On the Coming of the Western Corn to Beleriand by Ermingarden  

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Fanwork Notes

Written for the Unquote challenge prompt "…Fingolfin unfurled his blue and silver banners, and threw corn, and flours sprang beneath his marching feet, and the ages of the stars were ended." All facts about the Western Corn are taken from "The Making of Lembas" in NoMe. 

Fanwork Information

Summary:

An excerpt from a Fourth Age Gondorian scholarly text addressing the cultivation of the corn of Valinor in Middle-earth.

Major Characters:

Major Relationships:

Genre: Ficlet, In-Universe Artifact

Challenges: Unquote

Rating: General

Warnings:

Chapters: 1 Word Count: 357
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On the Coming of the Western Corn to Beleriand

Read On the Coming of the Western Corn to Beleriand

The following passage is excerpted from On Lembas by Gelirin Lischiriel, published in Gondor in the 344th year of the Fourth Age, and translated here from Sindarin into English for the first time. 

The scholarly consensus is that the Western Corn - that is, the corn of Valinor, of which lembas is made - was brought to Beleriand not on the swan-ships but by the host of Fingolfin across the Helcaraxë. Pengolodh writes that "Fingolfin unfurled his blue and silver banners, and threw corn, and flours sprang beneath his marching feet" as he entered Mithrim. This is poetic language, but plainly what is meant is that Fingolfin's host sowed the seed-corn they had brought from Valinor immediately upon arriving in Mithrim, that the corn sprouted and grew swiftly, and was then milled into flour in large quantities. 

Morgoth sought to destroy the Western Corn, whose virtues he well knew, by sending clouds of smoke and poisonous vapors over the fields of Hithlum - vapors which were both destructive in themselves and blocked the light of the Sun. Yet the Western Corn thrived in Mithrim nonetheless. Theologians have cited the fact that the seed corn brought from Valinor not only survived the crossing of the Helcaraxë, but germinated in Beleriand with its virtues intact in spite of the vapors of Morgoth, as a sign of the Valar's continued attention to the Noldor, alongside the contemporaneous and more obvious intervention of Manwë in Fingon's rescue of Maedhros.

Galadriel appears to have played a central role in the cultivation of the Western Corn in Beleriand, both among the Noldor and among the Doriathrim. It seems to have been Galadriel who brought the Western Corn to Doriath, where it was used in making the lembas of Melian. And Galadriel cultivated the Western Corn in her own realm in latter days: It was in Lórien that the Western Corn is known to have survived longest in Middle-earth, up to the end of the Third Age and beyond. Indeed, Galadriel and her granddaughter Arwen are the last known to have practiced the art of making lembas on this side of the Sea.

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