As any intrepid explorer of the human world will tell you, dehydration is one of the biggest threats to survival. There are times mentioned throughout each book when the characters seem in desperate need of food and water, and it looks as though they will surely perish if they don’t quickly gain access to these essential commodities.
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For example, in The Hobbit, when the band of dwarves are trudging through Mirkwood, and they come across a stream of blackened water. ‘They were thirsty, for they had none too much water, and in all this time they had seen neither spring nor stream.’ Luckily for them, Beorn, who lives on the edge of the cursed forest, had already warned them not to drink from any water source in Mirkwood, for there are poisons and dark enchantments that would have killed them far quicker than the enemy could have.
It was a good thing that they were warned in advance, ‘or they would have drunk from it, whatever its color, and filled some of their emptied skins at its bank.’ Frodo and Sam also suffer a similar fate during their travels across Mordor, with their lips becoming so parched that they struggle to even eat their remaining supply of lembas bread before it runs out, because it becomes too chalky in their mouths without anything to wash it down.
Not only are the companions unbearably thirsty, they are also hungry, and food is scarce on the adventures that they take. The dwarves have been rationing the food before entering Mirkwood (and even that is tough on Bilbo, for hobbits eat a lot, of course) but when they eventually run out of food altogether, they are so hungry that they try to accost some elves in the woods and join in their feast. This is a terrible mistake because it gets them lost beyond belief and almost killed by the giant spiders who dwell in the forest, but at that point they have little choice, for ‘without that feast, we shan’t remain alive much longer anyway.’
Similar echoes of hopelessness and despair can be heard in Frodo and Sam’s tale, as there is nothing to hunt in the lands of Mordor, and they haven’t had a proper meal since being fed by Faramir and his Rangers in the caves of Ithilien. ‘Last time I looked I’d got about enough of that waybread, and of what Captain Faramir gave us, to keep me on my legs for a couple of weeks at a pinch. But if there’s a drop left in my bottle, there’s no more. That’s not going to be enough for two, nohow.’ They are very quickly running out of food and water too, and in serious danger of starving to death, and by the time they get to Mount Doom, Frodo “can’t recall the taste of food” or the fresh strawberries and cream that Sam conjures up a vision of so vividly from The Shire.
And if hunger and thirst weren’t bad enough, there’s another deadly killer around that is just as dangerous: hypothermia. The companions spend a lot of their time out in the open air, under all sorts of weather conditions, from poisonous mirk and cloud, to blistering sun, from freezing sheets of rain to deserted land so dry that it’s all but rubble. This sort of temperature adjustment would wreak havoc on anyone’s homeostasis, and is a genuine hazard, that is as perilous as being killed by the enemy.
Luckily for Sam and Frodo, and the other members of the fellowship, they have the woven cloaks given to them by the elves of Lothlorien, which help to combat this somewhat. But the hobbit in the quest for Erebor isn’t so fortunate. In fact, Bilbo comes very close to hypothermia when he and the dwarves rise out of the prison on the barrels. Poor Bilbo is nearly left behind, and only just manages to grab hold of a barrel at the last second, but subsequently, he is stuck submerged in the freezing river. ‘He managed to keep his head above the water, but he was shivering with the cold, and he wondered if he would die of it before the luck turned, and how much longer he could hang on.’
This simply highlights how truly dangerous their respective tasks were, and how close they were to dying in so many different ways. These characters are formidable against more than just battling warriors and knives in the dark, they also manage to survive mother nature, and make their ways back to The Shire, having come out the other side of some truly epic adventures, that many others wouldn’t have been able to endure for even a fraction of the time.
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