There is a little-noticed line in the first volume of The Lord of the Rings that helps make this connection. It contains an important key, I believe, for unlocking this book that conveniently integrates the previously scattered episodes constituting the life of Turin Turambar. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the Company of Nine Walkers having found their path blocked by a huge snowstorm on Mount Caradhras, the wizard Gandalf cryptically declares that, “There are many evil and unfriendly things in the world that have little love for those that go on two legs, and yet are not in league with Sauron, but have purposes of their own. Some have been in this world longer than he…”
To an extent heretofore unrecognized, we know that we are born with genetic predispositions, whether mental or physical, that set drastic limits on our prospects and possibilities. We are also the partial products, not only of environing influences, but also of just plain luck – of good or ill fortune, of wyrd. Who of us can say that we have chosen the true path at every turning, or that we have deserved every disaster that has befallen us, so that our lives can be entirely explained by the decisions we have rightly or wrongly made?
This is not for a moment to suggest that Tolkien regarded the universe is an unsponsored and undirected accident. On the contrary, it is Morgoth himself who is the absurdist and nihilist, here declaring that “beyond the Circles of the World there is Nothing.” Yet Tolkien seems to have questioned God’s omnicausality as it is often conceived – namely, as if God were the divine Designer who, acting from beyond the universe, imposes his order from without.
See also Ralph C. Wood, “J. R. R. Tolkien: His Sorrowful Vision of Joy,” in C. S. Lewis and Friends: Faith and the Power of Imagination, ed. David Hein and Edward Henderson (London: SPCK; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), pp. 117-134.
I agree with most of what Wood writes, but I think that he swings too far in the negative direction in his assessment of Frodo. Yes, Frodo fails at Mount Doom, and Wood rightly points out Tolkien’s rewrite of the Mount Doom dialogue for Frodo. But Frodo is later justifiably praised in a public assembly by Aragorn, the returning king (in a scene that, to me, illustrates the Roman Catholic understanding of saints as well or better than any doctrinal discussion) and is even later accurately assessed by Saruman(!) as having grown in wisdom. His failure is not the entire story of his life by any means; he is still fundamentally heroic. Consequently, there is some real joy — although a bittersweet type of joy, yes — for Frodo when the rain curtain parts for him at the end of the tale. We know he, at last, will find peace, even as we feel his absence with Sam.