Denny’s to introduce Middle-Earth-inspired menu

You may never be able to try lembas — a fictional bread that Frodo subsisted on through part of his journey to Mordor in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy — but Denny’s thinks it might have the next best thing. The company is about to roll out a Middle-Earth-inspired menu as part of a tie-in with “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.”

…Menu items include 11 breakfast, lunch and dinner items such as “Hobbit Hole Breakfast,” “Frodo’s Pot Roast Skillet,” “Gandalf’s Gobble Melt” and the “Build Your Own Hobbit Slam,” which includes limited-time items such as “Shire Sausage.”[Source]

A menu that will increase your “Middle Girth.” Now as someone who has read Tolkien’s books multiple time, this menu will not entice me out of my Hobbit hole. Could they have come up with worst names? Where’s the Coney stew, the Ent-Draught, the Cram – Denny’s should at least have the Grand Cram? Now I can certainly understand the Hobbit tie-in with their propensity for multiple breakfasts but I won’t be eating there for first or second breakfast.

Now as to not being able to ever try lemmas.

The lembas has a virtue without which they would long ago have lain down to die. It did not satisfy desire, and at times Sam’s mind was filled with the memories of food, and the longing for simple bread and meats. And yet this way bread of the Elves had a potency that increased as travellers relied on it alone and did not mingle it with other foods. It fed the will, and it gave strength to endure, and to master sinew and limb beyond the measure of mortal kind. — “Return of the King” J.R.R. Tolkien.

Many will certainly see an echo of the Eucharist here and Tolkien’s love of the Eucharist is well known.

Tolkien rejected attempts to find Catholic symbolism in his work because he detested “allegory in all its manifestations.” Indeed he frequently chided Lewis for trying to dress Christ up in the lion-suit of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. For Tolkien, to look for such correspondences is to miss the point of Middle-earth, which is meant to be a real place and not just some amalgam of historical and religious debris.

Still, Tolkien acknowledged that his Catholic sensibilities unconsciously inspired characters and objects in his imaginative world. In a 1952 letter to Rev. Robert Murray (grandson of the founder of the Oxford English Dictionary and a family friend), he readily admitted that the Virgin Mary forms the basis for all of his “small perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity.” It is not surprising, he admits, that the character of Galadriel — a created being endowed with radiant beauty, impeccable virtue, and powers of healing — resonates with the character of our Blessed Mother.

Nor could Tolkien deny that the Holy Eucharist appears in The Lord of the Rings as the waybread (lembas), given by the elves to the hobbits to eat on their journey. The lembas reinforces the hobbits’ wills and provides them with physical sustenance in the dark and barren lands on the way to Mount Doom. As the Church teaches, while the Eucharist still tastes and looks like bread and wine, our sensations shroud a deeper mystery: The Eucharist is truly Christ’s body and blood. So in The Lord of the Rings the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Eucharist appear shrouded in the mysterious elements of Middle-earth. The best way to understand this is to see such examples of Catholic symbolism as literary “accidents.” To leave them out would have diminished the story; they are parts of Tolkien’s effort to make his world complete, true for all times and places.

As an author, Tolkien believed that his stories did in a limited and literary way what a priest does at the consecration: They present us with Christ and the entire story of creation and redemption through common elements of the world — in this case Middle-earth — which is shot through with the Truth of all Truths. [Source]

Now as to Lord of the Rings related food humor, here is something I did some years ago.