How did Sauron feed the armies of Mordor?

Question

According to TolkienGateway.net, Mordor's troops consisted of some 18,000 Easterlings and Haradrim, several Haradrim war Oliphaunts, and tens of thousands of Orcs just for the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Estimates for the number of orcs are over 50,000, with the full army size at 75,000.

Sauron had over 60,000 orcs, trolls, beasts, and Easterlings in reserve back in Mordor. These forces were unleashed through the Black Gate at the Battle of the Morannon.

During the Battle of Pelennor Fields, Sauron also sent many Easterlings to fight in the Battle of Dale.

Sauron also lost several thousand orcs in the Fall of Dol Goldur, a few hundred in the Siege of Gondor, and a few hundred in the Attack on Osgiliath.

Adding those up, Sauron likely had at least 140,000 soldiers under his command.

How did Sauron feed an army that size?

The land in the western parts of Mordor was largely infertile, producing only sparse brambles. The southern part of Mordor, Nurn, was slighly more fertile, and moist enough to carry the inland sea of Núrnen. Nurn was made somewhat fertile because the ash blown from Mount Doom left its soil nutrient rich, thus allowing dry-land farming. And according to TolkienGateway.net, the inland sea of Núrn was salty, not freshwater.

He's not growing crops and planting gardens. Nor is there enough plant life in Mordor for grazing animals like sheep or goats. Nor was the water fit for irrigating crops.

We know orcs eat (and hate) maggoty bread, but prefer fresh meat:

So what did they eat?

As usual, I prefer answers with specific quotes from the books, but I will accept quotes from the movies. My policy is that "Quotes get Votes", meaning if you provide citations and exact quotes for your answers instead of unsupported speculation, I am more likely to vote for your answer.

By decapitating random orcs and saying Looks like Meat's back on the menu boys :P — Aegon, Feb 21 '17 at 06:37
@Aegon Ah, but if orcs slayed their fellow soldiers for every meal, the army would soon dwindle. If a dead orc can feed 20 orcs for a day, then every day, Sauron's army gets 5% smaller. All Gondor would have to do is wait until Sauron's army was small enough to kill on a Sunday picnic. — RichS, Feb 21 '17 at 06:41
Maybe the orcs attacked villages just to snack on a few humans. — RichS, Feb 21 '17 at 07:05
@amaranth "He liquefied the dead and fed them intravenously to the living." Mmm... Yummy orc flesh milkshake! — RichS, Feb 21 '17 at 07:24
I'm guessing they were hungry a lot and this is why they were so angry and stressed out. A good superfood meal and a stress ball would have helped a lot of them become more mindful and productive members of society... ;-) — Toby, Feb 21 '17 at 10:05
The ring of power was lost for 2640 years. Sauron had a lot of time on his hands and he knew he'd eventually need to feed a sizeable army, so he made a lot of frozen dishes using his favorite recipes. Of course he had Mount Doom at his disposal, so thawing fifty thousand casseroles at dinner time was never a problem. — user100464, Feb 21 '17 at 15:36
You say you prefer book-based answers, but then include a quote from the films which appears nowhere in the books. Might be worth removing the gif and the "prefer fresh meat" claim, so as to reduce confusion? — Rand al'Thor, Feb 21 '17 at 21:59
Few knew of Sauron's other visage, as a demi-god of agriculture. — Mark Rogers, Feb 21 '17 at 22:28
I think the real question is how do orc Menus look like? Also, what is the etiquette? "Oh thanks for the menus, Gladys, what's good today?" — Keine, Feb 22 '17 at 10:42
Related question, but not duplicate: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/153470/do-orcs-drink-water — RichS, Feb 27 '17 at 15:52

score 166 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 21 '17 at 07:09

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You're not the first to have asked this question; in fact Sam pondered the very same thing on the way to Mount Doom (RotK Book VI Chapter 2: The Land of Shadow):

'I don't like the look of things at all,' said Sam. 'Pretty hopeless, I call it – saving that where there's such a lot of folk there must be wells or water, not to mention food. And these are Men not Orcs, or my eyes are all wrong.'

To which the author notes:

Neither he nor Frodo knew anything of the great slave-worked fields away south in this wide realm, beyond the fumes of the Mountain by the dark sad waters of Lake Nurnen; nor of the great roads that ran away east and south to tributary lands, from which the soldiers of the Tower brought long waggon-trains of goods and booty and fresh slaves.

So it was a combination of:

Food grown in the fertile lands by the Sea of Nurn, and,
Imported tribute from other lands.

Tolkien Gateway's statement that the Sea of Nurn was salt water appears to be a fabrication with no authorial warrant whatsoever. Read the books instead.

answered Feb 21 '17 at 07:09

Victim of Circumstance

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Maps in the books show the Sea of Nurn as having rivers flowing into it, but no outflow. Such seas are, in reality, salty. So it's a reasonable assumption by Tolkien Gateway, rather than a complete fabrication. – armb Feb 21 '17 at 17:16
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@armb: Not necessarily. For instance Pyramid & Walker Lakes, in Nevada's Great Basin, are only slightly salty. The reason is that they had outflows in wetter times (over 10,000 years ago), and it takes a really long time to accumulate significant amounts of salt. – jamesqf Feb 21 '17 at 19:38
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@jamesqf True. It is described as "bitter" in The Two Towers though. – armb Feb 21 '17 at 22:44
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@ armb - no visible, above ground outflow. There are real lakes, such as Lake Naivasha, that has no visible outflows, but is not salty. It is assued to have an underground outflow, as discussed at https://books.google.ca/books?id=3Q1pfcjMae8C&pg=PA1&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false – Scott Feb 21 '17 at 22:47
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@armb: Yes, 'bitter', not 'salty'. Could easily have been a somewhat alkaline lake, or have carbonate minerals forming tufa deposits, like Pyramid. – jamesqf Feb 22 '17 at 01:02
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@jamesqf I have been to Pyramid Lake in Nevada. It's not in a place I would call a "breadbasket". – RichS Feb 22 '17 at 05:11
A sea is, by definition, salty. – Feb 22 '17 at 15:29
@Terriblefan It's called "Lake Nurnen" in the quote, not "Sea". So at the very least, they didn't care about our dictionaries all that much :) In any case, it doesn't matter - Nurn was watered by rainfall (in part from the lake), not the lake directly. – Luaan Feb 22 '17 at 15:44
@RichS: Used to be quite a productive fishery there. And if you go a little further, towards Fallon (where a lot of Pyramid's water is sent these days) you do find quite a bit of farmland. – jamesqf Feb 22 '17 at 18:44
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@Terriblefan: apart from the fact that place names often thumb their noses at dictionaries (for several reasons), definition 1d at your link is “_an inland body of water —used especially for names of such bodies _”, which does not require it to be salty. – PJTraill Feb 23 '17 at 22:44
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I think it is near useless to debate whether the Sea of Nurnen is supposed to be salty based on the fact that its name contains the word "sea". Even in real life, we are not consistent about that. The Sea of Galilee is a fresh water lake, and the Great Salt Lake is an inland salty sea. Best just to go with the author's original intent for whether Nurnen's water could support agriculture. – RichS Feb 24 '17 at 21:05

score 17 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 21 '17 at 14:14

In addition to the answer above, the only additional information I can add is some of Karyn Wynn Fonstad's maps from the Atlas of Middle Earth. These include climate maps showing the area around the Sea of Núrnen as being Semi-Arid and mostly plains and bottomlands.

The first image suggests that the land was Semi-Arid, and slightly further South, in Harad, the climate was more humid. The second image suggests that the area around the Sea of Núrnen, was surrounded by Plains and Bottomlands. Providing the ability for food to be grown in the surrounding area.

As an non-canonical aside, most of the plot of the game Shadow of Mordor occurs in Nurn

Adding additional information in addition :P – Penguin9 Feb 22 '17 at 09:08 — Penguin9, Feb 22 '17 at 09:08

score 6 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 21 '17 at 17:10

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Nurn was the name given to the southern regions of Mordor, more fertile than Gorgoroth in the north, in which the great inland Sea of Núrnen lay. The people who inhabited Nurn were Men and there may have been prisoners of war there as well. These people were enslaved by Sauron, working the soil around the sea of Nurn to feed Sauron's armies.

Further cited references Christopher Tolkien's Unfinished Tales and The Lord of the Rings: Readers Companion - Hammond and Scull (eds)

edited Feb 21 '17 at 17:10

Edlothiad

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answered Feb 21 '17 at 17:02

Don Colley

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This doesn't really add anything not already mentioned in http://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/153052/22259. – chepner Feb 21 '17 at 17:17

How did Sauron feed the armies of Mordor?

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