With Brandon Sanderson now attracting even more attention than ever beyond its loyal fan base—a headline-grabbing deal to adapt his works into movies and series for Apple TV will have that effect: the author now addresses a question he has often been asked throughout his publishing career, which began in the early 2000s. It is this: why are there no elves and dwarves in his fantasy epics?
Sanderson took to his YouTube channel to see the latest on his Sander FAQ Video Series (hat tip: Polygon) to explain. Basically, when he started writing during his college and grad school days, the fantasy genre was “in Tolkien’s shadow,” probably even more so than usual due to the enormous success of Peter Jackson. the lord of the rings movies.
And as a result, Sanderson noticed many other works that were inspired by JRR Tolkien’s world-building. In fact, as he recalls in the video, he was inspired at that moment to write a controversial essay “about how Tolkien ruined fantasy,” an article he now calls “very clickbait in the days before we understood ‘clickbait’.” (Later in the video, he admits that he now realizes he was also being “a little snobbish” by trying to tell people what they should and shouldn’t enjoy.)
Sanderson says he has readjusted that vision and is even in the midst of revising Tolkien through audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. “But in the late ’90s, I was thinking, ‘Can’t we escape this?’” he said. “Fantasy should be the most imaginative genre. It’s the genre where you can do anything… and then I thought, well, I want my writing to be more focused on human beings than on fantastical creatures.”
And even beyond that, “if I’m going to make fantasy creatures, I want to try to make my own. I want to have some new fantasy races that don’t just feel like elves by another name or dwarves by another name.”
He did Including dragons, he noted, because “creating something that has the weight and wonder of a dragon that isn’t a dragon is very difficult…so I ultimately decided to lean toward that.”
At the end of the clip, he concludes by saying, “I no longer feel like we need to ‘kill the elves’ (referencing the name of his essay) or anything like that. I feel like writing your book, reading your book, reading what you love, writing what you love. And there’s room to do new things even after all these years with some of these ideas that Tolkien tackled in the ’50s and ’60s.”
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