Quote:
Originally Posted by SonofUgluk
Well , 10 views and not a single reply , i've heard this is the most useless tolkein forum on the net, this proves it
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Not useless, just slow.
Four hours between posts on a thread would be blisteringly fast for the Downs. Plus it's mid-week, and I think we've got a lot of Americans - they're probably still at work!
My first thought on this was that it's
possible that Tolkien went 'huh, this chase is a bit like Moses, drowning the Riders would be quite fitting', but... the Flight to the Ford is actually really different! The Bible story centres on the divine guides (pillar of flame/smoke), which wards off the Egyptians; there's no real analogy for that. And then Moses leads
all the people across, while Book!Frodo crosses alone, leaving his friends behind! The Nazgul are
driven into the water; the Egyptians went voluntarily.
Then again... Exodus 14 actually says that after the Egyptians were in the sea, God looked down from the pillar of flame and jammed their chariot wheels, trapping them there. And what does Frodo see, when he looks back from the bank of Bruinen? Glorfindel, as a bright flame, trapping the Nazgul in the river. So perhaps the connection is stronger than I thought.
But as I'm fond of saying, you can find parallels between
anything. It's certainly possible that Tolkien could have noticed the parallels, and tweaked his writing slightly to make them line up better (for his own amusement!); it seems unlikely he would have directly based the scene on the Bible story.
(Knowing his liking for Northern myths, I'm wondering if 'magic river drowning' is present anywhere in Germano-Nordic legends... that might be an actual source.)
hS