the one ridden by the witch-king).

They were more of a pterodactyl-type creature, and I don't think they were corrupted eagles--they were probably something else that Sauron nursed with "fell meats." Some prehistoric monster, like the Watcher in the Water. No mention is made of them in the tales about Beliarand, so I don't think they have anything to do with Morgoth--unless they came out of the pits of Utumno (which is actually likely).

They weren't magical, for one thing: while darts are described raining down from these beasts in ROTK, these are fired by the Nazgul and have nothing to do with the beasts themselves.

And as for "chummish" behaviour between Sauron and Saruman, you'll notice neither Sauron nor Saruman were on very good terms in the book. Saruman wanted to set up himself as the new lord of Middle-Earth, in opposition to Sauron: but in the end fell under his control until he was nothing but a mere slave. Saruman never bred Uruk-hai...those apeared before Saruman turned evil, when the east bank of Osgiliath fell. Uruk-hai were really just the warrior-caste of orcs, well-trained and far more scary. And no, no cross-breeding with humans was involved. However, Saruman did breed man-orcs (seperate from Uruk-hai) on his own, and these were the guys who apeared in the scouring of the Shire.

So, in short, Saruman couldn't have helped breed the "fell beasts", because they were grown in Mordor over a long period of time, before Saruman even thought of perhaps taking the ring for himself.

What were they, then? Corrupted Eagles is one choice. Prehistoric hell-creatures is another (the one I favour)--otherwise, pterodactyls.

 

[Alcuin]

Tolkien addressed the matter in 1958 in Letter 211:

I did not intend the steed of the Witch-King to be what is now called a ‘pterodactyl’, and often is drawn (with rather less shadowy evidence than lies behind many monsters of the new and fascinating semi-scientific mythology of the ‘Prehistoric’). But obviously it is pterodactylic and owes much to the new mythology, and its description even provides a sort of way in which it could be a last survivor of older geological eras.

Tolkien’s description sounds “pterodactylic” in “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”:

…it was a winged creature: if bird, then greater than all other birds, and it was naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear, and its vast pinions were as webs of hide between horned fingers; and it stank. A creature of an older world maybe it was, whose kind, fingering in forgotten mountains cold beneath the Moon, outstayed their day, and in hideous eyrie bred this last untimely brood, apt to evil. And the Dark Lord took it, and nursed it with fell meats, until it grew beyond the measure of all other things that fly; and he gave it to his servant to be his steed. …folding its fingered webs, it gave a croaking cry… digging in its claws, stooping its long naked neck.

 

[YayGollum]

Right. Sure, they could just be some random creepy creatures that were happened upon at some point, since it is mentioned that lots of unnamed monsters existed, but the giant eagle idea is more fitting, from the point of view of an evil type. Anyways, sure, Uruk-Hai may have been a term used to describe some Orcs before Saruman started messing with them, but, from what I can tell, he did breed some of his own, and humans were involved. And he probably had fun with it, too. Were not his Uruk-Hai types the first to obtain that nice resistance to sunlight?

 

[HLGStrider]

I have drawings done when I was itty bitty of the nazguls and besides the fact that I couldn't get the Ring Wraith to sit comfortably in the saddle so he is sort of floating over the beastie rather than sitting on it, my Ring Wraith looked a ton like the one in the movie, and this is before the movie.

However, I did always think of them as 'made in mockery of the great eagles.' I'm not sure how these two ideas mesh, but I never felt that they contradicted each other.

 

[jallan]

In Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, letter 211, Tolkien responds to a question of whether the Witch-lord's steed as a pteradactyl:

Pterodactyl. Yes and no. I did not intend the steed of the Witch-King to be what is now called a 'pterodactyl', and often is drawn (with rather less shadowy evidence than lies behind many monsters of the new and fascinating semi-scientific mythology of the 'Prehistoric'). But obviously it is pterodactylic and owes much to the new mythology, and its description even provides a sort of way in which it could be a last survivor of older geological eras.

 

[Alcuin]

Tolkien addressed the matter in 1958 in Letter 211

In Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, letter 211, Tolkien responds to a question of whether the Witch-lord's steed as a pteradactyl:

That’s two posts of the same quotation in 5 days. Can we all agree that the thing is a pterodactyl, or at least pterodactylic?

Welcome back, jallan!

 

[Persephone]

Yeah, I think we can agree that it is pterodactylic.