# What is the practical difference between lembas and miruvor?



## Peter86 (Jul 3, 2019)

As far as I can tell, lembas is like actual food whereas miruvor is more like a kind of energy drink that grants new strength.
Is this correct?
Or were they somewhat interchangeable in terms of nutrition and energy boost?
Would Frodo and Sam be able to survive on only miruvor during their journey to Mount Doom, for example?


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## Deleted member 12094 (Jul 7, 2019)

Concerning miruvor, the effect seems to be like a brandy when you're cold and your spirit is down:

_As soon as Frodo had swallowed a little of the warm and fragrant liquor he felt a new strength of heart, and the heavy drowsiness left his limbs. The others also revived and found fresh hope and vigour._​
If my clumsy comparison with brandy holds, then you'd hardly want to live on brandy alone...

By contrast, the function of lembas in the overall story-line is to provide a solution to the otherwise impossible problem of letting the main characters (Frodo and Sam, essentially) travel autonomously long distances, almost without any fresh food supplies, for 30 days.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Nov 16, 2019)

As Tolkien himself says, in the famous letter about the infamous Zimmerman film treatment. But he goes on:



> 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'. . .



And in another letter, responding to a request for biographical information, he refers to a critic who



> . . .saw in waybread (lembas) = viaticum and the reference to its feeding the _will _ (vol. III, p. 213) and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist. (That is, far greater things may color the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fairy story.)



Both lembas and miruvor, then, as elements in the structure of imagery, are counterparts of the Host and Wine in Catholic doctrine and ritual, and therefore not to be explained in "rational" terms. Although they are attributed ultimately to Yavanna, "No analysis in any laboratory would discover chemical properties of lembas that made it superior to other cakes of wheat-meal". This in response to Z's use of the term "food concentrate".

This sort imagery appears in many contexts: in the nectar and ambrosia of Greek myths, for instance, or the amrita and soma of Hindu texts. Interestingly, ambrosia and amrita, besides being etymologically related, both literally mean "immortality", and consuming them bestowed eternal life.

Or did it? There's some ambiguity: IIRC, Heracles was given ambrosia _after _he became a god; perhaps the achieving immortality through eating or drinking something was a wish-fulfilling dream -- a "mannish tradition", if you will, similar to Sauron's lie about Valinor "conferring" immortality, simply by being there.


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## Olorgando (Nov 16, 2019)

Umm - lembas one would eat, miruvor one would drink - I fail to see where any practical confusion could ever occur between the two ... 😕


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Nov 16, 2019)

No, the drink is explicitly from the "flowers" of Yavanna, while the food is made from her "corn".

At least I hope that last is correct, and not from her "corns"!


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## Olorgando (Nov 16, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> No, the drink is explicitly from the "flowers" of Yavanna, while the food is made from her "corn".
> 
> At least I hope that last is correct, and not from her "corns"!


Potential, but certainly not possible ancestors of ours that confused eating and drinking died out thousands of years ago (the confusion can definitely be deadly!)


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Nov 16, 2019)

Actually, to follow up on my first post, there is confusion in the Greek myths as to whether ambrosia is liquid or solid.


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## Olorgando (Nov 16, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> Actually, to follow up on my first post, there is confusion in the Greek myths as to whether ambrosia is liquid or solid.


An adaptation of a Shakespeare quote ought to settle that in a jiffy:
"To chew or not to chew".

As to Peter86's original question above, miruvor seems to be a bit of a quick "energy drink", almost a kind of, as we would say today, "doping".
"Would Frodo and Sam be able to survive on only miruvor during their journey to Mount Doom?" Not a snowball's chance in Angband, I would think.
Lembas were the long-distance (the better, the less "polluted" by other nutrition) source of sustenance.


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## Alcuin (Nov 17, 2019)

_Miruvórë_ was a drink made in Valinor from the flowers of Yavanna. _Miruvor_, the “Cordial of Imladris”, was distilled in Rivendell. Gandalf took some for the Company of the Ring. What connection there is between _miruvórë_ and _miruvor_ is not said, but certainly what Elrond had was not from blossoms in Yavanna’s garden! Probably _miruvórë_ is Quenya, and _miruvor_ the Sindarin word for it. Perhaps Elrond’s _miruvor_ was distilled according to a certain process brought from Valinor, probably from honey: that would make it some kind of mead.

Glorfindel brought either _miruvor_ or some other distilled spirit to Frodo and his companions. The Cordial of Imladris was described as a “warm and fragrant liquor”. (Mead could also be described as a “warm and fragrant liquor”.) Glorfindel’s liquor is described as “clear as spring water [with] no taste, … [n]either cool [n]or warm in the mouth.” Despite the differences in taste and “warmth”, both provided those that imbibed only a mouthful with “strength” and affected the “limbs”. 

There is an essay on “Lembas” in _Peoples of Middle-earth_. It was made of a special corn (i.e., _wheat_: “corn” is an English word for whatever is the common cereal grain: in England, wheat; in Scotland, oats (famously rounded upon by Samuel Johnson in a good-natured dig at his Scottish friend and biographer, James Boswell); in the Americas, maize) from the gardens of Yavanna. Elven women dedicated to Yavanna grew and harvested it, making lembas or “waybread” from the corn (wheat). Yavanna gave some to Oromë for the Elves during the Great Journey from Cuiviénen to the Great Sea. Melian the Maia, one of the folk of Yavanna, knew how to make this bread and also had the seed; Galadriel in turn learned to make it from her. The Elves of Lórien told Gimli that their lembas would keep long “if they are unbroken and left in their leaf-wrappings.” In _Letter_ 213 Tolkien remarks that one critic noticed the similarity of lembas to viaticum, “and the reference to its feeding the _will_ … and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist.”

If I understand the distinction correctly, both miruvórë and lembas were gifts of Yavanna: _Miruvórë_ (and its Middle-earth copy, _miruvor_) were made from honey, and in Valinor, that honey was from bees pollinating the gardens of Yavanna. Lembas were from a cereal grain (wheat, or more commonly “corn”) originally from Yavanna’s gardens, specially grown, harvested, and prepared, rarely shared with anyone but Elves.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Nov 17, 2019)

Thanks for citing the Letters number for the "viaticum" quote, something I should have provided myself. The other quotations, on the film treatment, are from Letter 210.

And thanks also for the reference to the essay on lembas, which I pulled out and reread. It certainly seems from the essay that the grain came from Valinor, and was considered "holy", to the extent that it was picked by hand, and stored only in baskets made from its own stalks, "and rot and mould and other evils of Middle-earth did not assail it". The "sacred" nature of lembas is underscored by the fact that only the highest elf-lady "had the keeping and gift of the lembas", and the growing and preparation of it was restricted to her and her "maidens of Yavanna", imagery which recalls the Vestal Virgins and similar orders. In any case, grain as a mystical foodstuff has played a part in real-world religious traditions through the ages; it was central to the Eleusinian Mysteries, for example.

Whether miruvor had a similarly direct link with Valinor is a question; I suppose one could carry flowers to Middle Earth as well as grain. But of course, the move entails more than geography: to cite Frye's fictional modes again, it's also a move from the Mythical mode of the First Age to the Romance mode of the Third, in which questions of what they were "really" made from can begin to arise. To follow the modes, I wonder how much of either would still be available in the High Mimetic world of the Fourth Age, after the return of the King, when the Elves were leaving. And in our Low Mimetic age of the "real" world, we're down to the recipes for mead drinks and food concentrates that are "miruvor" and "lembas" only because we call them that.

One aspect of these substances worth noting is the aura of prohibition that surrounds them; the elves give them to mortals rarely and with reluctance. This is justified as benign in a note in the essay: 

"For it is said that, if mortals eat often of this bread, they become weary of their mortality, desiring to abide with the Elves, and longing for the fields of Aman, to which they cannot come".

Still, the hint of "forbidden fruit" remains, the sense of foodstuffs reserved to the gods, which are dangerous for mortals to tamper with. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Eden comes immediately to mind, apparently sending the gods of the story into near-panic at the prospect of mortals next eating from the Tree of Life, and becoming immortal themselves, that they banished them, but there are many other examples -- for instance, the cattle of Helios, the "Oxen of the Sun", whose theft by Odysseus' crew brought their doom. As far as I recall, no one steals lembas or miruvor, but even the gift of them seems heavy with significance, and possibly doubt. It may be stretching a point to say "Melian gave lembas to Turin, and look what happened to him", but I wonder.

I'm getting far afield the original question, but it should be mentioned that, as so often in Tolkien, lembas and miruvor have their demonic parody; in this case, orc-food and orc-draught, as seen in the "Uruk-hai" chapter (where we also see the demonic counterpart to the athelas of the Kings in the "orc-ointment" smeared on Merry's wound). The hobbits partake of these, though wisely refraining from the "orc-meat", which brings another important piece of symbolic imagery into play: that of the sacramental meal, in which participants symbolically take the body, or "life" of the leader into their own. The demonic parody of this Eucharistic symbolism is cannibalism, explicit in say, Shelob, and stated as a positive by several orcs. "Demonic" miruvor doesn't go as far, but an undisplaced form of orc-draught would no doubt be human blood.

The other piece of demonic imagery associated with this is _sparagmos,_ "tearing-apart", the horrifying pulling apart of the hero as sacrifice. We see this in reality in the hurling of heads into Minas Tirith; Frodo at least loses his finger; but symbolically also: in Shelob's Lair, in Cirith Ungol, where he is "stripped" of everything, both symbolically and literally, and in a scene which brings into juxtaposition sacred and demonic imagery, at the very gates of Mordor:



> 'Dwarf-coat, elf-cloak, blade of the down fallen West. . .'
> 'These we will take!'



These are not merely objects, but are referred to repeatedly as "tokens" -- that is, as objects with symbolic meaning.


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## CirdanLinweilin (Nov 17, 2019)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> As Tolkien himself says, in the famous letter about the infamous Zimmerman film treatment. But he goes on:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Sounds like what the Serpent in Eden lied about on the Trees in Eden, which funnily enough, is like a parody on the whole Greek myth thing referring to Immortality conferring food.

CL


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## Miguel (Nov 17, 2019)

Holy organic food and beverages.


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