What Hath Hobbits to Do with Prophets?: The Fantastic Reality of J. R. R. Tolkien and Flannery O’Connor

The distinct literary styles of J.R.R. Tolkien and Flannery O’Connor share seemingly little in common, with the former belonging to the tradition of the fantastic or, more specifically, of fairy story and the latter to the tradition O’Connor called “Christian realism.”¹ Those familiar with the fiction of both authors might find any article that attempts to span the distance from the Oxford don’s English home to the invalid’s peacock farm in the American South far-reaching, to say the least, perhaps leading them to ask with Tertullian incredulity, as the title of this article suggests, “What hath hobbits to with prophets?” My response is simple: Much. In what follows, I maintain that there is an uncanny resemblance between Tolkien’s fantastic hobbits and O’Connor’s grotesque prophets, a resemblance that stems more from the common Thomistic theology and philosophy of art that cultivated these literary imaginations and their sacramental view of reality than from a common literary taste. Embracing a richly Thomistic Catholic theology, both Tolkien² and O’Connor³ employ the fantastic and the grotesque elements respectively in order to create what Alison Milbank terms a “defamilarizing” effect through which reality is distorted or altered in fiction so that readers might recover an anagogical vision of the reality that has waned in the post-Enlightenment West.⁴ Relying heavily on Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories” and O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, I argue that the fantastic elements in Tolkien’s fiction and the grotesque elements in O’Connor’s fiction each represent two distinct manifestations of a similar theological and aesthetic philosophy, and that the stylistic differences between the two authors can be explained by the limitations of their chosen literary modes.

I am not the first to discern the similarities between the artistic achievements of Tolkien and O’Connor. Acknowledging and attempting to overcome the vast dissimilarities between these two authors, David Sandner compares Tolkien’s literary art to O’Connor’s, arguing that the central similarity between the two artists rests in the distinctive “movement of grace through their stories” that allows for the unexpected encounter with grace.⁵ While Sandner’s article introduces a widely ignored critical conversation and insightfully examines several of the surface similarities between the works of Tolkien and O’Connor, the article falls short of accounting for the inherent theological foundations that underpin the particularly fantastic depiction of reality presented in the literary art of each author. In other words, Sandner draws out some of the thematic (and even stylistic) similarities between the two authors as a result of their common Catholic faith without necessarily accounting for the specific philosophy that moves Tolkien to the fairy story tradition and O’Connor to her own unnerving Christian realism.

Before I can adequately discuss the commonalities between the artistic vision that resulted in Tolkien’s fantasy and O’Connor’s Christian realism, I must first examine the central aspect of their artistic styles that establishes their comparability—that is, the vision and depiction of reality that informs each artistic style. Central to the Thomistic theology espoused by Tolkien and O’Connor alike is a belief in the preeminence and ubiquity of God in creation, a belief that has direct and meaningful implications for the way in which each author experienced the physical world.⁶ That reality consists of more than merely the material world is a belief that Tolkien and O’Connor shared, largely in opposition to the reigning secularism of their modern age. For the post-Cartesian, post-Enlightenment thinker, the term reality, in many respects, invokes a host of existential, dualistic, naturalistic, and pluralistic associations. Due largely to the secular connotations surrounding the term realism, O’Connor christened her fiction under the label “Christian realism,” knowing that her realist vision was predicated upon more than a merely naturalistic perception of the world. Moreover, as the Cartesian split between body and soul grew in prominence, becoming a defining feature of the Modern age...