Brandon Sanderson took the stage at Oxford on June 28 to deliver the 2026 Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Fiction The hour-long lecture revisited his once-controversial essay “How Tolkien Ruined Fantasy.” He admits the title was designed to provoke, but the argument underneath was honest: writers who spent decades copying Tolkien’s approach were missing what actually made his work worth copying in the first place.
In 1939, Tolkien himself stood at Oxford to deliver what became On Fairy-Stories, written while The Lord of the Rings was barely underway. By the end of 1938, the hobbits had only reached Rivendell. Frodo was still named Bingo Bolger-Baggins. And yet in that essay Tolkien named three emotional effects that great fantasy produces: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. Recovery means seeing the world anew. Escape is a form of freedom, not a shameful one. Consolation is the hope delivered through what Tolkien called the eucatastrophe. Sanderson built his 2026 lecture on those same ideas, and the callback to Tolkien’s own Oxford moment is deliberate.
Sanderson’s diagnosis is that Tolkien’s total world-building approach, done brilliantly in Middle-earth, sent the genre down a dead end once lesser writers treated it as a formula. Readers who loved fantasy drifted away in the ’90s. “They’d say that they fell slowly out of love with fantasy, because it was no longer giving them the sense of wonder it used to,” he said. The genre had gotten good at copying Tolkien’s framework. It hadn’t managed to copy his spirit.
That spirit, Sanderson argues, was innovation. Tolkien was not building a sequel to what came before. He was subcreating a new subgenre, drawing from heroic fantasy, from William Morris and H. Rider Haggard, from the Anglo-Saxon scholarship he spent his career doing. When Sanderson credits Tolkien with five key innovations that created epic fantasy, he’s careful to note Tolkien didn’t invent any of them from scratch. The work was the assemblage. Sanderson also acknowledges that scholars Dr. Michael Drout and Douglas A. Anderson reviewed the lecture before delivery, which gives it a bit more scholarly grounding than a typical author talk.
What Sanderson wants the genre to preserve is the emotion Tolkien spent his career defending: the feeling of genuine exploration. “It’s merely important that we offer a variety of places to explore, from a variety of diverse roots and narrative traditions, so that we preserve that emotion of exploration and innovation,” he said. “Otherwise, our readers will look elsewhere for that.” This is, of course, exactly what Tolkien himself argued in 1939. The professor’s own essay insists that Recovery, that sense of seeing the world with fresh eyes, is something only the best of these stories can deliver. Sanderson isn’t updating Tolkien’s argument. He’s redelivering it, eighty-seven years later, in the same city.
He closed by naming what he believes the genre offers: “two simple goods we could desperately use more of today. Empathy. And hope.”
The full lecture is available on YouTube and on Sanderson’s website. Polygon has additional coverage.
