Q: What Is the Significance of the White Stag in The Hobbit?
ANSWER: Just as Thorin and his companions are nearly finished crossing the Enchanted Stream in eastern Mirkwood a white hart comes running toward the stream from the eastern woods; it leaps across the stream and knocks Bombur into the water. A short while later a white doe and two fawns appear and the Dwarves foolishly give chase in a vain attempt to kill the doe for food.
UPDATE: In fact, the hart itself is NOT white. The white deer are mentioned after the hart comes and goes. This article was written in direct response to a question based on a common misconception; I should have paid better attention to the details.
The narrative of the story informs the reader that the appearance of the deer means that Bilbo and the Dwarves have passed more than halfway through the forest and are approaching its warmer, sunnier eastern lands. Commentators such as Douglas Anderson (The Annotated Hobbit) have pointed out that white deer are a familiar motif in fairy tales. They usually indicate that mortals are approaching the lands of immortals or are about to have an encounter with them.
The significance of the white deer may not have been lost on Tolkien’s children if they had encountered such animals in other stories he told them (either his own or more traditional tales). The story reinforces the mythical symbology as the travelers hear (Elvish) singing and laughter in the distant woods.
By this point the Elves are probably aware of the Dwarves but because the path is the only “safe” road through Mirkwood they appear to tolerate the intrusion. When the Elf-king (Thranduil) later confronts the Dwarves over their presence in his kingdom his chief complaints are that they stirred up the spiders and then disrupted his people’s feasting.
The presence of the deer therefore mark a boundary between lands claimed by Elves and “outside” lands; but they also serve as a warning that travelers are about to enter a region of Mirkwood where different rules or laws apply. That is, the Elves rule in this part of their forest and their laws must be honored.
Although the Dwarves were hungry and desperate, they were nonetheless trespassers and the narrator of the story (Tolkien) implies that because they failed to hold true to their course they brought on their encounter with the Elves through carelessness. However, this is a fortuitous circumstance for Bilbo later on learns (from conversations he listens to while the raft-elves take the barrels filled with Dwarves toward Lake-town) that even the elf-road “now came to a doubtful and little used end at the eastern edge of the forest”.
Hence, the white stag could also be interpreted as a sign of “divine intervention”, where a higher power sets into motion events that inevitably lead to the Dwarves’ being captured so that they could successfully complete their journey to Erebor. Tolkien himself does not seem to offer any evidence to support such an interpretation but almost the entire story follows a sequence of lucky breaks for Bilbo and his companions.
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