Simply Walking into Mordor: How Much Lembas Would the Fellowship Have Needed?
Keywords:
Book, Film, Biology, Metabolism, Tolkien, Middle EarthAbstract
The Fellowship of the Ring were supposed to travel from Imraldis to the forges of Mt. Doom in order to destroy the One Ring of Sauron. For an ideal journey with all 9 members of the fellowship, using the metabolic rates for each species from [2], the total calorific consumption of the 92-day journey was found to be 1,780,214.59 kcal. If the elves of Imraldis had provided the Fellowship with lembas, this would equate to them having to carry a total of 675 pieces, or 75 pieces each. For the different species, this equates to 304 for the hobbits, 214 for Gandalf, Aragorn and Boromir; 99 for Gimli and 60 for Legolas.
References
Tolkien, J.R.R. (2004) The Lord of the Rings 50th Anniversary Edition (Harper Collins)
Manoharan, K. & Rosetti, S. (2015) Modelling the BMR of Species in Middle Earth, Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics, 4.
Johansson, E. (2014) Time & Distance travelled in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, www.lotrproject.com/timedistance/ [Accessed 04/03/2015]
Transportation Research Board of the National Academies (2013) TCRP Report 95, Transit Cooperative Research Program, Chapter 16 (National Academy of Sciences), p.16-251 http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/tcrp_rpt_95c1.pdf [Accessed 04/03/2015]
Lutz, C.A., Mazur, E. & Litch, N. (2015) Nutrition and Diet Therapy (F.A. Davis Company), p.523
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