Quote:
- HoME XII, "Of Lembas" - fine handwritten manuscript; late 1950s, as you say. The grain is named as "corn", and described as having "great golden ears" and "white haulm", which seems to just mean the stalks (ie, to make hay/straw). It is noted as fairly hardy, but in a magical sort of way (can grow in anything short of frost, but not if the wind blows from Utumno).
Is it the "haulm" that identifies this as wheat? I don't think anything else there does, but grains are hardly my field!
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It also says that both were gathered by hand, and no metal tools were used in the process. You can't do this with maize, trust me; those stalks are brutally thick. And the "haulm" or leftover stalks is nowhere close to white, but a muddy yellowish brown, and useless for straw much less hay. Farmers plow it under.
As to "kind": Maddeningly vague. But it doesn't have to mean species; a Chihuahua is a different "kind" of dog from a Great Dane. Personally I would be very surprised that an Englishman of Tolkien's generation, who never traveled, would have even had a notion that Indian corn was a foodstuff, at least for civilized peoples: as far as he would have been concerned it was merely fodder, only eaten by animals, Red Indians, Americans and other foreign barbarians.
(Much more interesting would be to read T's account of how taters got to Middle-earth)