Hobbits and Christ: The worldview of J.R.R. Tolkien

For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, the Middle Earth imagined by J.R.R. Tolkien—and reimagined by Peter Jackson for the newly released film The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies—shares many commonalities with the real Earth. In The Christian World of the Hobbit, author Devin Brown studies the book’s Christian worldview. I interviewed him about his religious take on Tolkien’s classic.

Some people might be surprised to hear the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings was writing from a Christian worldview. It’s not the first thing I think of when I see wizards, orcs, and dragons. That’s right. People who are skeptical when they see the title of my book have a right to be, for two reasons. On the one hand, we English professors have a habit of finding things in books that authors never put there, … also, because there is no mention of God. There’s none of the things we typically associate with faith or religion. There’s no churches, there’s no priests, there’s no Bible, there’s no praying.

Where do you find a Christian worldview in The Hobbit? Look at Tolkien’s contemporaries and what were they saying about life. You don’t have to be an English major to know his contemporaries were people like [Jean-Paul] Sartre, [Albert] Camus, and [Samuel] Beckett, who said there’s no purpose to life, there’s no meaning to life, there’s no such thing as truth. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, we find all those things. There’s a distinct reason why Gandalf chose Bilbo, and it’s a particularly Christian reason. It’s going to be good for Bilbo, but also good for the world, and the believers in your audience will know that that’s how God works in our lives. Another thing we find there is the element of providence. Luck appears so many times. One day, I was writing my book, I think I sat down and counted 41 occurrences of “luck” or “luckily” or something like that. On the very last page, the last thing Gandalf says is, “You don’t suppose, do you, that all your narrow escapes were managed just by luck for your sole benefit?” … So we see a providence, we see a purpose, and we absolutely see a moral universe where there’s absolutely a clear right and wrong, and Tolkien’s contemporaries rejected all of those things

Another thing you talk about is Bilbo himself, that he’s not your typical hero and he has this tendency to disappear in times of crisis. How does his character play into the Christian worldview? [By] the fact that Bilbo doesn’t do anything that the readers of The Hobbit can’t do, Tolkien is saying something about all of us. He’s saying this: Bilbo’s an ordinary guy. Just like you and me, he doesn’t do anything that we couldn’t do, and, yet, there’s something extraordinary about him. His courage is not courage on the battlefield. His courage is this moral courage where he doesn’t kill Gollum or he gives up the Arkenstone. Tolkien doesn’t say this overtly, but we know, because of his faith background, he saw each of us created in God’s image. And when we’re created in God’s image, yes, we’re all ordinary people, but there’s something extraordinary about all of us. And it’s not the extraordinary “kill the dragon,” “defeat the giant goblin army.” It’s a very different kind of extraordinary.

Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were good friends, part of the same writing group called the Inklings. But their writings were quite different. In Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, God’s role and interaction with the world were a lot more obvious through the character Aslan. But you don’t see that in The Hobbit. Do you still see evidence that Lewis influenced Tolkien in his writing, or even the other way around? What people may not know is that Tolkien quit writing The Lord of the Rings several times, and each time he quit, it was C.S. Lewis who came back to him and said, Tolkien, don’t leave me hanging, in his own British way. You’ve got to finish this. Merry and Pippin just got carried off by orcs. Frodo and Sam just went away, what, are you stopping here? I want another chapter. I want it next week for our meeting. Later, after Lewis died—he died before Tolkien—Tolkien said he could never repay the unpayable debt he owed Lewis. … We could say that without C.S. Lewis there wouldn’t have been The Lord of the Rings, that Tolkien would have quit and left it unfinished, like he left The Silmarillion unfinished.

Listen to Christina Darnell’s interview with Devin Brown about The Hobbit on The World and Everything in It: