#Grima: whatever you posh city boy

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

Okay, here's a question for you: Grima + seafood. I have a character who grew up predominantly near the water and therefore grew up eating lots of seafood, and while I feel like Grima would probably have eaten a lot of normal fish, he might balk at crustaceans (much to my character's amusement), and so I got curious to know your thoughts on the matter! I admit that I don't know if Middle-Earth's waterways would even have crustaceans, but I wanted to hear your thoughts nonetheless!

Oooh yessss more Grima + Food questions, my favourite

I don't see why Middle Earth's freshwater sources would be so different from that of Europe's where they wouldn't host more than just fish - so I think you are safe to assume if Grima lived near a fresh water source he would have been familiar with all that such a vibrant ecosystem had to offer in terms of food.

For shellfish and molluscs and the like--he absolutely would be familiar with them! Or, at least, fresh water iterations, depending on where you have him growing up. Obviously marshland vs lakes vs streams vs swift running rivers are all going to provide different options (though definitely with overlap between some of them).

Some of the shellfish he might have known include freshwater oysters, mussels, clams, snails etc.

In streams, rivers, lakes and other such there's crawfish - which was historically a huge food source in Europe (though generally not the UK, but middle earth isn't bound to UK environment thank god, especially not Rohan). This means Grima seeing a lobster would be like "huh, a very large and weird looking crawfish".

An potentially fun nuance to add is that crawfish were, at various times, considered a bit of a luxury item and so it might be something he had greater access to as he climbed up the metaphorical food chain.

However, if he grew up where they naturally occur, and depending how you want to write land ownership and poaching/foraging laws in Rohan, he might have just had them around as day-to-day food. Or, it might have been something he (and his family) secretly foraged/poached from whoever the big-wig land over was.

There are also freshwater crabs of different sorts--found predominantly streams and rivers--so that's another food source he may have been familiar with.

Lake shrimp! that's another freshwater crustacean he might be familiar with. They're generally harvested for their tail meat.

In terms of characters getting seafood into Rohan, I really don't see that happening simply because of the distance that would be required to travel and the slow nature of transportation in middle earth. If Grima is eating seafood, like lobster or salt-water based crabs, oysters etc. he would have to be in a coastal town, or very near one that transportation on ice can be done in a timely manner.

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Another thing to consider when thinking through food access and cultivation and what a character might have had or not had, or the quantity of it, is land management.

In Europe, the medieval period saw the rise of legislation intended for protecting freshwater fish--particularly young stock and migrating spawning fish from over exploitation.

Therefore, Rohan might have laws on when you can harvest crawfish and how many you're allowed to harvest at a time from a specific area.

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Also a fun thing to think through is the cultural relationship with fishing and how it may have changed. Rohan historically was a nomadic society, and would have likely made great use of northern rivers and lakes in Rhovanion, where they originate from.

Depending on how much they incorporated fishing into their regular food-obtaining practices (it would have been seasonal), they likely would have developed a strong cultural relationship with the activity and the food it produced. How much of this relationship survived their colonsing/settling in what is now known as Rohan is up to the writer.

Also, did Dunlanders have a strong fishing practice? If so, when the Rohirrim colonized that land, how much did they absorb? How much did they erase? We know they expelled the Dunlanders, but even in an expulsion based scenarios, cultural exchange/shift is never a one-way street. Therefore they would have likely adopted things of the Dunlander traditions as much as Dunlanders that remained may have been forced to adopt Rohirrim traditions.

From an article on historical freshwater fishing in Europe:

Archaeologists have identified fishing cultures in prehistoric societies in Western Europe, for example, among Magdalenian hunter-gatherers in France and Northern Iberia both through bones and art, while the Mesolithic period in Scandinavia was also rich in fishing communities. These fisheries continued to be exploited through the millennia, not least in northern Europe. Artisanal fishing was of great importance in the historic period for the Sami, whose specialised fisher-hunter-forager cultures existed until recently along northern rivers and larger lakes in Sweden and in Finland. The Fisher-Sami fished the lakes of Tjäurajaure and Tjieggelvas in Swedish Lapland and the Inari Sami were predominately fishermen in Lake Inari in northern Finland until recently. The Skolt Sami in the borderland between Russia and Finland were mainly fishers before the Second World War. Like other fishing Sami, they migrated along rivers to their camp sites following the fishing season and although this practice has declined, many Skolt Sami are still fishermen.

If you want to have Rohan keeping some of its migratory/nomadic culture, you can people living in seasonal establishments. (This is what I have happening in What Makes a King where Grima grew up in one such community that moved with the seasons to specific areas, which they had done so for generations.)

From the same article:

[...] a medieval example is that of the farmer fishers of the south Devon coast in England, who had secondary seasonal settlements for fishing along the coastline and in estuaries. These ‘cellar settlements’ were used for storing fishing equipment, smoking fish and replaced by permanent fishing villages from the end of the fifteenth century. The fisher farmer lifestyle was found along many parts of the British coastline, practiced most recently in remote islands such as Orkney and Shetland off the Scottish northern coast and the now depopulated St Kilda west of the Outer Hebrides. 

They're speaking, of course, to coastlines but the practice is also done inland along freshwater rivers, lakes, marshes and the like.

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Ok I have gone on far too long about freshwater fish and fishing.

All this to say, Grima would not be flumuxed by crustaceans and would likely look at a lobster and go "large, different coloured crawfish relation of some kind!" Crabs he would have no issue with, again they're fairly similar in appearance, with some key differences (size, colour, shape of claws). Shrimp he may know. Same for a lot of molluscs, he would likely know them as related to the freshwater version he eats.

It's taste where things would differ! Saltwater mussels and freshwater mussels taste different! That is the sort of thing where he might have a "huh, interesting" moment.