animate-mush:

vardasvapors:

1. This line in ROTK is really interesting tbh: “The lembas had a virtue without which they would long ago
have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was
filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats.
And yet this waybread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers
relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and
it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of
mortal kind.” Idk….I tend to not think of it as something about the food itself as much as like, connecting it to that phenomenon where all kinds of other things elves make has a bit of magic-y stuff put into it via their making.

2. Which means, I assume, that they absolutely have a ton of cooking songs, just like they have songs for doing all kinds of other things down to knife-sharpening-songs, and special ones for lembas presumably.

3. The bit about “the Queen alone is allowed to give lembas” is one of those weird….what if there is no queen around, dude. Do u like, call it something else…? Anyway it’s interesting that despite it being associated with Melian, it’s a cross-cultural elf thing and not a Melian/maia thing. Does “lembas” actually refer less to the ingredients and more to the way it is given or intended? Wait, maybe “lembas” means “bread made from the same original batch of super magic infused yeast the elves in Cuivienen first discovered” (in Quenya it’s “coimas” which has the same ‘awakening’ root….I super love the Silm’s linguistic appendix okay).

4. MELIAN AND GALADRIEL HAVING BAKE-OFFS IN DORIATH THOUGH. Galadriel definitely thinking about Melian and Turin when she gives the Fellowship their supply…

Tolkien’s enough of a…I was going to say anglo-saxonist but I think instead I’ll say nerd… that the thing with the Queen giving bread might be partially connected to the the fact that the word Lady comes from hlafdig, which denotes loaf-giving.  A Queen is, etymologically, the person who gives out bread.