Library: Herbs of the Narog

Here follows the description of a book which may be found in certain libraries. The author is given as “Mornariel of Nargothrond”. This text is dated from early in the First Age, but this edition was copied onto new parchment approximately 800 years ago, and is quite fragile. The handwriting is very neat. Copies of this text by itself can be found in Mithlond and Imladris. The crumbled remnants of the original text are in Mithlond. The foreword indicates that while this book is no longer of much use as a field-guide, as the lands which bore the Narog all now lie beneath the waves, many of the plants survive in some form East of Beleriand and the methods of extracting remedies from the plants remain viable. The early pages of the book map the river Narog throughout its course over the realm of Finrod Felagund, and patches near the banks shaded in different patterns indicate (with the help of various keys and annotations) which plants grow in each place. The majority of the book goes through the plants and herbs in alphabetical order, each one having considerable space dedicated to it. Meticulous illustrations of each plant – how it grows in the wild, the changes in appearance over the course of the seasons, and close diagrams of the different parts – are accompanied by descriptions of where it grows, how to take cuttings from it without greatly damaging the whole plant, the uses of it (medicinal, culinary, practical, and so on), and the methods for getting the best out of it (distillation, crushing, weaving, and so on). The final section of the book is a series of indexes, so that as well as using the map to search by location or the main text to search by name, the reader can also look up plants by their uses, seasonal availability, and appearances.