One does not simply walk into Santiago

While I walk the Camino de Santiago the phrase, ‘Not all who wander are lost,’ often comes to my mind and when I was watching Fellowship of the Rings the other day I began to wonder just how far Frodo and Sam actually did walk in the Lord of the Rings to get to Mordor and how this compares to walking the Camino.

The distance from Hobbiton to Mount Doom is 1779miles or, to put it in terms that Camino walkers understand more, 2863km. This can be broken down to:

• Bag End to Rivendell = 458 miles or 737km
• Rivendell to Lothlorien = 462 miles or 743.5km
• Lothlorien to Rauros = 389 miles or 626km
• Rauros to Mount Doom = 470 miles or 756.39km
  Of this though the journey from Lothlorien to Rauros was mainly by boat and so can perhaps be discounted from walking distance making a grand total of 1396 miles or 2246 kilometres.
  
  
  To put this in some perspective the distance from St Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago is about 780km and the distance from Lisbon to Santiago is about 610km while if you were to walk from Paris to Santiago you would be covering about 2000km and so after that walk would need to take a taxi back to Rabanal del Camino and walk again to Santiago from there to cover the same distance that the two Hobbits did.
  Let’s consider a few other factors to the Hobbits’ walk: their size and weight carried and the terrain covered.
  
  
  Hobbits are shorter than humans – between 2-4 feet (0.61-1.22m) with the average being 1.07m (although Frodo was near to 4 feet). This then would perhaps have made them slower than humans (I am though only a bit over 1.4m and not that much taller than a hobbit!) and in The Fellowship of the Rings we see that on their first day’s walk they covered about 18 miles (29km). Not bad going (most days I walk 20-25km although I have never been chased by any Ringwraiths as I walk)!
  Here we can also mention Hobbit feet: covered in curly hair and with leathery soles we can consider them better protected than most Pilgrims’ feet (who often get blisters while there is no evidence that Hobbits do so).
  Frodo carried little on the quest but Samwise carried a large backpack which had in it (from my memory and a little research on the internet):
  
  
  •  Pipe
  •  Cooking pot
  •  2 frying pans
  •  Ladle
  •  A waterskin
  •  Bedding roll
  •  Lembas bread – approximately 41 loaves/cakes
  •  Container of salt
  •  Gifts from Galadriel
    • Rope
    • Earth
    • Seed
  •  Sword and scabbard
    
    
    at the least. It’s hard to know the precise weights of these items of course although the cooking equipment would weigh more than our equivalents now – a modern frying pan on Amazon states its weight as about 1.5kg so that is easily about 5kg for the two pans and cooking pot. I don’t know about how bed rolls were made in Middle Earth but in Guides one consists of a ground sheet with the bedding and pillow inside folded neatly and tied with string (and then rolled down the campsite hill to see how well you have tied it all together!). We must assume that a bedding roll would be at the very least a blanket then although by Return of the King Sam is using only his cloak to sleep in. He would carry at least the 1kg of water that most pilgrims do and probably a couple of kilograms of food and so we can guess at a minimum pack weight of 8kg (about what I carry on Camino).
    
    
    The terrain covered includes a journey up much of one of the Misty Mountains before being turned back by snow and these are as high as 12,000 feet (3657.6m) while the mountains of Mordor are more than 3000 feet high with Mount Doom itself being approximately 4,500 feet which is 1371.6m. The pass over the Pyrenees on the Camino Frances is about 1,400m and the mountains at Leon and O Cebreiro are similar in height so climbing up the Pyrenees is similar to climbing Mount Doom (and if you go that way and are struggling remember that fact and cut yourself some slack).
    
    
    Terrain then is similar to the Camino but not as well developed – few roads were there to be traversed making the walk more difficult.
    
    
    The time taken to walk (and row) the distance from Bag End to Mordor was from September 23^rd 3018 TA to March 25^th 3019 and so roughly six months of travel but with a stay in Rivendell from October 20^th to December 25^th and another in Lothlorien at Caras Galadlon from January 17^th to February 16^th making 93 or 95 days travelling (depending on whether February that year was a leap year). This is broken down as:

• Bag End-Rivendell = 28 days
• Rivendell-Lothlorien = 26 days
• Lothlorien-Rauros = 10-11days
• Rauros-Mount = 30 days
  Walking the 780km from St Jean to Santiago takes about 30 days compared to 2246.6km in 93-5 days minus the days spent by boat on the Anduin, approximately 10 days. So 85 days to travel 2246.6km – that’s 26.4km per day – a comparable distance to my (usually fairly leisurely) 20-25km per day on Camino.
  So, how much of the quest have I walked? My seven Caminos so far are broken down as:

• St Jean-Logrono, Leon-Santiago: 480km
• Santiago-Finisterre, Sarria-Santiago: 201km
• Triacastella-Santiago (via Samos): 140km
• Astorga-Santiago: 266km
• Astorga-Santiago: 266km
• St Jean-Santiago: 780km
• Porto-Santiago: 240km
  
  
  this makes 2,373km so I am 126.4km past Mount Doom by now (although I haven't done the distance all in one go or carrying the weight of the One Ring)!
  
  
  “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” Boromir tells us but that is exactly what Frodo and Sam do in the Lord of the Rings trilogy although it can be argued that there is nothing all that simple about their walk just as there is nothing simple about hiking the Camino.
  
  
  [If you want to be entirely accurate about Sam and Frodo’s journey then you should take into account their journey home as well which is broken down as:

• Minas Tireth to Isengard = 535 miles
• Isengard to Rivendell = 693 miles
• Rivendell to Bag end = 397 miles
• Bag End to the Grey Havens = 467 miles
  
  
  However much of these journeys were done by pony and few Caminoers walk back to their starting point or count any journey thereafter to be a part of their Camino and so these journeys have not been included in this discussion.]