The Lord of the Rings: Flight to the Ford

The Tale

When Frodo comes to himself, he is still clutching the Ring. The other hobbits are bending over him in concern; the fire is piled high but Strider, after seeing to Frodo, has disappeared. Frodo asks wildly about the ‘pale king’, but without the sight imparted by the Ring, they only saw a confusion of shadows and Frodo disappear, then reappear. When Strider returns, Sam draws his sword, his suspicions about the ranger being re-aroused, but Strider gently reassures him and bends down to tend to Frodo.

He listens gravely to Frodo’s tale, then reports that he has investigated the land around and the Black Riders are nowhere to be found. He fears that is because they have drawn away but are waiting near, confident that Frodo’s wound will overcome him soon and put the Ring within their grasp. Sam chokes, but Strider encourages him, saying that Frodo is tougher than he looks. Now he must leave again for a while; he bids them keep the fire piled high and guard Frodo well.

He returns in the morning and in the growing light, he finds a slashed black cloak and a long thin knife, notched and with the tip broken off, the blade that wounded Frodo. To their astonishment the evil blade melts in the rising sun, leaving only the handle. Strider says there are few who can heal the wounds from such evil weapons, but he will do what he can.  After he sings a long slow song over the hilt, he brings out the herb he has been searching for all night, the rare athelas that was brought to Middle-earth by the Men of the West. He puts the leaves in boiling water then laves Frodo’s wound. The pain and the cold eases in the hobbit’s shoulder, but his arm remains numb and useless.

They decide they must leave Weathertop at once, so they remove the supplies and put Frodo on the pony. The pony has greatly improved under his new masters even in the wild, and seems especially fond of Sam. They head off for the Road again. There is no sign of the Black Riders, but as they set out, they hear two cold cries, one calling and one answering. They are still being followed.

For the next five days they see no sign of the Riders but fear they will be waiting in ambush at some narrow point. That narrow point seems to come when they must pass the Last Bridge over the River Mithithiel. But when Strider scouts the bridge, there is no sign of the enemy. Instead, he finds an elfstone, a green beryl, in the middle of the bridge. He decides to take it as a sign that it safe to cross and they hurry over.

Frodo, meanwhile, has been growing increasingly worse, feeling colder and his wound, though closing, growing more painful. He cannot rest and when he does sleep, he dreams fitfully of black shadows closing in. The rain does not help. Then they find that in their effort to avoid being tracked on the Road they have turned too far to the north, closer to troll country than to the Ford of Bruinen where they can cross over to the lands of Rivendell. Unfortunately, Strider is not very familiar with the area.

They are going through the hills when Pippin and Merry return from scouting, to report there are indeed trolls up ahead! They approach warily to find three huge figures standing in the woods. Strider walks ahead unconcernedly and hits the closest with a branch. The hobbits gasp. They are stone!

Frodo laughs. These are obviously the trolls that Bilbo encountered in his old adventure. The company’s spirit rises a bit at the memory of that past triumph, and Strider says they’re forgetting not only their family history, but all that they know about trolls, to report them as being out in broad daylight. Merry calls for a song to further cheer them up, and at his urging Sam recites the comic tale of a troll who steals a shinbone from a graveyard. They are delighted to find that Sam composed it himself.

‘I am learning a lot about Sam Gamgee on this journey. First he was a conspirator, now he’s a jester. He’ll end up by becoming a wizard – or a warrior!’ ‘I hope not,’ said Sam. ‘I don’t want to be neither!’

As evening draws near, they prepare to camp, when they hear the sound of an approaching horse. But it is not a Black Rider as they first feared, but an Elf-lord on a white horse, shimmering in the twilight. Strider leaps out to meet him, and the two greet each other joyfully. It is Glorfindel, who dwells in the Rivendell. He has been on the Road for nine days, seeking the company. It was he who drove the Black Riders from the Last Bridge and chased them far from the Road. But now he fears they are probably gathering nearer, in their full force. Glorfindel puts Frodo on his horse Asfaloth and they ride out until late in the night. 

For a couple of days they press on, with Strider and Glorfindel growing more anxious about an ambush as they get closer to the Ford of Bruinen, the crossing that will put them into the comparative safety of Elvish lands. They finally pass through a cutting through a pine forest that leads them out into sight of the Ford, glimmering only about a mile away.  They have hardly come out of the ravine when the echoes of hoofbeats sounds behind them. They turn to see that the Black Riders have caught up with them in a last desperate effort to capture the Ring.

Glorfindel calls on Frodo to fly, to ride on. But a reluctance seizes the hobbit and he stalls, until he realizes that the Riders are sending out a silent command for him to wait. Fear and hatred make him resist and he draws his sword in defiance. But Glorfindel orders Asfaloth forward in Elvish, and the horse bolts away. The Black Riders give chase.

Frodo, who is falling into the shadows, can see them clearly now even without the Ring. He barely makes it across the river, passing at one point right in front of the face of the foremost Rider. Once on the other bank, he turns his horse and faces the menace of all nine Riders. Before their gathered power he no longer has the strength to race away. They call to him in cold voices to come to them.

 He brandishes his little sword and defies the enemy in the name of Elbereth and Luthien the Fair, but his voice ‘has not the power of Bombadil.’ The leader of the Riders, by now halfway over the river, raises his hand and Frodo is struck dumb and his sword breaks and falls out of his hand.  Asfaloth rears and snorts. The leader and three other Riders have entered the Ford; the leader is almost on the shore.

Suddenly with a crash and a roar the river rises into cresting waves and rolling boulders. Frodo seems to see white riders on white horses among the waves. The four Ringwraiths in the river are swept away, and when the others try to flee they are driven back by a shining figure of white light accompanied by dim figures brandishing red flames. The maddened black horses leap with their Riders into the rushing flood.

‘Then Frodo felt himself falling, and the roaring and confusion seemed to rise and engulf him together with his enemies. He heard and saw no more.’

Bits and Bobs

In this chapter we are introduced to athelas, a disregarded plant of hidden virtue, also called kingsfoil. Its origin in Westernesse, its forgotten worth, and its hidden uses make it a good metaphor for Aragorn himself, and the lost line of kings from which he descends. In one of her earliest stories of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin pays tribute to Tolkien by mentioning kingsfoil as an herb that exists in her fantasy world.

The ‘elfstone’ (green beryl) that Strider finds on the bridge can also be seen as an interesting foreshadowing of the Elessar (‘elf stone’) that he receives from Arwen by the hands of Galadriel, a green stone set in a silver eagle-shaped brooch. It is from this gem that he takes his royal name.

Sam’s song The Stone Troll appeared in its original form in Songs for the Philologists (1936) and was titled ‘The Root the Boot’. ‘The song's meter and rhyming scheme are those of the 15th century folk song "The fox went out on a winter's night".’ ‘The Root of the Boot’ is reprinted in The Annotated Hobbit and ‘The Stone Troll’ in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, where Pauline Baynes depicts the ‘Tom’ of Sam’s poem as Bombadil, or at least looking very like him.

Poor Glorfindel. He gets replaced in both movie adaptations, by Legolas in the Bakshi film and by Arwen in the Jackson. Although it wasn’t certain at first that he was the same Glorfindel who lost his life in The Silmarillion and died fighting a balrog to cover the escape of Tuor and Idril from the wreck of Gondolin, later published work by Tolkien confirms the fact that it is indeed he. After being re-embodied in Valinor, he is sent back to Middle-earth as an emissary, possibly in company of the Blue Wizards.

One thing is for sure. When he tells Frodo to 'fly', he is not urging him to catch an eagle to Rivendell.

The confrontation with the Nazgul at the Ford is a popular subject for illustration and serves as an excellent climax for the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring, (Book I: The Ring Sets Out). I am both surprised and pleased to have made it this far. This is the sort of project that in my younger days I would have delighted in but would have lacked the stick-to-itiveness to persist with. Let’s see if I can keep it going.