I really like the way L’Engle works with Biblical allusions in this book – you never feel lost if you don’t get the allusions because they fit so nicely into the world of the book itself, but it is also a lot of fun trying to imagine the little details that prompted some of the things she does here. For example, one of the seraphim takes for its animal form the shape of a pelican, which is surely an allusion to the pelican of Psalm 102: “I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.” Biblical scholars to this day wonder if that is a really accurate understanding of the verse, since it does not make sense exactly (pelicans don’t live in the wilderness…) – but L’Engle makes good use of that pelican and it plays a wonderful little part in the book!

That even applies to the unicorns in Many Waters: the King James Bible used “unicorn” to translate a Hebrew word, rêym, that probably refers to some kind of wild bull – the New International Version, for example, says “wild ox” instead of “unicorn.” For someone like L’Engle, however, who appreciates the poetry and tradition of the King James version, the unicorns are part of the Bible, which I suspect is part of how they made their way into Many Waters, too!

:-)