Day Seventeen: "Fly! Fly! The Enemy Is Upon Us!"

Peril catches up with Frodo and company at last, but not before they run into yet another friend. An elf named Glorfindel has been sent from Rivendell to look for them. He’s been tracking them for quite a while, and lets them know that Gandalf had not yet reached Rivendell when he left it nine days earlier. He also lends the exhausted Frodo his white horse, a steed who can outrun the horses of the Black Riders. It’s a good thing, because the full contingent of Nine Riders catches up with them at the Ford.

The pace of these passages seems to match the wild and pounding gallop of the white steed. It’s almost impossible to read the chase scene without a quickening of your heart, thus a quickening of the words. We rush with Frodo toward the hope of safety, our hearts pounding with the peril and terror of the Riders behind us. We ache with tired Frodo who hates the fact that he feels compelled to stop, that the lure on the Ring he carries is so hard to fight. And we thrill when he turns toward the pursuing enemy, raising his small voice in the face of such big evil: “By Elbereth and Luthien the Fair, you shall have neither the Ring nor me!”

The white waves crashing in moments later would seem to be a direct response somehow to those brave words. As the water roars and foams in a frenzy, pulling the Riders away from Frodo, he has a strange fancy that the waves look like white horses themselves. He sees “a shining figure of white light” before he faints.

Side note about white horses: there are an awful lot of them in fantasy literature, aren’t there? White horses and white stags! S. thought of the little white horse last night (not surprising, since we just read that wonderful novel by Goudge) and of course there is this white horse that Frodo rides, these white horses in the water, and later on, Shadowfax. There’s the white stag in Narnia, whom the Pevensies are chasing when they move back into their own world, and the brightly lit patronus stag and doe of Harry Potter. I’m sure there are plenty of other white animals I’m not thinking of at present…