Middle Earth Ranger Forum

So I'm churning some butter for the upcoming museum school fair, and I was thinking about the status of dairy products as a staple food in the Middle Ages. In early medieval Ireland, at least, dairy was such a staple that every peasant could expect to at least be given some salted butter when foodstuffs were being doled out by their lords. In fact, cattle themselves were such a staple of life and wealth that, if you could afford it, using a stampeding herd of cattle could be a genuine strategy on the early medieval and ancient Irish battlefield. So it got me thinking: how common would cattle and dairy products be in Middle Earth? Do we have anything from Tolkien saying what sorts of livestock would be more common in Eriador, Rhovanion, or Gondor? I mean, obviously the Rohirrim have their horses, but they're also a settled culture, not a nomadic culture like the Mongols or the Scythians, who would have eaten horse meat and drank mare's milk, either by necessity or by cultural choice. I imagine the ease with which one can procure dairy products with little more than access to cattle and simple tools would make it a pretty common food in Middle Earth, but what do you guys think?

If I remember properly, sheep are mentioned as one of the trolls meals in The Hobbit, as well as cheese being mentioned as a food the hobbits eat. I feel that sheep / goat milk would be used more in eriabor.
Not sure if anyone else has a memory of cattle being mentioned, but I can’t see them not existing

That's a fair point--especially in more thoroughly-settled places like Gondor, or even the Breelands. I imagine Hobbits would have a better time of it using goats for dairy products, seeing as goats are a good deal smaller than cows, so that feels more likely as far as I'm concerned. I'm almost certain I recollect butter being mentioned somewhere in either The Hobbit or LotR, maybe at the Pony in Bree. But, I could well just be misremembering. There's usually a lot of scattered things going on in my head as a rule, and it's a bit like a lumber room--thing wanted always buried.

Bilbo describes himself as "stretched, like a pat of butter spread over too much bread".

Pippin (I think) gets given a small loaf and "an inadequate pat of butter" as breakfast during one of the seiges ( Minas Tirith, if Pippin ,,,, otherwise it would be Merry at Helm's Deep)

A quick reply which I may flesh out later.

This ties in loosely with something I've been looking at lately which is the prevalence of winding horns in the Lord of the Rings.

Obviously such horns can come from either sheep, goat or cow. They can be made entirely from metal but organic would likely be the overwhelming majority in use. Surprisingly the section of the book with the most mentions of horn blowing is the scouring of the shire where it seems everyone is having a toot!

While cows would have been large for hobbits to handle there is no doubt that they would have been of a smaller and more docile breed than our current herds which have been selectively bred over the years and are now much bigger than those of even a few hundred years ago.
There are at least two occasions the hobbits describe something as cow like as well as the man in the moon song which Frodo sings in Bree, it features a cow and doesn't generate questions so it seems that at least in the Shire and the Breelands cows were known.

As to Rohan, Eomer mentions herds and herdsfolk being withdrawn from the Wold. Given the Professors attention to detail I imagine if he meant them to be sheep then they would have been called flocks and shepherds. There is also line in the appendices which speaks of the instability of Rohan after the death of king Helm that specifically mentions cattle.

The Rohirrim were grievously reduced by war and dearth and loss of cattle and horses; and it was well that no great danger threatened them again for many years, for it was not until the time of King Folcwine that they recovered their former strength.

Gondor? I think it's safe to say that if their closest allies had great herds of cattle then they did too.

Dexters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQJvHX-tIPo

All very good points! Thanks, guys!

This is from Udwin, who is having trouble with his account right now:

For a complete list of all the foods Tolkien mentions in late Third Age materials, check out Edge of the Wild for Autumn 2019 (Vol4:I2) (TLDR: we have plenty of references to butter and cheese throughout Middle-earth).

-Cattle are mentioned specifically kept by Beorn, and the men of Lake-town in TH.
-Cattle mentioned figuratively by hobbits, and Legolas ("driven like cattle")
-After the war involving Helm Hammerhand, the Rohirrim "were grievously reduced by war and dearth and loss of cattle and horses", so their 'herds and studs' were likely both bovine and equine.
-The folk of Hador had horses, sheep, goats and donkeys on their journey to Beleriand, and Hurin's homelands (Dor-Lomin, I assume) had cattle apparently.
-The wild kine (I'm picturing something aurochs-like) in the plains between Mirkwood and Gondor are likely the source of later domesticates.