Quote:
Originally Posted by Alfirin
Urbanized doesn't really help, unless there's a "rural" to go along with it. It isn't a matter of how civilized you are or how many cities you have. If there isn't a largish farm area around to provide it with food, the cities tend to have a big problem, since there tends not to be a lot of "direct" (first link in chain) food production there (depending on the level of the cities, there could be small gardens and little flocks and herds of eating animals, but probably not enough to cover the cities whole food needs. Food takes a lot of space to produce. That's sort of why camping out ouside a city is effective as a method of conquest; you CAN'T make enough food inside the walls to cover the population, so eventually the people inside starve. We already KNOW Thranduil is willing to trade for wine. I imagine that, if we looked closer, a lot of the base FOOD (flour, vegetables etc.) also had their origins outside of Thranduils domain.
All I was trying to get at is that, if you want to be vegetarian, you sort of need to know that there are people out there growing lots and lots of legumes or milking lots and lots of animals to provide you with all that protein.
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Agreed almost all Elven realms described by Tolkien would have had to possess agrarian areas.
Even taking into account that Elves possibly were able to comfortably survive on less food than humans, Tumladen likely was non-stop farms from the walls of Gondolin all the way to the mountains, Nargothrond would have relied on nearby farming villages, Rivendell likely included farms and vegetable gardens/orchards.
It gets a bit more complicated to explain places like Ossiriand, Doriath and Lothlorien that were heavily forested and unlikely to trade with outsiders for large parts of their history.
However even those still had 1) enough fields in "hidden glades" to grow the corn needed for Lembas 2) likely practiced forest based agriculture like some tribes of Native Americans did.