Coffee!

[lindil]

The Dwarf-trading theory has more going for it than the Gondor one.

There was no trade between Gondor and Eriador at the time of the Hobbit.

Barely any trade within Eriador and anywhere, only the Dwarves of the Blue Mntns and the varied inhabitants of Rivendell had regular interaction outside of their immediate regions any longer [ I think some details are forht comeing in UT or HoME12] anyway, in 'Of Dwarves and Men' we read about the majority of the Dwarves anscestral mansions being much farther away East, essentially off of the map.

So they I think would have been in the best position to trade something like coffee mansion to mansion and have it thus make it's way to to the wealthy Baggins.

[Eruantalon]

No offence to anyone but I think your missing the point here.


The hobbit was supposed to be the only work in middel earth when it was realsed.If I am not wrong.But after it popularity the book publisher wanted more from him.


So what I think is that he was just making somthing that had some famliar things in it.He was trying to take you from a transition from one world that we live in to a vary far one.Hence the party.Notice the narritve aspect in the book that wasn't found in any of The Lord of the Rings saga.

It was one of the many things he was trying to do to slowly bring the reader into this world he created.How do you explain a world no one has ever seen.How do you bring people there.He did this vary well,don't you think?

Well just look at the entire book.Its almost like a diffent mind set than the LotR.There is the seeds of ancient things.The fading shadows of them too.But still there not at all the same book.


He was trying to creat some thing for childre.The coffee is unimportent or where it came from.


Where did they get Tobbaco?

Where did they get coffee?

How was it that the shire didn't have winter even though they where so far north?

Why didn't Frodo or Bilbo ever get married,they where old enogh wheren't they.?

If Hobbits eat so much and where so portly why wheren't there ever any hart attacts there?

These are all forms of reality questioning the story.So they don't have anything to do with it.Since its not there place.

But in the 30s or 40s Egyptolagist found traces of cocain in some mummys.Could Tolkien have know about this.Maybe he thought that is wasn't too ridiculs to have Bilbo give his guest coffee.

Maybe what we think of as coffee today was not the coffee that the Dwarfs where talking about?

Maybe its a small detial Tolkien forgot to explain or explained it and we never found out about it.

There are tons of notes and written things no one has ever seen that he has written.It could go on and on like this.

[bombur]

”Where did they get Tobbaco?”
You are kidding I hope? I really suggest you read the books.

”Where did they get coffee?”
As we were discussing...

”How was it that the shire didn't have winter even though they where so far north?”
It had several... Just like every other place in ME (there are too many references to count or quote) but not during the summers...

”Why didn't Frodo or Bilbo ever get married,they where old enogh wheren't they.?”
Because not everyone does. And especially back in the times of old, some people chose a lifestyle that was considered impossible to combine with marrying and rising a family. Theese folks include most of our worlds famous explorers (like Magalhaes, Pizarro, Cortez etc) and knights errant (Like Lancelot) for example. Today marriage is considered to be a form of entertainment in most of the world and one may make such question as you did. As late as in the 1600-1700 the anwser to your query would have been baffeled stare. People who went missing for years to travel, who obsessed over poems and became social freaks simply DID NOT MARRY. Many academics did not marry. Hence the degree "Bachelor".

”If Hobbits eat so much and where so portly why wheren't there ever any hart attacts there?”

In LOTR, silmarillion and hobbit we are told the manner of death of exactly two hobbits (excluding the conflict of the cleansing of shire.) The manner of the death of theese two is told because they were Frodos mom and dad and their deaths led to Frodo being adopted by Bilbo. They did not have heart attacks because they had a boating accident first. They may have had indigestion though.

”But in the 30s or 40s Egyptolagist found traces of cocain in some mummys.”

Doubtful. Koka- plant does not grow on the old continent.

[Eruantalon]

Wait a minute? Why are you answering the questions. There supposed to be silly things that have nothing to do with books. Did you read what I had to say.

I wasn't posing a question. I was making a statment. Oh well if you don't get it I am not explaining.

[doug*platypus]

Ah, there's the rub. Eruantalon, you are slowly learning that there is no such thing as a rhetorical question in the Barrow-Downs forum. And fair enough, too.

The Lord of the Rings, and also post-publication alterations to The Hobbit, served to tie The Hobbit (which I only grudgingly refer to as a 'children's book') in with The Silmarillion, and at the same time providing the Hobbit sequel that the public (at large, not just kids) was clamouring for. If Tolkien had desired to remove coffee and make the story more realistic, he could have easily done so. He changed an entire chapter ("Riddles in the Dark", see Letters of Tolkien) after all, and a single word would hardly have been of consequence.

I can only surmise that coffee was intended to be left as it was. And that therefore, since JRRT was such an immaculate perfectionist, there is a plausible explanation out there somewhere for how hobbits (or at least the well-off Bilbo) came by coffee.

[doug*platypus]

The following was boldly swiped from another site during a dawn raid. Many bothans died to get you this information.

Q: Suilad, you guys are doing a great job! In LOTR I hear a mention of tea and I think sugar. Well I know that tea requires warm climates; for I belong to the Indian subcontinent. The realms of Middle-earth were based on the temperatures that prevailed in Europe – or England to be more precise (as Tolkien had planned). So where would our dear hobbits get their tea from? Did they trade with the south (it is mentioned that it is hot there) or were there other means by which they procured tea?

–Beleg Cuthlaion from Pakistan

A: Well, I don’t think this question stops with just tea. Tolkien wrote of some plants and foods that were meant to be distinctly English, giving Middle-earth the impression of "the familiar world" while we find other produce that was incongruous with this same world. What about corn, apples, and tobacco? The issue of agriculture in Middle-earth gets a bit tangled, I’m afraid. The matter is further confused by the FOTR film where we see Pippin and Merry cooking tomatoes up on Weathertop ("That’s nice! Ash in my tomatoes!") – when Tolkien himself never once mentioned tomatoes in the story. So did they exist in Middle-earth? Did regular tea and tobacco, even, exist in this Northern European-based fictional world or did the author just stick them in there? There is a discussion of "cold chicken and pickles" in The Annotated Hobbit where Douglas Anderson talks about Gandalf’s request. The wizard originally asked for tomatoes but Tolkien later changed it to pickles:

This revision brings up the question as to why it should matter whether Bilbo’s larder was stocked with tomatoes or pickles. Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle-earth, suggests that as Tolkien wrote the sequel to The Hobbit, and as he came to perceive the hobbits and their land as characteristically English in nature, he recognized tomatoes as foreign in origin and in name. They were imports from America, like potatoes and tobacco, which were quickly adopted in England. Though Tolkien does use the word tobacco in The Hobbit a handful of times, it is strictly avoided in The Lord of the Rings, where pipeweed is used. There, as well, potatoes are given the more rustic name taters. Tomatoes were thus out of place in the Shire as Tolkien came to perceive it.
That settles that. No tomatoes. Now what about tea? I think the answer lies in Tolkien’s fictionalization of tobacco, where the author created a proxy for the plant. It seems there was no actual tobacco per se, just his Middle-earth version of tobacco. The plant that came from Númenor was galenas; as Tolkien decided it should be "imported" to Middle-earth and grown in Gondor. It grew in the south of Gondor easily enough but up in the Shire it was carefully handled to survive the climate. Though I have no mind for farming, I would venture a guess that tea had a similar back-history. It probably originated elsewhere (maybe Gondor or further beyond) and was brought up the Greenway. If the clever hobbit farmers of the Shire grew any tea plants similar to the tea of our modern world, lucky them. It seems a rather tricky thing for Tolkien to balance: keeping familiar, English elements associated the hobbits and having to explain at great length (in the case of pipeweed) how these items came to be in the fictional world of Middle-earth.

–Quickbeam

From Green Books, the One Ring.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

This was one of the first threads I ever lurked on....perhaps the very first. It was waaaaay back in the day when I had a different screenname even! Reading through and posting on Kuru's interesting thread on possible trade between Dwarves and Elves in the First Age reminded me of it.

I love coffee, and I love Tolkien-related conundrums so it seemed time to resurrect this thread and to pose the question anew to a fresh generation of Downers:

1) Did the hobbits really have coffee, as we understand it (as opposed to some other form of drink which the narrator has simply called "coffee"), and if so

2) Where the heck did they get it?

For me, it makes most sense that they would have traded with the Dwarves for it, and that the Dwarves obtained it in trade with Men from the south...but this is where it gets tricky: Gondor was not southerly enough to grow coffee, so either the men of Gondor were trading with the Southrons in some way, or the Dwarves were trading with the Southrons....

And while we're at it: what about tea and sugar? Also crops that only grow in the tropics, so where the heck did that come from?

[Lalwendë]

There's not that much mystery to it really. Coffee doesn't have to be made from arabica, it can be made from all kinds of stuff, including chicory, which would in fact have been extremely common in Tolkien's day - its only lately with fancy city types wanting fresh-ground-hand-made £200 a cup coffee that us Brits have got all 'sophisticated' about the brown stuff. Maybe Tolkien would even have Camp Coffee (we all remember that stuff is we're over a certain age). If it wasn't made with chicory it could be brewed with acrons and other nuts.

Sugar? Sugar beet. Grows everywhere.

Tea? Dunno about that growing in different climes. But again tea does not have to be made from the usual leaf. However here, I think Tolkien as a Brit would have sniffed at the very thought of namby-pamby 'herbal teas'.

And the tobacco thing was cleared up because the plant even grows in the arctic and you can easily grow your own (and legally too) in an English garden.

[Bêthberry]

You know, I tried to find this thread just the other day, but for some reason I kept thinking it was started by Maril rather than BW and forgot the name. Great thread!

Fordim, I've always felt the Grey Havens was under represented in the LotR story. I mean, why maintain an important sailing harbour, manned by one of the oldest and wisest of elves, if it is going to be used only for one-way, one-time only, excursion trips to the West?

My bet would be that there was substantial trading going on via the Grey Havens, accessible to dwarves from the Blue Mountains and Hobbits and run by elves. The Bay of Belfalas offers several ports which fed into Gondor. I bet we could even imagine some kind of pirate RPG game out of this.

Pirates of the Haradrium.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Lal m'dear,

There's not that much mystery to it really. Coffee doesn't have to be made from arabica, it can be made from all kinds of stuff, including chicory, which would in fact have been extremely common in Tolkien's day

So called replacement "coffees" were only invented in WWII when the real thing became scarce -- so when Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in the 30s, coffee meant, well, coffee.

Sugar? Sugar beet. Grows everywhere.

Sorry again luv, but sugar beets weren't actually used for sugar until 1838 when the first commercial sugar beet mill was opened in the US. Sugar from beets wasn't even imported to the UK until much later. This means that the hobbits either had technology well beyond everyone else in Middle-Earth (including the steam engine, compressors capable of creating a vacuum, and boilers) or they were using sugar from a sugar cane, which is tropical. (What's more, sugar beets were a better source of sugar than other root veggies, but not hugely so -- they were hybridized and cultivated in later 18th Century to gain a higher sucrose level...got to love Wikipedia).

Tea? Dunno about that growing in different climes. But again tea does not have to be made from the usual leaf. However here, I think Tolkien as a Brit would have sniffed at the very thought of namby-pamby 'herbal teas'.

I think for Tolkien and hobbits alike, "herbal tea" is an oxymoron. So is anyone who drinks it.

And the tobacco thing was cleared up because the plant even grows in the arctic and you can easily grow your own (and legally too) in an English garden.

And who said anything about tobacco? My theory is that this is what the hobbits traded in return for coffee, tea and sugar.

Beebs: you're on!

[Folwren]

I have no comments, just wanted to pop in and say how relieved I am to see this thread. I didn't know if coffee was actually in M-E and without thinking about it, I stuck it into the Golden Perch thread. Only after I had placed the post did I wonder, "Wait a moment...was there even coffee there? And would the Hobbits have had it?"

At least I know now that there was coffee in ME...at least, from the little I've read on this thread, some people think here is...but I'm still not possitive about the hobbit question.

-- Folwren