LOTR: There Are Things Far More Dangerous Than Orcs Or Dark Lords On The Hobbit's Quests

gamerant.com:

Across both the quest to reclaim Erebor in The Hobbit book, and the quest to destroy the ring of power in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the hobbits have to face many deadly enemies. From cruel and malicious goblins and orcs, to flying Fell-beasts and black horse in the night, to evil wizard powers, and worst of all dark lords who want to taint and dominate all of Middle Earth. But there are a few things along both journeys that are even more likely to kill the companions than even these awful enemies.

As any intrepid explorer of the human world will tell you, dehydration is one of the biggest threats to survival. There are times mentioned throughout each book when the characters seem in desperate need of food and water, and it looks as though they will surely perish if they don’t quickly gain access to these essential commodities.

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For example, in The Hobbit, when the band of dwarves are trudging through Mirkwood, and they come across a stream of blackened water. ‘They were thirsty, for they had none too much water, and in all this time they had seen neither spring nor stream.’ Luckily for them, Beorn, who lives on the edge of the cursed forest, had already warned them not to drink from any water source in Mirkwood, for there are poisons and dark enchantments that would have killed them far quicker than the enemy could have.

It was a good thing that they were warned in advance, ‘or they would have drunk from it, whatever its color, and filled some of their emptied skins at its bank.’ Frodo and Sam also suffer a similar fate during their travels across Mordor, with their lips becoming so parched that they struggle to even eat their remaining supply of lembas