#sons of durin: ecological disaster

[awisetoad]

Ahahah thank you! I scrolled back and found that post, and after not having looked at it in quite a while I forgot all the stuff I touched on. I do have more to add tho

also tagging @error-reality-not-found bc they liked all the other posts

what did they eat: part 2, electric boogaloo

so last time I kind of considered their diet in terms of maybe what I'd consider a meal (protein + carbs, but little veg given the reaction in Rivendell to the salad lmao). It's unlikely, but there is a chance they are existing on MOSTLY meat because… I mean, I suppose you can kind of forage wild tubers and roots, tho it's not really feasible to be finding and digging them up in the quantities they'd need to meet what we'd consider a normal macro split every day while on the road.

honestly, its worth exploring that mostly-hunting-some-foraging line of inquiry anyway bc that's how so many fics seem to portray the start of the journey.

and boy howdy does this need a cut.

but first: it's far more likely that they'd set out from wherever packing some stuff along. I know I cited bombur baking bread, but idk if that's right. I did some investigating and it seems like prime candidates would've been, like, oats (or rice? and corn but I also dunno about harvest season so maybe its barley or farro or something idk), and possibly some kind of hardtack and/or bannock. probably some hard cheeses and fresh fruit for the first days, but not so much that it ends up spoiling. potatoes could keep, but again idk about seasonality and they are too heavy bc of the water weight compared to shit like oats & grains in terms of calories vs weight. you really can't forget the weight of it all, bc they'll need more ponies to carry whatever amount of provisions they choose to pack to supplement their hunting and gathering AND ponies to carry whatever the weight is of processed game after each hunting session ON TOP OF the ones they are riding AND however many are carrying their non-edible supplies (like the cook pot)

like, here's an example that's just a rough estimate but if everyone has 1 cup of (uncooked) oats a day that's like 300-some calories? I think that weighs 81 grams per person, so 1,215g per day which makes 36,450g across ~30 days, from Bree to Rivendell which makes… 80lbs/36kg of oatmeal I guess? and looks like that's about in the ballpark of what a pony can carry.

(I am staring right at Gloin and his coin purse lmfao)

personally I think packing provisions from the Shire/Bree is essential, but if they run out (or they are washed away down the river by a spooked pony, lookin' at you Book!canon) we might be looking at strictly hunting/foraging for a while.

for foraged stuff like tubers, mushrooms, and probably some stew-friendly greens for fiber that Ori definitely picks around… I don't know the feasibility of gathering enough to make what we'd consider a proper portion per person. I wouldn't be surprised if they threw in as much as they could find honestly just to stretch what else they have. nuts, seeds, berries I imagine would be more like road snacks/lunch during travel days (along with jerky, but we'll get to that) especially if they keep well during travel

also, I quick googled caloric needs for a backpacking trip and it looks like maybe somewhere around 4,000+ calories is the ballpark for hiking in mountainous terrain which does line up with my past-self's googling on that previous post, so. I'll stick to how I calculated game before. If we take a sec and explore that hunting-and-foraging-only diet per above (making them…keto?) the game requirements end up kind of doubling from my last post. We're looking at having to hunt about, what, 60,000 calories worth of meat per day for the group?

Which means, based on the numbers in my other post—

> They'd need to hunt 2 deer, or 2 boar, or 8 good-sized fish, or 8-14 ducks, or 20 rabbits, OR a whopping 82 squirrels* every single day.

jfc uH

holy shit.

ahem, anyway

the logistics of that fuckery

I inquired with some of my buds & some internet folks who have more hunting experience than I, and (as stated in my last post) there's no reasonable way you can hunt & trap at that scale effectively on a literal daily basis, especially if that means having to strike camp, ride 3-4 hours (to hit that 10/mi a day posited by that Atlas of Middle Earth map) set up camp again, and then the time it takes to then process & cook your kills.

not to mention, not every spot along their path will even make for good hunting at all. and while some days you score big, some days you don't score at all.

google tells me that prime hunting time for lots of kinds of game is around dawn and dusk as well, so there's no way people would be sleeping enough with that kind of schedule.

I maintain it's much more likely they're doing some hard hiking/riding for ~20 or so miles (what I googled of pony stamina) for several days until they find the best possible camp that will let them maximize their hunt/forage potential, and then they're at camp for several days just resupplying and letting the horses rest.

and like, obviously, they are mixing and matching game— so like, 1 deer and 1 boar, or 1 deer and 4 fish, or some combination of small game critters that adds up to the equivalent of 82 goddamn squirrels ahaha what the fuck

Which means, fishing, fishing nets, all manner of traps for all kinds of critters which all take time to set and check every day, kili and thorin become an arrow factory, several members of the company are working together to drive boar straight to bifur (the scene from outlander of the boar hunt was enlightening). The foraging folks foraging. Who is out there? The whole damn company, apparently.

You need to catch enough food for the days in camp as well as enough for the days of travel ahead. so, maybe 2 or 3 days moving, 2 or 3 in camp, we'll estimate 5 days worth of game at a time? which means you need to have some kind of home team to handle processing the utterly astronomical 410 squirrels you've somehow managed to bring home.

is it 410 squirrels or hundreds of beavers

(it does work out to ~5 per day, per person in the company. that's two squirrels for breakfast, one for lunch, two for dinner and your actual caloric needs are met. so… jfc hahaha)

(for the love of god someone check my math)

Honestly, most of the edible meat is probably getting turned into some kind of preserved thing for travel days— cold smoking jerky or sausage (given the free natural casings would be otherwise wasted). meat hand pies if Bombur has flour in the provisions? —and in-camp during these off days you're probably making use of the much faster to spoil, and less… uh… desirable? stuff. like the organs, like the bones, marrow, the kind of shit we grind up & call "mechanically separated"… use every part of those 410 squirrels, along with any foraged items that won't keep, know what I mean?

and keep in mind all this processing as well as preserving methods also require like labor and time so its not like you really get much of an "off" day. I did find several ways to smoke meat over open flame but they do require like 12 hours of tending a fire lol so more evidence they're staying put for a while in order to render their game useful over the next few travel days.

and then they get to do it again over the next 5 day stretch… and maybe even the next, resulting in the wholesale slaughter of 1,230 squirrels over 15 days.

assuming in this example that the provisions from Bree only lasted a fortnight until they ran out, spoiled, or were an unfortunate casualty of a spooked horse and they spent the other half of the 30-days-to-Rivendell systematically collapsing the ecosystem

so that's a lot of fucking food

uh, yeah.

I think there's basically two huge points to make that could explain why thorins company might not actually be a walking ecological disaster:

they weren't actually meeting their caloric needs consistently (or at all, lol— canonically they spend a lot of time starving). there's several reasons this could be. one: spooked pony forces them to exclusively rely on hunting game and foraging and they have a lot of days with little-to-no scores. two: pre-spooked pony, they rely far more heavily on provisions from the Shire/Bree and thus hundreds of squirrels are spared in the first half of the trip in favor of oatmeal & bread. three: dwarves' special canonical earth-bread tubers are shockingly nutritionally dense and prolific to forage along their entire route.

dwarves are hardy, and "hardiness" means they can survive for far, far longer than humans can without starving to death or even really losing muscle mass. thus generally they need wayyyyyy less calories than I calculated. I honestly think this is correct, and even tho this is kinda the opposite end of the spectrum from most of the arguments I just made about supply quantities, we also don't see the implications of this explored much at all either (and even if we do, it's usually not until we hit Mirkwood).

Honestly, it could make for interesting dynamics if you consider dwarves may not initially realize they need to feed their non-dwarf members far more often than they need to eat themselves unless they want to accidentally starve their romantic interest their tag alongs—

("wtf do you mean, second breakfast"

"I knew hobbits needed to eat more, but you need to eat how much?!?! I guess that ruins all of my carefully budgeted provisioning. no, no don't worry about it, it's fine, fuck, we may as well go get the damn handkerchiefs given we need to go back and buy many, many more pounds of oats and like… twelve more ponies."

or

"oh shit we only caught one fish to last all 15 of us the next several days but uhh we kind of have to give it Bilbo or he'll starve to death— it's ok, the rest of us can wait another 3 days of travel to eat we'll be fine haha *sobbing* and hopefully wizards can conjure their own calories who tf knows")

so how do they know how to do all that?

again, I know Tolkien's extended canon works paint the picture of dwarves mostly not getting involved with farming or animal husbandry, instead preferring a symbiotic relationship with Men's settlements in order to stock their larders. but, as I think I said before (I barely remember at this point lol) I think it's reasonable to assume that isn't the entire story:

tolkien was very elf-biased and dwarf culture was "secretive" (aka not explored as much); thus, we could assume that the people "recording" this information about dwarves did not have a complete understanding

we can assume that the much-preferred symbiotic lifestyle the dwarves of Erebor enjoyed due to its prime location as a center of trade in the north was straight-up deleted after the sacking of Erebor. life as they knew it fundamentally changed and they had to adapt as refugees, picking up skills they wouldn't have needed before

maybe Fundin took Balin and Dwalin cave-fishing as kids, or they learned it from lake-town. maybe boar is one kind of game found from erebor to ered luin, so bifur is in his element anywhere. maybe fili and kili learned to shoot and trap from rangers in eraidor. maybe bofur, being good at ropes and knots as a miner, can rig up a fishing net easily. or maybe that's dori, if you follow the Fanon that he's a weaver. maybe Ori's actually really fucking accurate with that sling— look up native sling hunting on YouTube.

I do think that Gloin, being the one seemingly bankrolling the expedition along with maybe Balin, would be responsible for calculating, provisioning, and budgeting for the journey from Ered Luin, and acquiring ponies somewhere in the Shire, and then provisioning once again in Bree for the next stretch.

But also consider that they likely had a real plan for that next stretch and resupply point (that doesn't involve elves) that didn't end up working out given that more than a few unfortunate events happened (spooked pony, trolls, elves, realizing they had a deadline at all lmfao). Like. Where were they going next, before the trolls fucked everything up? around thru dunland? were they going to resupply originally in Rohan? or is there a settlement other than Beorn's they might've aimed for? Who knows.

endnotes

I think this sufficiently paints a vivid picture of the absurd amount of planning, effort, time, cost, supplies, and other various considerations that need to be done for this kind of excursion, and how crazy it is that we just gloss right tf over it ahahah

also the timeline for thorin meeting Gandalf, returning to ered luin, provisioning, traveling to a meeting in spaghetti-land, and then to hobbiton is bunk and I have another ted talk about that

and about bed rolls.

I'm not gonna link stuff bc it'd be too much, but my sources are shit like a billion hours of bushcraft camping/cooking videos, act/pct thru hike videos, the lewis and clark expedition records, Townsends and tasting history and Sohla's history food show on YouTube, the original Native American diet & pemmican, early human hunter-gatherer societies, fandabi dozi on YouTube, wagon trail cowboy shit, how to feed the crew of a 17th century ship while at sea, primitive food preparation pre-refrigeration, how medieval armies razed the countryside while marching to war, and personal real-life experience that includes but is not limited to: professional catering experience, feeding my 30-person extended family for every holiday growing up, feeding many bachelorette and stag parties for more than a few days bc I'm in my wedding attendance era.

anyway thank you for coming to my dissertation, apparently ted talk, happy to answer q's or expound on anything that might be unclear :)

*(it's possible it's even more than 82 squirrels/day because I have no idea if my past-self took Bilbo and Gandalf into account so I might be off by 2 entire people's worth of food, and fuck if I am going to attempt to figure out how many calories a hobbit needs. I'm not checking, I don't think I care to discover whether we have our first entries to eriador's endangered species list)

also fucking 82 squirrels that will literally never not be funny I am wheezing and crying right now in real life, good god

Not one of my normal posts, but:

Who do you think would go hunting for the Company during their travel to Erebor?

Would it be Dwalin?

Bifur?

Would Kili and Fili go out to hunt for the food?

Or would it be Thorins purpose also, to provide for his companions as the leader of the adventure.

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

I’ve thought overnight about it, and:

I’ve got a lineup (from most often to least often)!!!

1. Gloin (we all know this man makes everything a completion, his game is the best, his wife is the best, his hair is the nicest copper color, his son is the best, we could go on and on) he prides himself on the kill he makes for the company.

2. Bifur I cannot use words to describe how vicious yet clean this dwarrow is with his kills. When Bifur kills an animal, it is left so perfectly, it looks like it’s alive, perfect for cooking and using every bit of the body they need

3. Suprisingly is Dwalin! We know our warrior is a bit rough around the edges all over, but he cares for his fellow kin in a subtle way, such as making sure they eat so they can “Put that food to good use and use your brain for once!”

4. Fili and Kili (cuz they a duo) Kili normally does the killing of Deer and such with his arrow, while Fili will take down physically with a dagger, Fili normally goes for the neck right away, Kili goes for the lungs of what he shoots at when hunting