Thanks for citing the Letters number for the "viaticum" quote, something I should have provided myself. The other quotations, on the film treatment, are from Letter 210.
And thanks also for the reference to the essay on
lembas, which I pulled out and reread. It certainly seems from the essay that the grain came from
Valinor, and was considered "holy", to the extent that it was picked by hand, and stored only in baskets made from its own stalks, "and rot and mould and other evils of
Middle-earth did not assail it". The "sacred" nature of lembas is underscored by the fact that only the highest elf-lady "had the keeping and gift of the lembas", and the growing and preparation of it was restricted to her and her "maidens of
Yavanna", imagery which recalls the Vestal Virgins and similar orders. In any case, grain as a mystical foodstuff has played a part in real-world religious traditions through the
ages; it was central to the Eleusinian Mysteries, for example.
Whether miruvor had a similarly direct link with Valinor is a question; I suppose one could carry flowers to Middle Earth as well as grain. But of course, the move entails more than geography: to cite Frye's fictional modes again, it's also a move from the Mythical mode of the
First Age to the Romance mode of the Third, in which questions of what they were "really" made from can begin to arise. To follow the modes, I wonder how much of either would still be available in the High Mimetic world of the
Fourth Age, after the return of the King, when the
Elves were leaving. And in our Low Mimetic age of the "real" world, we're down to the recipes for mead drinks and
food concentrates that are "miruvor" and "lembas" only because we call them that.
One aspect of these substances worth noting is the aura of prohibition that surrounds them; the elves give them to mortals rarely and with reluctance. This is justified as benign in a note in the essay:
"For it is said that, if mortals eat often of this bread, they become weary of their mortality, desiring to abide with the Elves, and longing for the
fields of
Aman, to which they cannot come".
Still, the hint of "forbidden fruit" remains, the sense of foodstuffs reserved to the gods, which are dangerous for mortals to tamper with. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil in Eden comes immediately to mind, apparently sending the gods of the story into near-panic at the prospect of mortals next eating from the Tree of Life, and becoming immortal themselves, that they banished them, but there are many other examples -- for instance, the cattle of Helios, the "Oxen of the Sun", whose theft by Odysseus' crew brought their doom. As far as I recall, no one steals lembas or miruvor, but even the gift of them seems heavy with significance, and possibly doubt. It may be stretching a point to say "
Melian gave lembas to
Turin, and look what happened to him", but I wonder.
I'm getting far afield the original question, but it should be mentioned that, as so often in
Tolkien, lembas and miruvor have their demonic parody; in this case, orc-food and orc-draught, as seen in the "
Uruk-hai" chapter (where we also see the demonic counterpart to the
athelas of the
Kings in the "orc-ointment" smeared on
Merry's wound). The
hobbits partake of these, though wisely refraining from the "orc-meat", which brings another important piece of symbolic imagery into play: that of the sacramental meal, in which participants symbolically take the body, or "life" of the leader into their own. The demonic parody of this Eucharistic symbolism is cannibalism, explicit in say,
Shelob, and stated as a positive by several
orcs. "Demonic" miruvor doesn't go as far, but an undisplaced form of orc-draught would no doubt be human blood.
The other piece of demonic imagery associated with this is
sparagmos, "tearing-apart", the horrifying pulling apart of the hero as sacrifice. We see this in reality in the hurling of heads into
Minas Tirith;
Frodo at least loses his finger; but symbolically also: in
Shelob's Lair, in
Cirith Ungol, where he is "stripped" of everything, both symbolically and literally, and in a scene which brings into juxtaposition sacred and demonic imagery, at the very gates of
Mordor:
'Dwarf-coat, elf-cloak, blade of the down fallen West. . .'
'These we will take!'
These are not merely
objects, but are referred to repeatedly as "tokens" -- that is, as objects with symbolic meaning.
