Personally I think we’re well into fanwank territory trying to determine who would win. IMHO, if Tolkein had written (and maybe he did somewhere) the Eagles or horses or whales opinions on the Wars of Man he would have tried to convey two things:
You can’t really anthropomorphize a viewpoint of a different race like that. Maybe Sauron was threat to the Eagles ultimately, but try convincing them of that! For all we know they have a higher or different understanding of things. It’s like when Gandalf was talking about Tom Bombadil and giving him the ring.
Any aid that WAS rendered was as a favor for the Istari.
As for the OP…Nazgul can’t fly. Their steeds do. And I seriously doubt they have practice in air-to-air combat. I think the Eagles would have ripped them a new asshole. You try swinging a sword while your steed is flipping around all over the place. Assuming the Eagle was even in swing range. I also have my doubts as to effectiveness of any aura of fear or cry of doom on an eagle. Their not humanoids. I know they don’t HAVE to be, but that’s just my opinion.
I too am going with an Eagle winning against a Nazgul.
An AMRAAM massively outranges a Nazguls sword and if you can cut of a Fell Beasts head i don’t think it would do terribly well against 20mm Gatling fire
Both look pretty nasty. Talons and a beak/jaws. We don’t know the flight performance characteristics of either. We can extrapolate from real-world eagles, and they’re pretty agile in the air. But the square-cube law is working against giant eagles; the extrapolation cannot be linear.
Worse, the Nazguls’ mounts are wholly fictional – and probably contradictory to real-world laws of physiology – so we have no way of knowing how tight their inside-loops and snap-rolls are.
Having to bear a Nazgul during combat would hamper them significantly. One strategy might be to have the Nazgul jump off and let the steed fight on its own.
Otherwise…Gryphon vs. Minotaur? How does one even begin?
Didn’t the Eagles have some connection to Manwë? I thought their sparing involvement in the events of LoTR might have something to do with the reluctance of the Valar to get involved in Middle Earth affairs.
OTOH if Eagles do have such a divine connection, then I imagine they would be immune from the Nazguls’ chief weapon, the ability to elicit terror in their opponents.
But yeah, they were connected to Manwë and were probably Ainur of a sort. Thorondor - “King of Eagles” is not around in the LotR (or likely the Hobbit) - Gwaihir - “Windlord” is said to be his descendant of him.
I don’t know that they did anything to the Nine themselves. I believe they only attacked their “fell beasts” in the air. They’d have been very useful during the Battle on the Pellenor Fields. But deux ex machina sometimes are busy elsewhere.
