Giant Eagle
| 7 Giant Eagle (No tile) | |
|---|---|
| Difficulty | 29 |
| Attacks | |
| Base level | 25 |
| Base experience | 1185 |
| Speed | 24 |
| Base AC | -20 |
| Base MR | 100 |
| Alignment | 20 (lawful) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 0 (Not randomly generated) |
| Genocidable | No |
| Weight | 3000 |
| Nutritional value | 800 |
| Size | huge |
| Resistances | fire resistance, cold resistance, sleep resistance, shock resistance, poison resistance, drain resistance |
| Resistances conveyed | none |
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A Giant Eagle:
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A Giant Eagle, 7, is a type of monster that appears in dNetHack, notdNetHack and notnotdNetHack. The Giant Eagle is a strong lawful being and huge avian animal with an elongated head and talons that is considered an archon, a minion and a lord to its kind. Giant Eagles are capable of flight with their wings, can see invisible, can track foes, can be seen via infravision, possess enhanced HP regeneration, recover from being scared faster than normal, will pick up magical items and other items they come across, and can follow a hero to other levels if they are in close enough proximity. Giant Eagles have 10 points of AC in the 'dodge' category and 20 points in the 'special' category.
Giant Eagles have two claw attacks and a bite attack. They possess fire resistance, cold resistance, sleep resistance, shock resistance, poison resistance and drain resistance, along with a weakness to unholy weapons and items.
Giant Eagles can be warded by a fully-reinforced Elder Elemental Eye.
Generation
Giant Eagles are not randomly generated normally, and will also not appear normally in Gehennom. Normally-created Giant Eagles will be peaceful towards lawful heroes with a good alignment record.
Giant Eagles can appear as minions of the gods Lugh and Manwe Sulimo.
A Giant Eagle is placed randomly on the Astral Plane during level creation.
Strategy
Giant Eagles are very straightforwardly strong monsters with a base speed of 24, a MR score of 100 and a high amount of HP that should nevertheless be on the less difficult side for a hero encountering them. Most characters encounter Giant Eagles late enough that hostile ones will not be a major concern, either because they are very likely to be felled by much more vicious opponents if their equipment and overall kit are lacking, or because they are sufficiently prepared for the late game that the beasts will represent a much simpler obstacle compared to the likes of other lawful angels and minions.
Giant Eagles also make excellent steeds due to their animal nature and shape: their elemental resistance properties and 100 MR score offer a lot of defensive coverage, but their lack of resistance to magic missiles, stoning and disease can be sore points (though the latter two are far more niche to encounter as damage sources in comparison). As Giant Eagles are potential minions of Lugh, a lawful Knight that has trained their beast mastery skill to Expert and is at least experience level 23 may find it worthwhile to try their chances at obtaining a tame giant eagle as a gifted minion from their deity.
Origin
In J. R. R. Tolkien's setting of Middle-earth, the Great Eagles (or simply "Eagles") are immense birds that are initially described as "spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles"—while they resemble actual eagles, the Great Eagles are much larger, possess sapience and can speak. The Eagles have varied in nature and size both within Tolkien's writings and in later adaptations.
In the First Age, the Great Eagles are primarily associated with Manwë, the ruler of the sky and Lord of the Valar, and bring news from Middle-earth to his halls upon Taniquetil, the highest mountain in Valinor. Their first appearance within the main narrative of The Silmarillion has them "sent forth" to Middle-earth by Manwë to live in the mountains north of the land of Beleriand, "watch upon" Morgoth and help the exiled Noldorin Elves "in extreme cases". Their ruler was Thorondor, "Lord of the Eagles" and "mightiest of all birds that have ever been": he and the other Eagles were instrumental in ensuring that the Hidden City of Gondolin remained undiscovered longer than any other Elvish kingdom in Beleriand; when the city fell, the eagles protected the fugitives from ambushing orcs. The Eagles also fought alongside the army of the Valar, Elves, and Men during the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age, and gathered their numbers together to destroy several winged dragons in an aerial battle.
On the island of Númenor in the Second Age, three Eagles guarded the summit of the holy mountain Meneltarma, appearing whenever anyone approached it and staying in the sky during the Númenórean "Three Prayers" religious ceremony. The Númenóreans called them "the Witnesses of Manwë", believing he had sent them from Aman "to keep watch upon the Holy Mountain and upon all the land". When the Númenóreans began to speak openly against the Ban of the Valar, Manwë appeared as eagle-shaped storm clouds, called the "Eagles of the Lords of the West", to try to reason with or threaten them. By the end of the Third Age, a colony of Eagles lived in the north of the Misty Mountains, as described in The Hobbit: these Eagles opposed the goblins, but also often hunted the sheep of the local Woodmen. They rescue Thorin's company from a band of goblins and Wargs, ultimately carrying the dwarves to the Carrock, and a great flock of Eagles later participated in the Battle of the Five Armies.
In The Lord of the Rings, the Eagles of the Misty Mountains helped the Elves of Rivendell and the Wizard Radagast to gather news of the Orcs: Gwaihir the Windlord carries news to Isengard, rescues the wizard Gandalf from the top of the tower there, and again rescues Gandalf from the top of Celebdil after searching for him at Galadriel's request. Gwaihir and his Eagles appear in great numbers towards the end of the book, and the Eagles similarly arrive at the Battle of the Morannon, helping the Host of the West against the Nazgûl, while Gwaihir, Landroval, and Meneldor rescue Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee from Mount Doom after the One Ring had been destroyed.
Scholarship and study of Tolkien's writings has observed that Gandalf's association with Eagles is reminiscent of the god Odin and signals one of many influences from Norse mythology—some also cite Biblical echoes, especially when the Eagle-messenger sings of the final victory to Faramir in phrases reminiscent of Psalm 24. Within the firm moral framework of his early material, the Giant Eagles are regarded as somewhere in between the "obviously-good" elves and evil creatures like the goblins, neither solely vicious nor wholly benevolent souls: per one Tom Shippey, the narrator of The Hobbit describes the eagles as "not kindly birds", and as further observed by one Marjorie Burns, Bilbo is afraid of being torn up and eaten by them; one of the Eagles indeed describes him as "rather like a rabbit", and though Bilbo does not become their meal, in the end "[...]rabbit is precisely what the eagles do bring them for supper".
Similarly, the question of the Eagles' sentience is one pondered by Tolkien throughout his writings. Though his early works did not warrant precise definitions of their nature, after completing The Lord of the Rings Tolkien moved toward a more carefully defined "system" of creatures—for some time he considered the Eagles to be bird-shaped Maiar, but realised that this contradicted statements made in The Lord of the Rings about Gwaihir and Landroval, specifically regarding that they were descended from Thorondor, while he had long before rejected the notion of their being "Children" of the Valar and Maiar. In the last of his notes on this topic, dated by his son Christopher to the late 1950s, Tolkien decided that the Great Eagles were animals that had been "taught language by the Valar, and raised to a higher level—but they still had no fëar [or souls]."
Encyclopedia entry
That also shall come to be by the heed of Iluvatar, and before
the Children awake there shall go forth with wings like the wind
the Eagles of the Lords of the West.
