with Brandon Sanderson now garnering more attention from a more loyal fan base than ever before—a headline-grabbing deal to adapt his works iMovies and series for Apple TV will have that effect—the author now addresses a question that has often been asked of him throughout his publishing career, which began in the early 2000s. It’s like this: why aren’t there elves and dwarves in his fantasy epics?
Sanderson took to his YouTube channel for his latest film “SanderFAQ” video series (hat tip: Polygon) to explain. Basically, when he started writing in his college and graduate school days, the fantasy genre was “deep in Tolkien’s shadow” and probably more so than ever thanks to the massive success of Peter Jackson. The Lord of the Rings movies.
And as a result, Sanderson did many other works inspired by JRR Tolkien’s world-building. In fact, as he recalls in the video, he was inspired to write a controversial essay at the time “about how Tolkien ruined fantasy,” which he now calls “very clickbait in the days before we understood clickbait.” should not be enjoyed.)
Sanderson says he’s revising that vision and is even in the midst of revisiting Tolkien via audiobooks narrated by Andy Serkis. “But in the late ’90s, I said, ‘Can’t we get away from this?’ I thought.” “Fantasy should be the most creative genre. It’s a genre where you can do anything…and so I thought I wanted to have a quality to my writing that was more human-oriented than fantasy-creature focused.”
And even more than that, “If I’m going to make fantasy creatures, I want to try to create my own. I want to have new fantasy races that don’t feel like elves by any other name or dwarves by any other name.”
He did include dragons, he noted, because “it’s very difficult to find something with the weight and awesomeness of a dragon that isn’t a dragon…so I decided to lean into it in the end.”
At the end of the clip, he concludes: “I don’t need to ‘kill the elves’ (referring to the title of his essay) or anything like that anymore. I feel like write your book, read your book, read what you love, write what you love. And even after all these years, there’s still room to do new things with some of these ideas that Tolkien approached.” In the 60s.
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