It’s a question every Lord of the Rings fan asks him or herself eventually: If giant eagles could give Frodo a ride home after he dropped the One Ring into the fires of Mt. Doom, why couldn’t they have given him a ride there and saved everybody a lot of trouble?
The theory, which we first encountered here, states that hitching a ride with the eagles was Gandalf’s plan all along! It certainly seems more reasonable than making a Hobbit hike all the way to Mordor.