One of the Great Eagles, named as the brother of Gwaihir the Windlord. During the War of the Ring, he followed his brother from the eyries of the Misty Mountains and made the long flight southward to aid the foes of Sauron. At the Gate of Mordor the Eagles found the Captains of the West embattled by the guardians of the Black Land. Landroval and his companions descended on the Winged Nazgûl, but as they did so, the Nazgûl fled back into Mordor. In that moment, Sauron had discovered that his Ring was close to destruction, and had called on his servants to stop the Ring-bearer from completing his quest.
The Nazgûl failed, and the Ring went into the Fire, causing Mount Doom to burst into flame. At the call of Gandalf, Landroval joined his brother Gwaihir and another Eagle, Meneldor, and the three swept into Mordor to rescue Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee from the fire and ash of the erupting volcano.
Landroval's part in the rescue of Frodo and Sam represents his only mention in the published corpus. He does also appear, however, in several of the source texts for the Silmarillion. Notably, various accounts of the rescue of Beren and Lúthien after their escape from Angband (mirroring the rescue of Frodo and Samwise to some extent) feature both Landroval and Gwaihir.1 These events belonged to the First Age, making Landroval (and his brother) thousands of years old at the time of the War of the Ring.
Some of these texts are contemporary with The Lord of the Rings, and there is little doubt that Tolkien intended both accounts - from the First Age and the Third - to feature the same Eagles, though the settings were millennia apart. The story of the rescue of Beren and Lúthien by the Eagles does in fact appear in the published Silmarillion, but the names of the Eagles are omitted (due to an editorial decision that Christopher Tolkien would later call 'mistaken').2
Notes
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Actually, in most uses of the Landroval's name in the early Silmarillion texts, it is spelt Lhandroval (and Gwaihir is Gwaewar). The spellings were later updated to be consistent with those in The Lord of the Rings, so there is no doubt about the intended identities of these Eagles.
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2 |
Christopher Tolkien's full comments appear in volume IX of The History of Middle-earth, where he says, '...the names of the vassals of Thorondor were suppressed in the published Silmarillion ... on account of the present passages in [The Return of the King], but this was certainly mistaken...'. For clarity, Thorondor was the Lord of Eagles in the First Age, and the phrase 'vassals of Thorondor' here refers to Landroval and Gwaihir.
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- Updated 15 July 2026
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