Seeing God’s Providence in the Events Around You

The word luck appears twenty-five times in The Hobbit, luckily is used eleven times, and the word lucky nine times. We find these luck-related words used by Tolkien so regularly that readers may begin to wonder if the author is suggesting by this frequency that there is more than mere luck at work, that what may seem like luck at the time is really something far greater.

In chapter one, Gandalf tells the dwarves that if they think he made a mistake in choosing Bilbo, they can stop at thirteen and have all the “bad luck” they like, thus framing the whole quest under the question of luck. In chapter five we are told Bilbo is saved by “pure luck” when he needs more time to figure out Gollum’s riddle but can only stammer “Time! Time!” which is actually the answer.

In addition to the frequency with which Tolkien uses some variation of the word luck, The Hobbit’s plot turns on a series of coincidental events which seem particularly lucky, even if the word luck is not mentioned. During the riddling game with Gollum, it seems extraordinarily fortunate that a fish happens to jump out of the water and onto Bilbo’s toes because fish is the solution to the riddle that Gollum has just asked.

None of the occurrences of luck in The Hobbit can match the apparent coincidence of Bilbo’s finding and picking up the ring which Gollum has lost. After becoming separated from the others during their escape from the goblins, Bilbo crawls blindly along in the tunnels beneath the Misty Mountains. Readers are told that suddenly the hobbit’s hand touches what feels like a tiny ring of cold metal.

Given the huge, cavernous spaces of the goblin kingdom, the miles of maze-like passageways, the tiny fraction of the tunnels that Bilbo traverses, the fact that he can see nothing, and the extremely small space where his hand touches down, to many readers Bilbo’s coincidental finding of the ring may seem like too much of a coincidence, like simply too much luck. As if recognizing this fact, Tolkien’s narrator states, “A magic ring…! He had heard of such things, … but it was hard to believe that he had found one, by accident.”

It was hard to believe that he had found one, by accident.

On The Hobbit’s final page, a place of particular significance, the author speaks through Gandalf to explicitly make the point hinted at all along. The wizard says to Bilbo, “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventure and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?”

Bilbo agrees with Gandalf’s final statement with a grateful “Thank goodness!” Readers are meant to learn what Bilbo learns and to conclude along with Bilbo that his adventures and escapes were not managed by mere luck but instead by something which may have seemed like mere luck at the time but is the invisible hand of Someone who cares about Bilbo and about the Middle-earth.

Though he was a brilliant Oxford Professor and one of the greatest storytellers of his century, J. R. R. Tolkien lived in a world that was not very different from yours or mine. He had to help his wife with their four children, he had papers to grade, and he rode his bicycle to work every day. He was also a very serious Christian. As a part of his faith, he tried to see God’s invisible hand at work in his family, in the events around him, and in the lives of the people he came in contact with. He prayed each day for God’s help, and when help was given—he saw it as a blessing from God, not luck.

When J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, his faith influenced his fiction as he made sure that Mr. Bilbo Baggins also saw that all his adventures and escapes were managed by something, or Someone, that was more than mere luck.