Its been too many decades since I read the books, but a couple things have stuck with me during my youthful camping days with my friends.
One: There was some particularly healthful light weight food, that they had available. My friends reasoned that Pop Tarts were the closest thing to that food; so our most popular camping food was Pop Tarts.
What was that food in LOTR? and can you point me to a couple of short entries where this food is featured?
two: I think Sam Gamgee was fond of bringing string on adventures. SOmething about him getting ready to go on the trip and insisting on bringing string: because we can always use a bit of string.
I’ve googled looking for quotes that might suggest this but have come up blank. DId I make this point up? or did I miscontrue it from years of misremembering? If you can also point me to a passage where Sam praises the value of a ‘bit of string’ on journeys, I would appreciate it.
I think you may be misremembering this. There is a section where he berates himself for forgetting to bring along “a bit of rope”.
*“Rope!” he muttered. “No rope! And only last night you said to yourself: “Sam, what about a bit of rope? You’ll want it, if you haven’t got it: Well, I’ll want it. I can’t get it now.” *
The bread was called lembas and was given to the Fellowship as they left Lothlorien. Ditto the rope (not “string”), which Sam used at the start of Book Four (that is, the second half of The Two Towers) to get him and Frodo down a steep cliff in the Emyn Muil, and shortly after to tie up Gollum when they captured him.
Both items feature in the chapter “The Taming of Smeagol” to emphasise Gollum’s corruption; the touch of the rope burns him painfully, so that he is willing to swear oaths in order to have it removed, and the lembas tastes like dust and ashes to him even though it is delicious to hobbits (and others; when Gimli first saw it he thought it was just a type of cram, the waybread of the Men of Dale near the Lonely Mountain where he lived, and after the first crumb he gleefully nommed the whole piece, which was enough to feed him for a hard day’s travelling).
Hmm, when Gollum was playing the riddles game with Bilbo, Bilbo’s inadvertant riddle was “What have I got in my pocket?” Gollum’s guess was “String… or nothing.”
Well maybe it was a different character, of maybe even a different story…but somehow I don’t think so…
We always seemed to be wanting to bring a bit of string (maybe it was rope?).
It may have been only a single line or two in the whole books, but I feel somewhat confident there was something about preparing for the trip and taking along a bit of string because you can always find a use for it.
I don’t suppose there’s an electronic version somewhere to search for 'bit of string"
I’d liken lembas more to soda bread than anything like a poptart. Yeah, the lembas was light a flaky, but you can live off a good heavy irish soda bread for days on end while hiking.
Sam DOES want string, and he gets some from the elves. Not for anything as prosaic as climbing down a cliff, though; he, Frodo and Gollum use the string to perform a traditional Elvish dancing challenge, where two of them hold the string while the third attempts to bend backwards and shimmy beneath it. Eventually Gollum loses, and as a result he has to guide them to Mount Doom.
And here I started to give you the WHOLE backstory, which is that the name of the competition was actually “Lembadas: The Forbidden Dance,” and that Tolkien, wonderful man that he was, mistranslated it in his first draft and nobody ever caught it. Now, though, I’m GLAD I didn’t share that little tidbit of information! You’ll NEVER know about it now! So there!
I decided to dig out my copy of The Letters Of J.R.R. Tolkien for a little Lembas research, as I clearly have too much time on my hands…
[QUOTE="J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 210]
Lembas, ‘waybread’, is called a ‘food concentrate’.[…]
No analysis in any laboratory would discover chemical properties of lembas that made it superior to other cakes of wheat-meal.
In the book lembas has two functions. It is a ‘machine’ or device for making credible the long marches with little provision, in a world in which as I have said ‘miles are miles’. But that is relatively unimportant. It also has a much larger significance, of what one might hesitatingly call a ‘religious’ kind. This becomes later apparent, especially in the chapter ‘Mount Doom’.
[/QUOTE]
This letter was written in response to an early attempt at a film script for LOTR, circa 1958. The reference to it having no chemical difference from ordinary bread, but some kind of religious significance is interesting, and an extremely rare example of Tolkien linking his Catholicism to his work. In the chapter he cites, lembas is described as becoming more sustaining the longer one relies solely on it.
(Quote taken from the notes to the Letters rather than from LOTR as I’m slightly lazy).
Tolkien explicitly refers to the connection between lembas and the Host in Letter 213, and to it’s increasing power when fasting, as perhaps the only direct evidence in the book of his Catholicism.
So, probably not a pop tart! It’s basically wheat bread, but imbued by the Elves with some sort of spiritual or magical power, the nature of which is not clearly defined - like almost all of the Elves powers. This is probably more than anyone ever wanted to know about lembas, but now you know it…
As far as string, maybe the OP was thinking of this:
S: Good. Well I have this large quantity of string, a hundred and twenty-two thousand miles of it to be exact, which I inherited, and I thought if I advertised it…
W: Of course! A national campaign. Useful stuff, string, no trouble there.
S: Ah, but there’s a snag, you see. Due to bad planning, the hundred and twenty-two thousand miles is in three inch lengths. So it’s not very useful.
Or at least, of him doing so explicitly. The connections are all over the place, if you know to recognize them: For instance, the Elven reverence of Elbereth bears a strong resemblance to Catholic attitudes towards Mary.
