by Peter Archer
Another alternative is to catch fish with your hands, but this is noisy, messy, requires a specialized upbringing, and generally is not advised.
Gut the fish and cook them either in a pan (if you have one) or threaded on a skewer. Season with herbs and potatoes, which you may find growing in the Wild or in someone’s garden.
Knot Tying
Ropes and their use are basic to survival in the Wild. You may find it necessary to climb up or down a mountainside, secure a boat, or simply use a bit of rope to tie items onto your pack. In any case, you’ll need a basic knowledge of knot craft. Practice tying the following kinds of knots:
HITCH. Used to fasten a rope to a post or a pinnacle of rock. It can either be fixed or sliding (if you want the knot to tighten when you pull on the rope).
LOOP. Holds tightly around any object. Excellent for tying up packs so they don’t come apart while you’re running away from goblins, wargs, or balrogs.
BENDS. These knots fasten two ropes together—helpful when you have several short ropes and need to climb down a particularly steep and high cliff face.
The best kinds of ropes are made by the elves; those of Lothlórien are particularly skilled in this art. Further, elven ropes have a tendency to come when you call, a useful quality if you don’t want to leave a rope as a sure sign to pursuers that this is the way their prey came. Fifty ells of rope is a good length for the adventurer to carry; it should answer for most emergencies.
Swimming and Boating
Hobbits are sadly deficient in these skills (except for those who live near the banks of the Brandywine River). But swimming and boating are likely to come in handy if you’re exploring a world penetrated by rivers, lakes, and inland seas. Traveling by boat is faster, safer, and more comfortable than walking or even riding, but if your boat overturns in rapids (or because, in a moment of panic, you grab for the edge of the boat and tip it over), you must know how to at least keep your head above water until a more skillful swimmer can reach you and propel you to shore. Above all, when in water, don’t panic. Waving and shouting will only make you sink faster and perhaps attract unwelcome attention from the enemy.
Weapons and Their Uses
Any discussion of surviving in the Wild would be incomplete with out a short lesson on how to use various weapons available to the adventurer. The average traveler is probably carrying a sword and possibly a bow, but these are not the only options. Here are some of the weapons available to you, together with comments on their usage.
Swords
This is the weapon de rigueur of anyone setting out for the Lands Beyond. Swords come in different lengths and weights, and the trick is to find one that you’re comfortable wielding that also does some significant damage to anything it hits. A basic rule of thumb is that your sword should not be more than half your height. You should swing it easily with one hand, although two will put more force into the blow. Remember that sword fighting isn’t a matter of wild slashing. The clever fighter uses the first moments of a battle to gauge his enemy’s weaknesses and look for where blows will be successful. Parry, thrust, parry, thrust… that’s the rhythm to establish. Keep your sword sharp at all times, and remember to clean it thoroughly after you’ve killed someone. In the heat of battle, with multiple enemies, the cleaning will have to wait.
Hobbits often use daggers as swords, given their lack of height. That’s fine, keeping in mind of course that a dagger or short sword used by a hobbit will do proportionally less damage to an opponent than a sword wielded by a full-sized human.
Shield
In addition to blocking your enemies’ blows, you can use your shield itself as a weapon, thrusting it forward and knocking your opponent off balance. As with the sword, a shield should be comfortable to carry. Some come with a spike (or boss) in the middle, also useful as an offensive weapon. Shields are also helpful for sleighing down snowy slopes or skidding down a flight of stairs while firing arrows at the enemy.
Bow and Arrow
This is an excellent weapon for those venturing into the unknown. Its light, portable arrows are retrievable (at least in most circumstances; if they hit an oliphaunt, it’s probably a good idea to let them go), and it kills almost silently. It requires a good deal of practice, but once mastered, it’s essential to the equipment of any adventurer. Practice firing rapidly and smoothly, and try to retrieve as many arrows as you can; they’re expensive and time-consuming to make, and in all probability, you won’t replenish your store until you touch base with civilization again.
Axe
These are the preferred weapons of dwarves, although dwarves are also known to carry swords (Thorin Oakenshield, for instance, wielded the sword Orcrist, and upon his death in the Battle of Five Armies, it was placed on his tomb under the Lonely Mountain). The skilled dwarf can slice a goblin’s head off with a stroke of an axe and decapitate another with the backswing. Since dwarves are short, their strokes are likely to disembowel a taller opponent (a troll, for instance) or take out a pair of kneecaps.
Crossbow
These are handy during sieges but less useful as portable weapons. For one thing, they’re laborious to load and crank to firing position. Although a crossbow bolt is potentially more dangerous than an arrow (it can, for instance, penetrate most armor, except mithril), its effectiveness is mainly in massed fire from ramparts against the serried ranks of the enemy. Still, some adventurers take them on long journeys.
Stones
These are plentiful, handy, and deadly against spiders, though not much else. Still, a well-thrown stone can knock down even an armored knight, although he’ll probably be back on his feet in a few minutes with a headache and a permanent grudge against whoever was unsporting enough to pitch a rock at him. On the whole, stones are best confined to opponents who are the size of giant spiders or smaller. Hobbits are adept at this sort of weapon, having practiced at the dartboard of their local pub.
Guides to the Lands of the Wild
It’s called the Wild for a reason: You won’t find many guides to it, and those that exist are often out of date and unreliable. Still, if you’re bound and determined to be better prepared before setting out, there are a couple of possible aids that will minimize the chance of you becoming completely lost and spending weeks traveling in circles.
Maps
The elves are big on maps, and many of the best maps of Middle-earth are made by elves. Being elves, they delight in offering cryptic, hard-to-understand instructions along the lines of “Here be ye great dangers! Mortals beware!” They also like to use such things as moon letters, which is secret writing that only appears on the map when the full moon is shining behind it (at which point it’s probably far too late to do the owner of the map any good at all).
Dwarves also make maps, which are a good deal more practical than those made by elves. Dwarvish maps tend to show mines, secret doors to mines, important chambers in mines, and the location of taverns, based on the excellence of the ale served.
Hobbit maps are a bit like hobbits themselves: They wander around a lot and often don’t go anywhere in particular, but they enjoy themselves while they’re getting there.
Rangers
Rangers are useful guides for explaining the perils and possibilities of the road ahead. That’s because, being Rangers, they, well, range. That is, they spend most of their time on the road, exploring, so they’re more likely to have an accurate idea of what’s out there than most maps. The downside is that Rangers are:
Taciturn
Gloomy
Cranky
Disinclined to talk to anyone they deem frivolous—or, at any rate, less serious about the state of the world than they are, which is pretty much everyone
Old Men Who Sit By the Tavern Fire, Muttering to Themselves
Such men can be persuaded to speak after you’ve bought them three or four pints of their favorite ale. Keeping in mind what it takes to gain information from them, you should have an idea of how reliable that infor
mation is likely to be.
Innkeepers
Practically useless as sources of information, innkeepers hear a lot of gossip from travelers, but since they’re constantly rushing about carrying mugs of ale and wine, they only hear half of what’s being said and remember only a quarter of that. Thus they constantly get things mixed up and spew out the results as a kind of stew of misinformation. As a general rule, if a landlord tells you to do something while on the road, play it safe and do the opposite.
Expeditions and Adventures
Warriors are busy fighting one another in distant
lands, and in this neighborhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields
as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary).”
—Gandalf in JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit
When Bilbo ran down the lane toward the Green Dragon, without his pocket handkerchief or his pipe and pipeweed, he was taking a step into a much larger world than he’d ever imagined existed. It wasn’t just a change in the physical scenery that mattered. It was a change in his mental scenery as well. He admitted that as the adventure (or Adventure, as he tended to think of it) went on, he found himself assuming a role that he never would have imagined possible when the uninvited dwarves first gathered in his parlor at Bag End.
In the battle with the spiders of Mirkwood, he found himself, involuntarily, the leader of the dwarves, ready, as he himself said, to “do the stinging.” It was he who rescued the hapless dwarves from the wiles of the spiders; it was he who found an escape from the dungeons of the Wood-Elves; it was he, at last, who discovered the “back door” into the Lonely Mountain and the path to the treasure hoard of Smaug the dragon.
Even when he and the dwarves first arrived at the Lonely Mountain and were sitting outside the “back door” waiting for something to happen, Bilbo was a far different hobbit than the funny little fellow “bobbing on the door mat,” who had run out of Bag End without a pocket handkerchief. Gazing over the deserted town of Esgaroth, he dangled his feet and stared into the distance beyond the wood and mountains, wondering about the distant lands just over the horizon and what adventures they held.
Frodo and his friends had far more of those adventures than they bargained for, and for Frodo at least, it was a great relief to return to his old familiar haunts in the Shire—even though they were altered and he himself would spend only a few years there before taking sail from the Gray Havens for the Undying West.
Many of us are like that—we don’t expect adventures, and we resist them when they knock at our doors. But after all, we need them to spur us into the lands beyond our Shires, lands holding the promise of new experiences and new wonders to behold.
For some hobbits—Bilbo and those brave adventurers who come after him—the lands beyond the fields they know are a constant temptation.
Mode of Travel
For a hobbit, the preferred means of travel is his own woolly feet. Although Bilbo and the dwarves occasionally travel by pony, they walk a good part of the way to the Lonely Mountain. Of course, eagles also carry them some of the way.
Travel Maintenance
Ponies are all well and good when you can get them, and Bilbo and the dwarves begin their journey on a nice group of young horses that last as far as Rivendell. On the other hand, there’s the matter of stabling them, grazing them, and (in the interests of stealth) picking up after them. Perhaps walking isn’t so bad after all. Walkers should be sure to equip themselves with sturdy packs and stout staves, helpful for picking one’s way amid ruts and boulders in the road as well as for fighting off the odd goblin attack.
Walking the Paths of the Wild
One’s own feet are the most reliable means of transportation, but that isn’t to say that they’re the most convenient. After all, walking is slow, treacherous, and subject to weather and occasional attacks by midges, spiders (big and small), and Dark Riders. Still, on foot, you can expect to go about two or three miles per hour, which for a full day of walking will take you fifteen or twenty miles closer to your destination. And, among other things, it will improve your physique. Frodo is twice the hobbit he was when he and his friends finally arrive at Rivendell, ready to start the next, and longer, stage of his quest.
Travel by Ent
Pippin and Merry are the only two hobbits to travel via Ent—an unusual but highly efficient mode of transportation. Pippin goes so far as to try to count Ent strides (getting lost at about three thousand). Assuming most Ents are about as tall as Treebeard (fourteen feet high) and that the average Ent stride is about four and a half feet, three-thousand Ent strides would run to only about two and a half miles. In reality, Ents probably walk much further than that. We can reasonably assume that Ents travel at about twelve or thirteen miles per hour and are easily able to walk a hundred miles in a day. For purposes of travel in a place the size of Middle-earth, that’s a good pace.
Travel by Boat
Keep in mind, of course, that hobbits generally dislike water. Hobbits, as we learn early on, come in three varieties: Stoors, Fallohides, and Harfoots. Of these, only Stoors (from whom were descended most of the Brandybucks and hobbits of Buckland) had any interest in, or skill with, boats. Hobbits in general distrust boats as nasty, tricky things, as likely to dump you into the water and drown you as not. However, when push comes to shove, a hobbit will travel by water, although he won’t be happy about it. Sam Gamgee, about as typical a hobbit as you’ll find outside the Shire, complains constantly when traveling by boat down the Anduin River, and the others of the Fellowship learn quickly that he’s not to be trusted with a paddle, even in calm waters. So travel by boat is an option, but only in the most desperate of circumstances.
Warg in Waiting
Those of the goblin (or orc) persuasion may want to consider riding wargs. The wild wolves of Middle-earth have the minor drawback of occasionally eating their passengers (and anything else that gets in their way), but surely that’s a minor inconvenience compared to the security of riding your own private, living tank. Wargs have a wide range and are quite capable of devouring the irritating dwarf, elf, or hobbit that gets in your way. (Special note: Beware of wizards wielding staffs!) [Extra-special note: Beware of elves wielding bows!)
Fly the Friendly Skies
If neither pony nor foot nor boat nor Ent will serve, consider asking an eagle for a lift. The advantage: a bird’s-eye view of the landscape of Middle-earth. The disadvantage? Well, slipping off midflight, for one thing. For another, there’s always the danger that the eagle will mistake you for a morsel intended for one of its offspring. But that’s a small price to pay for a quick flight. Eagles are discerning birds with a general allegiance to the right side in a fight, but it’s all too possible for an eagle, on an early morning reconnaissance flight, to mistake a hobbit for a tasty rabbit. The general lesson: Eagles are useful but potentially dangerous allies.
Appropriate Clothing
If you’re going to go off on a quest, for goodness sake dress the part! For example, when traveling for a long journey in varying weather, something simple in a dark green hood and cloak is indicated. If one is cautiously stealing into the heart of a dragon’s lair, it’s better to wear something sturdier—mithril mail perhaps. Above all, wear boots. They’re a good indication of how long you’ve been traveling (Strider’s are caked with mud when Frodo first meets him), as well as your status as an adventurer.
Equipment
Questing is a dangerous business, and one should not undertake it lightly. The basic equipment one might take when setting off in search of a dragon-guarded treasure includes the following:
A sword
A coat of mail—preferably dragon-proof
A cloak
Rope, because you never know when it’ll come in handy; if you don’t have it, you’ll want it
Boots (unless you’re a hobbit, in which case, fur-shod feet wi
ll serve)
A magic ring that makes you invisible (optional but helpful)
Keep in mind that at least half, if not two-thirds, of your equipment will be lost along the way in misadventures, encounters with trolls, dragon attacks, and disastrous adventures involving goblins and wargs. So plan to take at least twice as much of anything you need, since someone else will wind up with half of it before your adventure’s over.
Things Not to Take With You
Lest you be tempted to over-equip yourself with items you really won’t need on an expedition in search of adventure, here are some things not to take with you:
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. It’s true that at the beginning of the adventure you might want to sing a long, epic song that explains to anyone who cares to listen how you came to be in the fix you’re in and why the treasure buried under the mountain is yours. But are you really going to need clarinets, bass viols, a drum, flutes, fiddles, and a harp for all that? And what are you going to do with all of these musical instruments when your party is attacked by goblins in the mountains? Better leave it all at home and practice your a capella singing.
