Saruman- not to mention nine eagles? Sure they are buddies with Radagast and they make an exception for Gandalf, but they aint a taxi service. Thehy grumbled about taking the dwarves a rather short distance.
I just checked- 340 miles from the border of Mordor. Can the eagles even fly that far? And even the borders were patrolled by orcs. The whole trip was about 1800 miles. Mt Doom is 4500 feet tall.
This suggests it took Frodo about 20 days to go from the Black Gate to Mt. Doom. That’s 17 miles/day which is doable but seems a bit fast when you are trying to be stealthy and avoid capture. Also, short-legged Hobbits so 17 miles per day seems a pretty good pace. Possible but pushing it. Of course, fictional stories get some latitude here I think.
Well, you don’t have to fly in a straight line if you wish, and while we know the Uruk-hai use bows, there’s not much other evidence of anti-air on his part. As for Nine Eagles Taxi Service (I’m stealing that), it is quite literally the end of the world for the Free Peoples of Middle-Earth if the quest fails so just maaaaaybe they can be bothered to help out of enlightened self interest if nothing else.
They didn’t enter at the black gate, they entered at the smaller gate guarded by Shelob, Cirith Ungul. And they had about two weeks of lembas plus some fresh provisions from Faramir when they entered. That looks like about 50 miles, based on the map right after the synopsis, at the start of book 5. They didn’t travel in a straight line, by any means, but they traveled a week or two within Mordor. (I actually just read that bit, two days ago, but wasn’t paying close attention to the dates, even though JRRT is explicit about them in many places.) And they lost some food, but mostly their problem was finding potable water, which wasn’t abundant, especially when they got to Mount Doom.
Sounds better than Deus ex Machina Airlines…
From the link I provided above it does seem it was about 12 days from Shelob to the final bit where the Ring is destroyed.
And, of course, it was not a straight march for them…they got in trouble along the way.
IIRC Frodo and Sam found a small stream shortly after entering Mordor – it was a bit metallic but was very welcome. After that they had to rely on cisterns used by Orc armies – these were pretty bad but they didn’t have much choice. Sam gave most of his water to Frodo.
Brian
Remember, the Eagles aren’t just big birds. They’re Maiar of Manwe and presumably on or near the same level of power as Gandalf or Saruman. Letting one of them take custody of the Ring would likely end very badly.
Walking to the mountain, yes. But once they reached Mount Doom, there were no sources of water, and they had only one water skin between them. And as they approached the mountain Sam was keenly aware that they didn’t have enough food to get out of Mordor, should they succeed.
Sam also wonders where the armies of Sauron get their food, and the author helpfully tells us that there are enormous farms, run by slave labor, in Southern Mordor, by lake Nurnen (that Sam doesn’t know about.)
As it happens, author J.R.R. Tolkien has weighed in on this very issue. Naturally, he got asked this question a lot, whether in correspondence with friends or by randos at the pub. And he always gave the same answer: “Shut up.”
The Eagles, too, are powerful beings, descendants of the Eagles sent by the Valar Manwë — a figure many times more powerful even than Sauron — back during the First Age. They would have become evil Eagles like that.
Plus, Sauron was looking for the forces of good to pull something like that. He expected Gandalf or Galadriel or Gwaihir the Eagle to put on the Ring, and then he would have corrupted them. He never thought that seemingly unimportant people like Frodo or Sam would handle it, and thus wasn’t looking for them.
That’s a great cite.
I’ve seen this claim a lot, but I’m really not sure where it comes from.
FWIW:
For some time Tolkien considered the Eagles as bird-shaped Maiar;[T 6] however, he realised that the statement about Gwaihir and Landroval’s descent from Thorondor had already appeared in print in The Lord of the Rings,[T 29] while he had long before rejected the notion of their being “Children” of the Valar and Maiar.[T 32] 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 [souls].”[T 29] - SOURCE
I mean, Tolkien also went back and forth on whether the orcs were corrupted elves or whether they were animals that could parrot speech, and ISTR he settled on them being Men at one point, but the reader consensus seems to be that they were elves and that’s what’s been depicted in the movies and in The Rings of Power.
Personally I think their being Maiar makes more sense in his cosmology and he must’ve made a mistake when he was translating the original Westron. 
It’s not like they’re the only talking animals. Wargs can talk, too, and I think it’d be pretty laughable to claim that they’re all ainu.
It seems this relevant Tolkien quote hasn’t made its way into the thread, so for sake of completeness:
Gandalf put his hand on Pippin’s head. ‘There never was much hope,’ he answered. 'Just a fool’s hope (…)’
They can?
In The Hobbit they can, but I don’t recall them speaking in LOTR or the Silmarilion. I chalk it up to being one of those bits from the Hobbit that don’t really fit into the Legendarium since it wasn’t originally intended to be part of it, like trolls with British names that speak perfect Westron and turn to stone in the sunlight, or men that can shapeshift into bears, or “worms of China”, or Gollum willingly giving the Ring to Bilbo in the pre-LOTR edition.
The Legendarium is an unfinished work when you get down to it, so certain questions like “where did the orcs come from” or “are the Eagles Maiar” don’t really have an answer that can be definitively pinned down since Tolkien himself never satisfactorily settled it.
But Eagles being Maia (which Tolkien hadn’t even settled on the existence of when he wrote LOTR) makes more sense to me than “talking animals were just a thing back then” because Middle-Earth is supposed to be prehistoric Europe, and if they were just animals then it raises the question of why we don’t still have talking eagles today, but if they were Maiar it makes sense that they would have retreated to Valinor once the Enemy was no longer present in the lands of Men.