Lembas, Shmembas

[rabidsamfan]

Just what do we know about lembas?

Taste and consistency:

The food was mostly in the form of very thin cakes, made of a meal that was baked a light brown on the outside, and inside was the colour of cream.

I’m not too sanguine about the “cake” description, as I’ve had dictionaries describe crumpets as tea-cakes. (Okay, they were American dictionaries, but still!) Still, they’re probably sweet. Gimli compares them to honeycakes, and the Elf says they will stay sweet if kept wrapped, although in that instance he could mean “not stale”, as sweetness wouldn’t fade in and of itself. Still, by all accounts lembas is quite toothsome and I’m pleased to think that sweetening is part of that. But I think of cakes as being very moist on the whole, and moisture is the grand enemy of any food which has to be carried and preserved over long distances. Gimli’s “crisp corner” also indicates a dry texture, but not necessarily. “Waybread” would seem to imply a breadish consistency at first glance, although I’ve had 18th century recipe Gingerbread that was as hard as chalk, and the “bread” reference here is probably more to it being the staff of life and made out of flour. Frodo also describes the lembas which the Orcs of Cirith Ungol had handled “broken” rather than smashed, which could imply a drier texture (and would make it easier for him to gather up the pieces to carry along.) It could be a kind of twice-baked bread (toast!), and probably is, to reduce the moisture content.

Size, shape, and appearance:

The lembas was presented in packets, made of leaves, and once a packet was broken into the contents become subject to deterioration, so the size of the packets would be limited. Call it seven wafers to a packet and you’d have a reasonable number from an Elven point of view. You could readily count how many people on a journey and how many weeks it should take and pack accordingly. Each individual wafer is small enough that a packet of them can fit in a hobbit’s pockets. Pippin and Merry certainly kept stashes of them, like cookies swiped from the communal cookie jar, and it was a good thing too. Merry says he has a packet in his pocket, and after he and Pippin had eaten “two or three pieces” they still calculated that they had five days worth. Mind you, hobbits have small pockets, such as would fit comfortably in small trousers and waistcoats and coats. Presumably the largest pocket would be the inner coat pocket, but it still is limited in size. So wafers of lembas have to be big enough to eat a little at a time, but small enough that Gimli can put away an entire wafer/cake before an Elf has time to stop him. So I’m guessing that lembas wafers are about two inches across. They’re not round: Gimli breaks off a corner, so we’re talking squares or triangles. They’re flat – were told that they’re thin -- but unlikely to be foldable, the way that pita bread would be. So all in all I suspect that we’re talking about something the size and shape of a saltine, with coloring similar to a Ritz Cracker.

So, how much lembas does it take to feed a hobbit?

One will keep a traveller on his feet for a day of long labour, even if he be one of the tall Men of Minas Tirith.

So the Elf told Gimli, and it was probably true – although the only Tall Man who would have had a chance to test the theory in recent decades would have been Aragorn, who has some Elvish blood that seems to improve his stamina. Still, Elves live a long time, and somewhere in the Ages Men must have survived on lembas well enough. The Elves probably have a fair notion of how well Dwarves do on a lembas diet as well, but I’m beginning to believe that no one has ever tried the experiment with hobbits.

Presumably, Galadriel sent the Fellowship along with more food than lembas, since they are admonished to spare the supply of waybread while other sources of provender are available. It’s not only a potent kind of food, but also one which is easy to carry and to keep edible. It’s tastiness might encourage the Fellowship to indulge a bit while they are still on the river, but the only time we know for sure that they dipped into the supply was the night they were stuck on the boats after Legolas took a shot at the Nazgul.

When Sam and Frodo split off from the group Sam grabbed some packages of food, which seem to have mostly been packets of lembas. Three days later, he and Frodo are down to nothing but the stuff, and Sam has already begun to be dissatisfied. It’s hard to tell if they have some for dinner, but they do have it as breakfast the next day. The next mention of food is daybreak the next day, when they stop and Gollum tries a taste. Nine hours later, we’re told, Sam wakes up and is hungry.

Hmmm.

Furthermore, when Sam tells Frodo that they’re going to have to ration the lembas, he doesn’t know how long it will last, he estimates. This tells us something about how hobbits eat lembas. If it were 1 cake per hobbit per day he’d be able to be precise. 42 cakes for two hobbits is 21 days, and I defy anyone to tell me that Sam couldn’t handle the math. (Of course, he might not be precisely sure of how much lembas Frodo has in his foodbag, but assuming that each leaf-packet holds a predictable number of cakes he ought to at least have some idea.) But if the hobbits have been eating 1 and 1/3rd or 1 and ½ wafers each day – or 1 cake on one day and 2 on the next – then the calculation becomes trickier.

It’s a fair presumption that up until the time that they discuss rationing the food, Frodo and Sam have been pretty much eating when they felt like eating – Sam says they’ve been pretty free with the food – but once they start to restrict themselves I’d guess that they both remembered the Elf saying that one wafer a day is sufficient and try to hold close to that. They’ve got other things on their minds than food of course, and Gollum’s eating habits are enough to turn anyone’s stomach sour. (Not to mention that between the gully and Ithilien, they are short of drinking water, which might make limiting their food easier to live with.) In any case, by the time they get to Ithilien and have a chance to drink some clean water and wash up, Sam’s thoughts have turned to food. He’s too hungry to sleep, properly, and he wants to supplement the lembas. The rabbit stew is the result.

It’s in Ithilien too, that Sam looks at Frodo and is reminded of watching his master in Rivendell, while they were all waiting to see whether or not Frodo would survive the Morgul blade. In Rivendell, the first thing Frodo notices about himself when he faces a mirror is that he has lost weight, and the description of his face at this junction suggests the same thing. ” Frodo's face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed.” We don’t know whether Sam has changed noticeably, because he’s bereft of mirrors, but I think it’s fair to argue that a week’s diet of lembas has not been sufficient to keep them from losing ground. Now Frodo’s dinner before that scene is described as “mouthfuls” of lembas, rather than a wafer, so there’s a possibility that they’re already on less than a wafer a day, but it’s not certain. Sometimes they seem to eat before they go to sleep, and sometimes when they set out, so they may be splitting the ration out through the day. In any case, they each had half a wafer with the rabbit stew, so it’s unlikely that they’ve restricted themselves too sharply.

The meeting with Faramir gives Frodo and Sam a break from a steady diet of Elven-bread, which they take full advantage of. Even a cold meal puts them in a much better mood than the lembas has. (Of course the wine probably has something to do with that.) And when they go on, Faramir makes sure their packs have dried foods in them.

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.


By the time that they’ve been in Mordor for a while Tolkien finds it worth noting when Sam makes Frodo eat an entire wafer of lembas at one meal, so we can assume that by that point of the journey either the usual ration was smaller or that they’ve been trying to use up the pieces that were broken before they go bad. There’s no metaphorical flummery in the description of Frodo’s face by the time they’ve come to the approaches of the Isenmouthe; it’s “lined and thin” by then, and Sam’s already taken to giving Frodo both of their rations on occasion.

As they make their way to the mountain, the water problem becomes crucial, and here’s evidence that lembas is dry if nothing else, because when Sam becomes too parched he can’t manage to eat at all, and presumably Frodo’s having similar trouble. If Sam’s original calculation was right, they would have run out of lembas three days before they reached the Crack of Doom, though the additions of Faramir and the depradations of the Orcs would have thrown that off somewhat. Certainly Sam stints himself, and Frodo’s not in any shape to notice, so between one thing and another, they can’t have been much of a burden to the Eagles.

Jokes about Lembas as diet food aside, I've concluded that while lembas carries some calories, it works in part by kicking your metabolism into a gear that allows it better access to whatever fat you might have stored up, followed by muscle etc. It feeds the will – which of course is something that Frodo needs – but it is designed as emergency food, and essentially keeps you on your feet right up until the moment that there’s nothing left of you to burn. The Elves gave the Fellowship quite a bit of the stuff, and I suspect that Galadriel at least had some idea that the effect of lembas on the will was more important a consideration than its effect upon the physique. If she had more experience with hobbits, or the hobbits more experience with Elven-waybread, perhaps Sam and Frodo would have started out with a greater supply of other foods, or better means of foraging along the way, in order to save the lembas until Mordor itself. But in any case she knew that Frodo didn’t expect to come back, and was as willing as Gandalf (or even more willing) to risk the life of a small hobbit or two against the return of Sauron.

More Lembas Thoughts (Response to the comments here.)