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and drowning. Or . . . well, things look different when you’re a grown-up. I couldn’t understand them then, and I despair of explaining us now.

 
    THE RAVEN AND THOREN
    The Hobbit
    Chapter XV: “The Gathering of Clouds”
    Nobody suggests that Bilbo go on the Ring-quest, though he stands up and volunteers to do so. On the evidence of The Hobbit , it might even seem that the quest is his by right. But he is, quite simply, too old, not only physically but spiritually as well. He has drunk of the wine of mortality, and for him the age of adventures is over.
    So another hero must be found.
    “You were meant to have it,” Gandalf tells Frodo, unlikeliest of saviors. A string of coincidences brings the One Ring to him. It falls from the finger of a king, and is found by one scavenger and stolen by another. An adventurer, lost and seeking to evade ores, chances upon it in the lightless passages beneath a mountain. A wizard convinces the adventurer to bequeath it to his nephew. The Ring, we are told, is actively seeking its master, Sauron. Yet its journey takes it directly away from Mordor, and straight to the Shire.
    Coincidences multiply during Frodo’s flight from Hobbiton. He leaves at the last possible instant, saved from a Black Rider by the simple chance that the Gaffer thinks he’s already left town. He is saved again by elves, who happen along just in the nick of time. He is saved a third time from Old Man Willow, and a fourth time from the barrow-wraiths by Tom Bombadil, who rather pushes plausibility by happening along just in the nick of time twice . In Bree, he is saved by Strider, who also happens along, again, just in the nick of time. At the Ford of Bruinen, he is saved by Elrond and Gandalf, who . . . well, you know the drill. There is a special providence on Frodo, guiding and protecting him all the way to Rivendell.
    Yet from Rivendell onward, the quest is thwarted and delayed with maddening regularity. The Fellowship cannot take the pass through the Misty Mountains, and must therefore make the more perilous passage through Moria. Gandalf falls doing battle with a Balrog, depriving them of his strength and council. There are ores on the eastern bank of the Anduin, forcing Frodo and Sam to travel downriver, away from their desired route. Gollum leads them up a road they cannot possibly survive.
    But the contradiction is only apparent. There is a power at work here, both in the abetting and in the hindrance, “beyond any design of the Ring-maker,” as Gandalf says. And there is on Middle-earth only one such power, though (significantly), it is never named.
    Tolkien was religious, not in the loud, proselytizing manner of his friend C. S. Lewis (whom, to his frustration, he converted from atheism to Anglicanism, one crucial step short of Catholicism and salvation), but with the bone-deep sincerity of a man born into the faith he still holds. Which is to say, he was not trying to argue anyone to his beliefs, but only to portray the workings of the world as he understood them.
    If we ask why an omnipotent and benevolent deity would put our hero through so much suffering in order to destroy the One Ring, we are asking the wrong question. For the mere destruction of evil was never on the agenda at all. Little children, in their frightening innocence, believe the world would be a better place if only we would kill all the bad people. Those adults who love them understand that the moral realm is more difficult than that, and that the evil we must fear the most resides within ourselves.
    There’s a subtler purpose at work here.
    Ignore the geopolitics and the movements of armies, and follow instead the Ring as it travels toward its ultimate destiny. Time after time, Frodo unwittingly uses it to test those he encounters. First he offers the Ring to Gandalf, who, horrified, cries “No!” and “Do not tempt me!” Then he must rebuff the unwise desire of his beloved uncle and mentor Bilbo to hold it again. When