Tolkien eagles fighting Mordor army Orcs and Trolls — Print & Oil Painting

The viewpoint is on the ground, in the crowd, and that is what makes this one work. We are standing among the enemy at head height, close enough that the nearest of them is cropped by the bottom left corner at twice life size, and the bird is coming down into that press from directly in front of us.

The eagle is enormous and has been painted as a real bird rather than as a heraldic one. The plumage is worked feather group by feather group in golden brown, tan and dark umber, the primaries are separated and back-lit at the wing tips, the legs are thrown forward with the toes open and the talons out, and the beak is wide with the tongue visible inside it. Nothing about the anatomy has been stylised.

Beneath it the ranks are a study in bad teeth and bad helmets. Grey-green faces, tusked and snarling, jammed shoulder to shoulder across the bottom third of the picture, some in crude iron caps, some bare, with a few spear shafts and a blue-steel blade rising among them. The painter has resolved perhaps eight of them properly and left the rest as suggestion.

Behind it all the sky is dull red and full of ash, a dark peak stands at the right, and broken banners lean at intervals across the middle distance. Light comes from behind the bird, which is why its wings glow and the crowd does not.

The eagles in these books never turn up because anyone called them, and they never stay. They arrive from outside the argument, settle the part of it that happens in the air, and leave the walking to everyone else. Part of our Lord of the Rings collection, next to the same birds settling matters overhead and this army painted without anything falling on it.