Gandalf's "A traitor may betray himself", all contribute to Tolkien's portrayal of what he believed was the character of reality. The implied message is that what appears as luck to the protagonists is indeed a higher purpose, and that all can work out well. But all the same, they must keep up their courage, and ignore, in a similar manner as Frodo and Sam, "their bewilderments, infatuations, [and their] sense of being lost and abandoned". The scholar of literature Randel Helms writes that the "significance" of the destruction of Saruman's realm of Isengard is summarized by a pair of similar proverbs, Théoden's maxim, and Gandalf's "Often does hatred hurt itself"; the action of the Ents taking revenge on Saruman then shows just how providential control and cause-and-effect morality work out in practice. References Primary Secondary Sources Themes of The Lord of the Rings