A hundredth re-read of the LotR

[Nogrod]

So, from the fitting numbers we get into a world guided by providence? Or is it a world of necessity? Where everything just has to happen the way it does?

Originally Posted by Ibrin

there is no true coincidence in Middle-earth, that all things happen for a reason, even if that reason is never known.

Even if I have quite a strong distaste for Matrix II and III (I liked the first one though) that was a question they brought forwards nicely: the world of the Matrix was just "cause and effect" like the character Merovingian put it (with the necessary anomalies in the form of agent Smith and Neo) but the "real world" was guided by providence; in a very fatalistic way the prophecies just came true - even if the minute details were often baffling and didn't seem to contribute to the greater fate of things.

Yes, this will come more important later in the book when Gandalf voices his concern about pity and letting Gollum live...

But looking at the way one may jump from 111th & 33rd birthday - coincidentally or contrivingly happening - to these considerations it really arouses the question whether Tolkien wished, by the selection of those "fitting" birthdays to address the reader that we are in a fantasy or mythical landscape now and there the providence rules supreme? And whether that as a myth portrays to us more what the world should be like, not what it is like?

To put it in Matrix-terms, is the Middle Earth the "real world" vs. the Matrix of the actual world of natural sciences of cause and effect?