What Hath Hobbits to Do with Prophets

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 farreaching, 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 Tolkien 2 and O’Connor 3 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 read