A scene that Gandalf recounted to most members of The Fellowship of the Ring at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell. Held captive by the traitor Saruman the White, Gandalf is held captive atop the tower of Orthanc, until Gwaihir the WindLord, swiftest of the Great Eagles, comes to investigate, and bears Gandalf away.
As described previously, I'm currently re-reading The Lord of the Rings, just to have it fresh in my memory when I see the first film in a couple of months' time; having only read it once before, in high school, I had forgotten just how amazingly evocative the imagery is. It's no wonder that 2 or 3 decades' worth of Tolkien calendars, by the brothers Hildebrandt and many others, have not run out of images to paint!
Updated 2001.10.17 - On further reading of the series (specifically the return to Isengard in The Two Towers), I realize that my original rendition of Orthanc was wildly off-base - Tolkien later described Orthanc in greater detail as a monolithic black rectangular tower with 'horns' at the corners; so in the interests of accuracy, I felt I needed to revise the image. I'm actually not as happy with the resulting composition, but "what can ya do..."
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