# Food in Mordor



## Rivendell_librarian (Feb 28, 2020)

I've been wondering about what the armies in Mordor did for food. The Encyclopaedia of Arda (a good source?) says that Nurn around the Sea of Nurnen was more fertile than the Plateau of Gorgoroth and was worked by slaves (cf Sparta's helots?). These slaves were released in the fourth age.

Anyone know more about these slaves - were they captured from Harad or elsewhere? How long were they held as slaves of Mordor? What kind of food did they produce?






The Encyclopedia of Arda - Nurn


The lowlands of the south and east of Mordor. Beyond the range of Orodruin's fumes, Nurn was more fertile than the barren Plateau of Gorgoroth to the...




www.glyphweb.com





Bump - I'm surprised this question wasn't answered.


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## Phantom718 (Mar 2, 2020)

I'm not sure much is mentioned about what orcs eat - except for things like the "maggoty bread" the Uruks had in TTT (film), and occasionally eating each other (TTT/ROTK films). I tend to doubt they'd grow "normal" produce like men or elves would, but who knows. They probably had largely a scavenger kind of diet like Gollum. Just my guess. I could be wrong.


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## Aldarion (Mar 2, 2020)

Actually, Orcs do eat normal food - as noted in OP, we know that there are large fields worked by slaves around Sea of Nurnen. The only question is whether they are raising crops to feed orcs, or to feed animals to feed orcs. One way or another, it is clear that Mordor does, in fact, have food production.


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## Deleted member 12094 (Mar 3, 2020)

The origin of these slaves is nowhere to be found. They are hardly mentioned at all, except that indeed they were freed by Aragorn and could keep the lands for themselves.


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## Rivendell_librarian (Mar 3, 2020)

Ok thanks for that Merroe and Aldarion.

I've just found this in the ROTK:

_Frodo and Sam gazed out in mingled loathing and wonder on this hateful land. Between them and the smoking mountain, and about it north and south, all seemed ruinous and dead, a desert burned and choked. *They wondered how the Lord of this realm maintained and fed his slaves and his armies. *Yet armies he had. As far as their eyes could reach, along the skirts of the Morgai and away southward, there were camps, some of tents, some ordered like small towns. One of the largest of these was right below them. Barely a mile out into the plain it clustered like some huge nest of insects, with straight dreary streets of huts and long low drab buildings. About it the ground was busy with folk going to and fro; a wide road ran from it south-east to join the Morgul-way, and along it many lines of small black shapes were hurrying.
‘I don’t like the look of things at all,’ said Sam. ‘Pretty hopeless, I call it - *saving that where there’s such a lot of folk there must be wells or water, not to mention food. And these are Men not Orcs, or my eyes are all wrong.’
Neither he nor Frodo knew anything of the great slave-worked fields away south in this wide realm, beyond the fumes of the Mountain by the dark sad waters of Lake Núrnen; nor of the great roads that ran away east and south to tributary lands, from which the soldiers of the Tower brought long wagon-trains of goods and booty and fresh slaves*. Here in the northward regions were the mines and forges, and the musterings of long-planned war; and here the Dark Power, moving its armies like pieces on the board, was gathering them together. Its first moves, the first feelers of its strength, had been checked upon its western line, southward and northward. For the moment it withdrew them, and brought up new forces, massing them about Cirith Gorgor for an avenging stroke. And if it had also been its purpose to defend the Mountain against all approach, it could scarcely have done more.
‘Well!’ Sam went on. ‘*Whatever they have to eat and drink, we can’t get it.* There’s no way down that I can see. And we couldn’t cross all that open country crawling with enemies, even if we did get down.’_

2 hobbits contemplating a wasteland with no obvious source of food or greenery. One can almost hear Captain Scott saying: "Great God! this is an awful place"
It seems likely the slaves were brought from the south and east.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Mar 3, 2020)

I'd imagine that many of the slaves would be from populations conquered, or at least raided, by Mordor's Southron and Easterling allies. (Note: I see RL replied while I was typing, but I'll leave mine as is).

That, along with many other things we'd like to know more about, is left vague, for a couple of reasons, one being the sheer length of the work, which, despite Tolkien's oft-expressed optimistic letters to his publishers, "grew in the telling" until it took fourteen years to reach completion. Even then, he later regretted that it was "too short" -- a regret I believe most on this forum share. He did spend a great deal of time and effort after publication filling in blanks in the story, for which fans should be grateful. He said in a letter that he was aware of the importance of agriculture, economics, and similar elements in a society, but couldn't get to everything.

I'd suggest another reason: some things are left vague, or at least not described in the kind of detail seen in other encyclopedic works -- Moby Dick, say -- deliberately, in order to maintain the contours of the story's structural imagery, which consistently points to its sources in the radical imagery of myth.

For instance, "orc-food" is meant to be the demonic parody of lembas, the "sanctified" food of Lorien: we could probably assume the latter would be as distasteful and inedible to the orcs as it was to Gollum: "Dust and ashes! We don't eat that". Similarly, "orc-draught" parodies miruvor.

Orc-_meat _goes as far in the direction of radical mythical imagery as possible: Pippin eats the "stale grey bread" given to him, "but not the meat. He was famished but not yet so famished as to eat flesh flung to him by an Orc, the flesh of he dared not guess what creature"; and Ugluk has already expressed pride in serving "the Hand that gives us man's-flesh to eat". We don't know where this "man's-flesh" comes from, but the important feature is the imagery:, which goes beyond the contrast with lembas, to parody the sacramental meal, in which followers symbolically take the body of the leader into themselves. It appears in Biblical symbology, of course, but in many other traditions as well. The demonic parody of this is _cannibalism; _the radical mythical form of "orc-draft" would be human blood. I note in passing that the painful but effective unguent smeared on Merry's wound is the demonic counterpart of athelas.

The same sort of mythic imagery appears in the freeing of the slaves in Mordor: the Saviour descends into the "belly of the Beast" to liberate the captive souls, an image which occurs in countless stories, from the Bible to Little Red Riding Hood, in some forms of which all the wolf's previous victims emerge alive from his opened belly. I hope to explore more of this particular imagery, as it applies to LOTR, at some point in the near future.


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## CirdanLinweilin (Mar 3, 2020)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> I'd imagine that many of the slaves would be from populations conquered, or at least raided, by Mordor's Southron and Easterling allies. (Note: I see RL replied while I was typing, but I'll leave mine as is).
> 
> It, along with many other things we'd like to know more about, is left vague, for a couple of reasons, one being the sheer length of the work, which, despite Tolkien's oft-expressed optimistic letters to his publishers, "grew in the telling" until it took fourteen years to reach completion. Even then, he later regretted that it was "too short" -- a regret I believe most on this forum share. He did spend a great deal of time and effort after publication filling in blanks in the story, for which fans should be grateful. He said in a letter that he was aware of the importance of agriculture, economics, and similar elements in a society, but couldn't get to everything.
> 
> ...


That's a cool explanation!

CL


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## Rivendell_librarian (Mar 3, 2020)

I guess Peter and the Wolf is another example like Little Red Riding Hood Thanks for this S-e S: well thought through.

So it seems orcs would eat meat (inc cannibalism) and grain (bread, maybe rice) but they wouldn't eat their greens and likely not root vegetables or fruit.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Mar 12, 2020)

I'd imagine they'd eat just about any "normal" food they could get ahold of.

BTW, there's a thread about food in general in ME around here somewhere.


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## Olorgando (Mar 13, 2020)

Rivendell_librarian said:


> ...
> So it seems orcs would eat meat (inc cannibalism) and grain (bread, maybe rice) but they wouldn't eat their greens and likely not root vegetables or fruit.


Erm ... so it would be easy to spot crypto-Orcs at picnics, I would assume? 🤔


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## Aldarion (Mar 14, 2020)

Greater question is one of general logistics. Mordor has no rivers. Animals that pull wagons eat the food themselves. So if whole north of country is in shadow, lot of food must be lost on transport (IIRC, 280 km is range of army with wagons).


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## Olorgando (Mar 14, 2020)

If the country traveled through provides opportunities for grazing, feeding the livestock - horses and oxen - is not such an issue. That is why all nomadic cavalry peoples like the Mongols, earlier the Huns and even earlier the Scythians tended to be inhabitants of prairies and steppes. They had severe problem with swampy and / of steeply hilly to mountainous and / or heavily forested regions. Which could have been an issue in Mordor, very much so the closer one got to the plateau of Gorgoroth, which appears to have a north-south expanse of 150 miles or 249 kilometers as per Fonstad's map. And as the region from west to north of the inland sea of Nurnen is named Lithlad or ash plain, that can't have helped. From the closest part of the coast of Nurnen to the border of the plateau of Gorgoroth seems to be another 150 miles or 240 kilometers. That must have posed massive logistics problems for Sauron's forces in Gorgoroth a seen by Sam and Frodo, something JRRT silently glossed over (he does seem often to give the baddies almost unlimited resources without bothering if this was even remotely possible).


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## Rivendell_librarian (Mar 14, 2020)

Good point about logistics. I think there are rivers in Mordor running into (out of?) the Sea of Nurnen but none that reach into the plateau of Gorgoroth


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Mar 14, 2020)

However, I _think _I recall Christopher saying parts of the maps had been simplified for publication, and some features left out. Whether that affected the map of Mordor, I don't know.


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