food

Frying-pan

lfsaldenbirch , , , ,

Is this our only food-word in a chapter title?  It is attested in OED.

  • CHAPTER VI – OUT OF THE FRYING-PAN INTO THE FIRE
  • 06.051 out of the frying-pan into the fire’

[06.051]  ‘What shall we do,  what shall we do!’ he cried.  ‘Escaping goblins to be caught by wolves!’ he said,  and it became a proverb, though we now say ‘out of the frying-pan into the fire’ …

 

“ˈfrying-ˌpan, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/75171. Accessed 13 September 2017.

Food-supplies

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  • 01.122 especially in food-supplies,

I am struck by this passage.  Thorin explains that the dwarves of the mountain didn’t bother to grow or hunt food for themselves, since they could very easily be paid in food for their amazing work.  That seems a recipe for disaster.  If this is true, then the drive to work things out peacefully with the people of Dale would be foundational to any child of any leading house of that community.  Do we take the dwarves as a sub-community of the larger Long Lake region, as we would a monastery providing medicine and prayer to a medieval village upon whose farming they depend?  If you don’t have food, about two days of siege would lose you all your gold.  Can one of our Word Fans point us to scholarly work or speculative fiction on the subject?

This word is attested in OED both with and without hyphens.

“food, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/72632. Accessed 13 September 2017.

Food-bags

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Concerning rain as they traveled.

  • 02.029 and into the food-bags,” thought Bilbo.

Considering food preservation techniques in such an age, I would have been sad to even lose cram to rain damage.  If only salted things were left after the weather of Chapter 2, that certainly would have contributed to my enthusiasm in finding Rivendell in the next chapter!

“Food-bag” is not attested in OED.

Egg-shaped

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  • 08.092 and it did not take him long to find a nice smooth egg-shaped one

Ah, the right tool for the job.  Nothing like it.

This word is, of course, attested in OED. I rather love one of the examples:

1854   J. H. Stocqueler Hand-bk. Brit. India (ed. 3) 370   Ceylon is egg-shaped.

“egg, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/59878. Accessed 13 September 2017.

 

Egg-question

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  • 05.047 he was so flustered by the egg-question.
  • 05.073 than when Bilbo had asked him the egg-question.

This is one of the few times that hyphenating words to create a new one distracts me.  Were there truly so many questions about eggs that Bilbo’s language had a word for that?  Or is it a clue to the nature of the language itself – able to adapt to new concepts by agglutinating when appropriate?

This word does not appear in OED. Wouldn’t that have been surprising?

Drinking-horn

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Hyphenated in the OED entry.

  • 13.046 and broken drinking-horns

I am struck that they are broken drinking horns – it helps me remember that the dragon isn’t a glorious creature who looks splendid in among the treasure, but that Tolkien’s dragons in Middle-earth are malicious and covetous.

[01.123]  Dragons… hardly know a good bit of work from a bad,

“drinking, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2017. Web. 7 September 2017