There is real adventure to be had in God’s fantastic world, real evil to fight, real moral complexities to navigate, real sorrows to bear, real redemption to celebrate. Tolkien created Middle-earth not as an escape from the real world, but as a retreat to see our reality all the clearer and come back more wide awake to our world. . . .

Tolkien’s stories summon us . . .  not to settle for our little comforts and play spaces and semblances of control, but to dream for more, to lose ourselves in some great global pursuit, to vanquish the foe, to win the peoples.

Evil in the world is real and powerful, as Tolkien so starkly portrays. And so throughout The Hobbit, says Devin Brown, Tolkien is teaching us a lesson about . . . an invisible Hand at work in the entirety of the story.

But even more poignant than some Great Providence at every harrowing turn is the climactic moment of rescue and resolution. Which now, at long last, we come to in this third and final installment of The Hobbit. It is what Tolkien called “the Consolation of the Happy Ending” in his powerful essay “On Fairy Stories.”

Here we finally taste “the joy of the happy ending.” But don’t think that means it comes with simplicity, and that you can see it coming. Tolkien coined a term for this happy ending that “all complete fairy-stories must have.” He called it “Eucatastrophe,” which means “the good catastrophe.” It is

the sudden joyous “turn” . . . a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of . . . sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance: it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium [the gospel], giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world.

. . . The great insight of Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories” is that the Christian story “is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.” The “Joy” we experience at the sudden climactic turn from evil to good, from death to life, from utter darkness to brilliant light, is a “gleam or echo of evangelium [the gospel] in the real world.” Says Tolkien,

The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. . . .

 It is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men — and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.

. . . For Christians, here [in The Hobbit] we find just a gleam, just a faint echo of the Joy that is, and is coming, and will shine and sound for all eternity, and satisfy our souls in that True Story for which we were made.

David Mathis, "Bilbo's Last Goodbye"