Book Review: "The Christian World of the Hobbit" by Devin Brown

PATHEOS
By Greg Garrett

View publisher's promotional video

I'm a person of faith who has written both novels and nonfiction books about Christianity and culture including books on "U2" and "Harry Potter," so I know from experience the two pitfalls for anyone writing about art and faith. A writer can marginalize an artist's use of myth and his or her own beliefs as unimportant, or can claim that every note, scene, or image is drawn expressly from the artist's professed faith. Neither of these extremes is true if an artist is a true artist, and that's why the approach that Devin Brown takes in "The Christian World of the Hobbit" seems exactly right. Professor Brown studies how J.R.R. Tolkien's deep Christian faith informed the world of Middle-earth, but he doesn't claim too much or too little. Tolkien, as he notes, was famously leery of allegory—that is, imaginative work in which every element of the story has a corresponding element in a myth or belief system—but Tolkien did describe "The Hobbit" as fundamentally religious, and like many of us who are Christian artists, he spoke of how his faith informed the creation of his art. [link]