ME plants - mostly flowers

[Evisse the Blue]

About the flowers that grow in ME:
Some of them are obviously found only there (in that category fall niphredil, mallorn, elanor, evermind, lissuin, mallos - if anybody would like to add to this list any I've omitted they're most welcome!).
As for the others, my speculation is: either they're the same as on this earth, or they are so similar to ours that they can be given an equivalent in English without being very far from the truth. After all Tokien gave the hobbit lasses common flower names. So can we say that ME had the same bontany as out earth?

[ August 15, 2003: Message edited by: Evisse the Blue ]

[Luthien_ Tinuviel]

Another one to add to your list would be athelas. And yes, I would agree that Middle-Earth had roughly the same botany as our own Earth. There are references to carrots, potatoes, turnips, fern, bay-leaves, thyme and sage, to name but a few (all of these are from Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit, page 641 in the one-volume Houghton-Mifflin edition). So I would assume that most, if not all, of the plants that are common to us today were found in ME as well.

[Evisse the Blue]

Thanks for the reply, Luthien! Yes, how could I forget athelas? Was athelas a plant with flowers, though? As far as I can remember only the leaves were being used.

[Lord of Angmar]

Also, in Concering Pipeweed, part of the prologue to the Lord of the Rings, it is mentioned that the pipe weed that hobbits smoke is "a variety probably of Nicotania," (pg. 9, Houghton Mifflin), meaning that it is probably a strain of or similar to modern-day tobacco. Indeed, Middle Earth's botany seems to resemble our own earth's quite closely.

[Orogaerion]

There is a reasonable explaination for this.
If you read the Lost Tales 2 i think it states that the world as we know it is the same as Arda and therefore it is normal to believe that most of the botany har remained.
although some must have been lost i.e mallorn and athelas.

[Sharkû]

Don't forget Aiglos, Seregon, and the fabled Amon Rûdh roots.

Anyway, it is a safe guess that the botany of Middle-earth is basically the same as ours - cf. Letters for the canonical statement that Arda is our world. One or another plant becoming rare or lost over the imagined course of some 7,000 years seems only probable.

[Birdland]

About the flowers that grow in ME:
Some of them are obviously found only there (in that category fall niphredil, mallorn, elanor, evermind, lissuin, mallos...

As the resident expert, Treebeard, might say: "Let's not be hasty" concerning 7th Age equivalents to the above flowers.

The earth has such a vast variety of flora that it is possible that the Good Professor may have had a particular flowr, or type of flower, in mind when he described some of the Elven blooms. Your topic has stirred my curiosity. I'll have to do some research.

Here's another connection The name of Eärendil's ship was Vingilot, this translates as "foam flower", a plant I have in my own garden, and which is also popular in English gardens.

[Noxomanus]

There is a flaw regarding plants as ME is placed in Europe yet there is tobacco and potato wich didn't reach Europe until the 17th century.

[Gwaihir the Windlord]

ME is not just Europe, but at least the entirety of the Old World as we know it. Possibly the Americas were part of ME as well, joined to the East of the continent.

If the Eastern Lands were in fact a seperate landmass to Middle-Earth, then potato and tobacco would quite possibly have been brought to ME by Numenorean mariners in the early Third Age, adopted and perfected by Hobbits before being lost in the dark ages of after years.

If this sounds too unlikely, then perhaps these plants were in fact native to Middle-Earth in the first place. Obviously they would have had to have been either lost through some evil or abandoned. Hmmm.... anyway, I personally will think of this minor issue only vaguely in the latter terms, as it really isn't that important [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img].

[Evisse the Blue]

The earth has such a vast variety of flora that it is possible that the Good Professor may have had a particular flowr, or type of flower, in mind when he described some of the Elven blooms

You're right, I browsed through the ending notes in UT and found that aeglos and seregin (thanks,Sharkû for those) are like 'furze' respectively stonecrop. But they say furze has yellow flowers while aeglos has white ones. By the way, have you noticed that the majority of Tolkien's flowers are white? The rest are standard colours (i.e. red, yellow), not sophisticated but simple and beautiful. No genetic tampering with them, I suppose [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]
Birdland, that's a wonderful discovery - I had no idea Earendil's ship was named after a real flower I assumed it was just a figure of speech, a Beowulf style metaphor.
You probably all wonder though: why the topic? [img]smilies/rolleyes.gif[/img] Am I right, Gwaihir? [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

[Noxomanus]

[/QUOTE]I personally will think of this minor issue only vaguely in the latter terms, as it really isn't that important[/QUOTE]

Not very important??It's as wrong as placing kangaroos in North America and grizzly bears in Australia!It completely upsets the rules of what should be where.You might not have a need for biogeographic correctness but it's completely wrong in my eyes and a major flaw in Tolkiens work.So it IS important.

[Evisse the Blue]

I think that what Gwaihir was saying is that this is a minor issue in light of other events from the books not generally.

[Gwaihir the Windlord]

[img]smilies/smile.gif[/img] Since ME is in fact one large landmass, and not seperate continents -- for instance, North America and Australia, divided by thousands of miles of ocean (not to mention countless aons of time) -- this issue does not seem all that much of a problematic one.

Actually, Nevisse, I never think like that. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] It's all important, but for reasons of the united geography of ME, and coherence in the books in terms of societies, this particular problem can be largely waived to my mind.

[Noxomanus]

Nevertheless, I will have a need of biogeographic correctness.