Are Elves vegatarian?

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Puddleglum

Maybe Beorn? TH doesn't explicitly say so, but the only foods I see actually listed served in his house seem to have been bread, honey, nuts, fruits and mead - so perhaps ...

Possibly Bombadil & Goldberry too? They served the hobbits cream, honeycomb, bread, butter, milk, cheese, green herbs & ripe berries.

Gandalf did advise Bilbo against mentioning the word "furrier" within Beorn's hearing, suggesting that Beorn was very possibly not in favor of killing animals, and the lack of meat at his table seems to support that.

As for Bombadil, he doesn't seem to have kept any animals, other than Fatty Lumpkin, and meat wouldn't appear to have been otherwise available to him.

That said, it might be hard to say sometimes whether vegetarianism in Middle-earth, whether it existed or not, was a conscious choice of lifestyle, or simply borne of necessity when groups had no ready access to meat.

[Tar-Jêx]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Gandalf did advise Bilbo against mentioning the word "furrier" within Beorn's hearing, suggesting that Beorn was very possibly not in favor of killing animals, and the lack of meat at his table seems to support that.

As for Bombadil, he doesn't seem to have kept any animals, other than Fatty Lumpkin, and meat wouldn't appear to have been otherwise available to him.

That said, it might be hard to say sometimes whether vegetarianism in Middle-earth, whether it existed or not, was a conscious choice of lifestyle, or simply borne of necessity when groups had no ready access to meat.

In medieval times, it was hard to be a healthy person without eating meat. For the peasants, meat was a luxury, but they weren't vegetarian.

[Galadriel55]

I was just thinking of a certain scene in the books (sadly don't have books with me, can't quote, but would appreciate if somebody did) from Flotsam and Jetsam that may be of interest. What kind of food do Pippin and Merry offer? They don't have much - beer, bread and honey, ham. Nothing says that or dear Legolas specifically did not eat the ham, but I've always assumed everybody ate everything.

So if it makes you happy, you can debate whether Legolas was surviving on bread and honey or if his behaviour proves that Elves are not vegetarian. I don't really feel like arguing it either way.

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by G55

So if it makes you happy, you can debate whether Legolas was surviving on bread and honey or if his behaviour proves that Elves are not vegetarian. I don't really feel like arguing it either way.

Honestly I’m not sure why anyone does, at this stage, as it seems to me that the case was closed a long time ago. I think it’s worth pointing out that the original question arises, not from anything Tolkien wrote about his Elves, but from Jackson's portrayal of them in "Unexpected Journey". The OP was puzzled at the discrepancy between this and the description in the book of the Wood Elves feasting on “roast meats”.

[Alfirin]

Originally Posted by Tar-Jêx

In medieval times, it was hard to be a healthy person without eating meat. For the peasants, meat was a luxury, but they weren't vegetarian.

Particularly if you are not really agrarian, as some of the elves probably were not (i.e. I not sure ALL the elves had farms around). Getting enough protein to stay alive is hard unless you are actively growing something you can stockpile, or live in a tropical region where there are seeds and nuts of some sort year round. That's one of the big reasons that most of the major agrarian societies relied so heavily on legumes of one kind or another. Once your population gets big enough that major meat consumption for everyone is not longer feasible, you NEED that pulse crop to make up the gap. Or why I say "Contrary to what most people thing, a hill of beans amounts to quite a lot." Even dairy can only get you so far, as you have to make sure that you dairy stock is perpetually lactating (not always easy to do, if you can't convince your rams and bucks to do their job on a given doe/ewe or you're a peasant family with only one or two milk cows who needs to find someone ELSE with a bull to "freshen" her.) or get really, really good at making hard cheese. It's a little hard to imagine Beren spending his whole autumn gathering nuts and acorns with the mania of a squirrel, but that is probably what he would have to do I he had really committed to a no meat lifestyle (unless I am right, and the animals got so close to him that he could milk the deer and collect the unfertilized eggs of the wild birds. and even those would be seasonal)

[mhagain]

Originally Posted by Alfirin

Particularly if you are not really agrarian, as some of the elves probably were not

Most of the Noldor and many of the Sindar were actually quite urbanized. Elves (or at least the Eldar) appear to have liked living in cities.

Tirion-on-Tuna, Alqualonde, Gondolin, Nargothrond, Menegroth, Ost-in-Edhil, Caras Galadhon, Mithlond, even Thraduil's caves - they were all cities.

[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.

[Orphalesion]

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.

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.

[Alfirin]

I wonder if mallorn seeds are edible? (the seed is described as a "nut" but not every nut is something you can eat) However much they may have valued the trees for their beauty (and their convenience for putting houses in.) the grove probably produced far more nuts than it would be feasible to re-plant, so eating them could be a possibility.

Indian wise (if we are thinking along those lines), I might imagine something along the diet of some of the California Indian tribes, who often relied on acorns as their primary carbohydrate source. Assuming the forests of Lorien are similar to European forests in tree makeup, there'd probably be large areas of chestnuts and beeches as well (you can eat beech nuts if you know how to leach and prepare them, same as acorns) On the oily-fatty tree nut side, there'd probably be hazel copses, and maybe some walnuts and almonds (If Gondor/Ithillien is supposed to be somewhere in the Tuscany region latitude wise (I remember than from an earlier discussion about why Sam though Gollum would be able to find wild bay laurels), Lorien is probably something along the lines of Northern/Middle France, so walnuts can grow there (though not necessarily as well as further south.) Possibly, even some of the more cold tolerant varieties of olive. and of course all kinds of lesser plants in the odd open clearings.

But, given the food issues I sometimes wonder if Galadriel (who, having come from Aman, would have probably familiar with all of the trees of that place) Sometimes might have thought that, as nice and pretty as mallornen were, her people might have been better off if fate had given them a DIFFERENT kind of Amanian tree, like Yavannamire, which we KNOW has edible fruit (I assume that any fruit described as "luscious" is probably good to eat.)