After it abandoned Gollum, it was stumbled and fumbled upon by Bilbo Baggins, “the most unlikely person imaginable.” “Behind that,” Gandalf tells Frodo, “there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”6 It is grimly ironic that Gandalf’s words, which are among the most important in the whole story, are usually overlooked by those who refuse to see the “fundamentally religious” aspect of
...more
