Brandon Sanderson - "On Fantasy" | Tolkien Lecture 2026

[00:00:01]All right. Hello everyone.

[00:00:04]So, good evening and welcome to the 2026 Tolken lecture on fantasy literature.

[00:00:10]Since 2013, this lecture series has been organized by a committee of students and alumni of Pemrook College in honor of JRR Tolken and the enormous contribution to fantasy literature that he made while serving as the Rollinsson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon here from 1925 to 1945.

[00:00:29]This lecture is held annually thanks to the generous support of the Pemrook Pink grant scheme, the Katus Foundation, and of course the support of lecture attendees over the past 14 years.

[00:00:40]Special thanks also goes out to the Tolken family and estate for encouraging our exploration of fantasy literature throughout these lectures and to Utah Valley University for bringing us this year's speaker. Speaking of which, tonight we have the honor of hearing from one of the most popular, influential, and prolific fantasy authors of today, Brandon Sanderson.

[00:01:03]Brandon Sanderson grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. He lives in Utah with his wife and children and teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University. His bestsellers have sold fi 50 50 million copies worldwide and include the misborn saga, the stormlight archive novels, and other novels including Tres of the Emerald Sea, The Rhythmatist, Steelheart, and Skyward. He also won a Hugo Award for The Emperor's Soul, a novella set in the world of his acclaimed first novel, Alantress.

[00:01:32]Additionally, he completed Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming to the stage this year's Tolken lecture speaker, Brandon Sanderson.

[00:01:46][applause] [cheering] [applause] >> [applause] >> Well, thank you everyone. This is a dream come true. Uh this is awesome.

[00:02:11]We're going to start with some thank yous on my uh my end here. I'd like to acknowledge a few people. Um hearty thanks to Dark Dr. Michael Drought and to Douglas A. Anderson. uh their two scholars who were kind enough to read through this lecture and uh unstuff my foot from my mouth in several places.

[00:02:31]Uh I'd also like to thank UVU Utah Valley University. Uh Dr. Ethan Sprro and Scott Paul, thanks for having me here and facilitating this. I really appreciate it. Uh to Penroke College, thank you for your hospitality. Uh to the Tolken Lecture Committee for organizing and sustaining these conversations. Uh, thank you for inviting me to give a lecture. Normally, I have to be somewhat entertaining, but I'm at Oxford now, so I get to be boring.

[00:03:00]And you can't complain. You all signed up to listen to me talk about the history of fantasy for an hour, so it's your fault. Uh, thank you to Oxford Town Hall and the Bodian Library. Thank you for hosting us in places that carry so much history and scholarship. And thank you to my team. Thank you for your work, your patience, and your commitment throughout this entire process.

[00:03:21]All right, here we go.

[00:03:24]In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Professor Tolken wrote the initial draft of his essay on fairy stories. The Hobbit was only a couple years old at this point, and Tolken hadn't finished Lord of the Rings yet. In fact, he barely started. By the end of 1938, the hobbits had only reached Rivendell and Frodo was still named Bingo Bulier Baggins and Aragorn, I didn't know this before I started working on this, was Troder, a wild hobbit who wore wooden shoes.

[00:04:00]Regardless, on fairy stories quickly became a foundational text for the genre that Tolken was pioneering. Fantasy was not new in 1938. It can be argued the genre is as old as storytelling is. Even the term fantasy was not new back then.

[00:04:17]George Macdonald was the first to really popularize it in regards to our genre with his book Fantasies which was spelled with a ph. That was back in 1858.

[00:04:28]However, something different happened with the publication of The Hobbits and more importantly the Lord of the Rings.

[00:04:34]I'd like to speak to that today. the innovations that Tolken made, how they spawned a new subgenre, and why fantasy stories are still relevant today.

[00:04:44]Consider this a kind of generational retrospective of Onfairy stories with an eye toward doing something dangerous, which is defining what a fantasy story even is. The invitation to lecture here in this prestigious historic location cannot help but provoke a man to question his own credentials. While I'm a reader and lover of these stories, I'm not a true scholar of them. That said, I'm encouraged by the fact that Tolken in his essay said something similar about himself. And I do hazard to guess that I've spent as much time as anyone in the wilderness that is the outreaches of the fantasy genre, wrestling with what portions of it can be brought home and cultivated into stories.

[00:05:27]Fantasy can be at its most simple defined as a genre where anything can happen. For large stretches of history, it was primarily an oral medium, stories imagined on the spot, then told to fascinate and delight. It is the genre of the fairy story, the myth, and the tall tale. As I mentioned, it is a wilderness of untamed possibility where anything can grow. Walking those wilds, you will find wonder and awe in abundance, but not really structure.

[00:05:58]Indeed, it could be argued that fantasy is antithetical to structure. How do you define or encapsulate the infinite, the half-formed, the encoade ideas that lie just beyond the horizon, tantalizing, daring us to stretch a little further so that we might catch the briefest glimpse of their majesty among the shifting and obscuring mist.

[00:06:19]Yet, in order to succeed as a literary genre, to change from stories whimsically imagined to stories repeated around hearthfires to stories that will fill the pages of novels in a satisfying and profound way, fantasy must adopt structure. We must impose bounds upon the boundless. We must stop at some place along that horizon and explore not the next hill over but the one that we have already traversed, striving to find the story among the storied ideas.

[00:06:49]Fortunately, imaginations are like fractals. They express more and more detail the longer you study them. Slice off a piece of infinity and that piece itself will be infinite. As authors, we don't seek to constrain imagination, merely harness it. To this end, I'm going to put a few definitions in place.

[00:07:09]First, fantasy is fiction.

[00:07:13]This is the first and most important rule. Fantasy, as Ida will define it, must be imagined as fiction, presented as fiction, and accepted as fiction. It is not within the scope of this lecture deposit on the nature of religion or deity. But surely we must agree that the Bible, the Quran and the Aonyishads are attempting to do something very different from the Lord of the Rings. A fantasy story might imagine deities, but they are fictional deities presented without calls to faith or adulation.

[00:07:44]They can be metaphor or metaphors or allegorories. Sorry, professor for real world religious traditions, but their context must be fictional. Alan is not Jesus Christ. Eruar is not Elohim.

[00:07:58]This leads to our first big problem in defining which historical works are fantasies. Is the Odyssey a fantasy work? Did Homer take what he believed to be was an oral history of actual events and dramatized them? Did his audience believe these were the actions of gods or was this all metaphor and entertaining fiction? It gets more difficult even with texts like Bailwolf or the Epic of Gilgamesh where we have even less context. What of the fairy stories that Tolken himself so loved?

[00:08:28]How many of the people telling them believed in those fairies? To them, was the tale of an elf king a historical fiction with imagined characters, but a real life setting?

[00:08:39]As I believe intent is important, I cannot categorize most works existing before the 1800s as being fantasy. I cannot say 100% whether Shakespeare believed the ghost of a dead father would and could return to give warning to his princely son. Though I do know that when it came time for the prophecy of great uh Burnham Wood moving to high uh Dunen Hill, Shakespeare didn't have the trees move there themselves.

[00:09:07]So this problem does lead us to our second definition. Second, fantasy must be impossible. In his essay, Tolken seeks to define the fairy story and rejects most common definitions.

[00:09:21]Fortunately, the great philologist himself was handy with a definition now and then. To him, a fairy story is a story about the land of fairy, the quote unquote perilous realm full of danger and wonder. Fantasy, in turn, is not about a place, but an idea. The idea of the impossible possible being made briefly to seem real. The dividing line between science fiction and fantasy is a vague one. A contested border with armies camped on either side and winning ground back and forth. Subg genres and these days internet trope tags are seized and relinquished like banners.

[00:09:55]John Clute in the Encyclopedia fantasy literature defines fantasy as a self-contained narrative. When set in this world, it tells the a story which is impossible in the world as we perceive it. When set in another world, that other world will be impossible.

[00:10:09]Those stories set there may be possible in its terms. I'd like to simplify this to just say fantasy is about the impossible while science fiction is about the plausible. This isn't a perfect definition. Unlike science which can measure the weight of an atom, we cannot strict strictly measure words as they represent ideas. And ideas, as we've established, are boundless nuggets of possibility always upon the horizon.

[00:10:35]Some stories will stubbornly refuse our boxes. And that's all right because we have one final definition to help us determine what constitutes fantasy.

[00:10:44]Third, fantasy uses fantasy aesthetics.

[00:10:48]You might find this recursive. What good, you might say, is a definition that contains a reference to itself.

[00:10:56]In this final definition, we must accept that fiction is an art and not a science. How do we tell art nuvo from the art deco? Well, we look at it and measure which aesthetic it is using.

[00:11:09]Importantly, we look at the artistic movement the artist was part of and how they viewed their work. The same is true for fantasy literature. Now, mark me here. I'm not saying that a fantasy must use must use trappings like elves, knights, or castles. However, barring an intentional desire to hide some genre, a fantasy story presents itself as such.

[00:11:31]Fantasy leans into, but isn't limited to, certain emotional experiences, exploration, a sense of wonder, the visiting of a land where our rules no longer work and new rules must be understood. It can be horrifying with the magic a dark and ominous unknown. It can engage the problem-solving parts of our brains by presenting new impossible branches of physics. It can travel to Middle Earth or take you to a pub in London with monsters in the basement.

[00:11:58]However, it is always challenging the idea of what is real and what can be real. Now, you might ask, what about insert stories set in space with fantasy elements?

[00:12:11]Is it a fantasy? It is a is it a science fiction? The answer is yes, it is both.

[00:12:18]Just like Lord of the Rings is both a fantasy story and a war epic. Just like Narnia is both a fantasy story and a Christian allegory. Just like Misborn, it's both a fantasy story and a heist. A story is never just one genre.

[00:12:32]Now, to explore what Tolken accomplished, I want to talk about what fantasy looked like during his day. With these definitions in place, fantasy being fiction, fantasy being impossible, and fantasy being something presented with intentional fantasy aesthetics, we can finally approach the purpose of this essay. I want to explore what fantasy as a genre looked like before Tolken, then talk about his innovations in creating my favorite of all fantasy flavors, the epic fantasy. So, first let us ask, what kinds of stories was fantasy regularly telling before The Hobbit and more importantly, The Lord of the Rings variant one, portal fantasy. In this section, I'm going to rely on my own views and experiences with the genre and my own studies. For the dedicated scholar, I'll suggest one look to Farah Mendelson's Rhetorics of Fantasy back from 2008, which claims a different classification system from my own. I don't claim to understand more than she does, but I've also relied upon my definitions for some years now, and I find them useful. By my view, the most common fantasy tale from the 1800s and early 1900s, when this genre first came of age, is the classic portal fantasy.

[00:13:44]These are stories about a person from the mundane world who finds some gateway, portal or strange passage into the world of fantasy. They explore it, find it fraught with danger and wonder, and then hopefully for them return to the mundane world. The most famous early example is 1865's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It certainly meets our definitions. It is fiction intended as a tale for children. It is impossible, full of potions and vanishing cats. And last of all, it paints with the colors of fantastical whimsy. However, it is not the first of its kind. Tolken himself as a youth was fond of George McDonald's fantasies, though he later found it a little too moralizing. This book from 1858 is often cited as an inspiration for to the 20th century authors. Early portal fantasies owe a lot to the classic fairy tale, a distinct subset of the fairy story.

[00:14:39]While the portal in them is often more nebulous than an actual gateway, involving a trip to the darkest woods, for example, they have the same hallmarks of what would become Alice's Adventures, Narnia, and Harry Potter in our modern age. Though many of the most famous portal fantasies are for children, they don't have to be. In fact, I'd argue that the modern urban fantasy is a variant of the portal fantasy, albeit with some horror elements added in. In these characters often enter an alternate world, not by a dream or fairy ring, but via doors in dark alleyways. The portal fantasy has remained a vibrant popular pillar of the fantasy genre from its inception with roots in mythological or religious texts like Dante's Inferno or the classical Greek descents to the underworld. They are easy to get into. They use a character from our world to provide relatable eyes through which to experience the fantastic. However, there is a second fantasy variant just as old as the portal fantasy and one that professor Tolken himself was quite fond of studying that is the heroic fantasy.

[00:15:37]So variant two heroic fantasy heroic fantasy is that genre popular popularized popularized by the likes of people like uh hr writer Haggard famous for his book King Solomon's Minds and William Morris. These were huge influences on Tolken to the point that he told his fiance Edith he was hoping to produce something like William Morris's romances with chunks of poetry in between. I discovered this genre through Robert E. Howard's Conan stories which came a little later. These are stories with their roots in the heroic epics. Balewolf, dear to Professor Tolken's heart, is the example in English, though of course time has lost to us even the name of the Balewolf poet, leading us to only imagine as to the great Scops intentions with the poem. A heroic fantasy traces the larger than life exploits of a heroic figure facing incredible odds. Normally, the hero explores new lands and defeats foes with sword and muscle in a low magic setting where wizards connive and spells are never to be trusted completely.

[00:16:37]It can be argued this was the first subg genre of fantasy to actively target a mature audience. As while many early entries, such as the John Carter stories, which are also portal fantasies, maintain a bombastic pace, there is also a gritty realism to them.

[00:16:51]They contrast the often surreal fairy stories or the whimsical portal fantasies with grit and even nihilism.

[00:16:58]People die in brutal ways. The hero is not guaranteed victory. He or she might be larger in life in many ways, but is still often a lone warrior against the might of nations. There's a sense of desperation, fear, and even melancholy to these stories.

[00:17:14]One curious aspect to a lot of these early heroic fantasies is their connection to our world. Secondary world fantasies did exist, but they were very rare. Haggard's Allen Alan Cordmain is a man from England. Conan was set in the prehistory of our world, and John Carter was an American sent to Mars. Once Tolken popularized the secondary world, however, many later heroic fantasies followed suit. Authors like Fritz Lever, David Gmel, Michael Morco, and a popular modern example, my friend Joe Abberrombie, all take place in secondary worlds.

[00:17:46]So when Tolken sat to write that first famous first line of The Hobbit around 1830, heroic fantasy was the environment. Oz, Barum, and the pulp magazines like weird Weird tales were the dominant forms of fantasy. Haggard and Morris were among Tolken's favorites. But all of these books and stories, while excellent, were seen as niche. There wouldn't be a fully recognized fantasy book on the bestseller list until almost 50 years later with the release of Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shanner. Fantasy was seen as a genre for children or the childlike.

[00:18:21]We all know what happened. Tolken rebuilt and restructured not only fantasy but the industry as a whole.

[00:18:28]Publishers sat around scratching their heads as the sequel novel to a children's book became the most exciting publishing phenomenon since Agatha Christie.

[00:18:37]We aren't here simply to la professor Tolken however but to analyze what he did and how it created a third subgenre pillar of fantasy the pillar we call epic fantasy. So variant three epic fantasy I feel that Tolken made five key innovations that together created the epic fantasy subg genre which to this day remains a major force in the industry. Now to give due consideration to Tolken's contemporaries none of these five innovations were created whole cloth by him. He was part of a conversation, a dialogue, and as any artist knows, nobody, no matter how brilliant, sits in a room without any influences and created something powerful. Tolken was not the first to do a secondary world fantasy, though there are some precursor like Eliza Haywood's The Adventures of Eio Eioanei. I wrote down the pronunciation for myself, but it's still far. The adventures of Eioanei, Princess of Aviho in 1736.

[00:19:38]I'm sufficiently convinced that the first true secondary world fantasy is Fantasmon by Sarah Cooler, who way back in 1837 was laying the groundwork for modern fantasy and deserves every bit of credit for imaginative and shocking preient writing. It's quite good if you guys want to read it. Tolken was not the first to build immersion into a story by including inorld artifacts and ephemera.

[00:20:00]Dracula, for example, was using in world journals to tell a story before Tolken made the hobbit into a relic discovered and translated to English. And obviously, um, Stoker wasn't the first to invent the ephemera for a book either. However, it can be said the same of Einstein, whose theory of relativity was greatly influenced and accelerated by the work of his contemporaries and forerunners. We do not need to exaggerate and say that Tolken invented everything X-nillow or fully formed like Athena springing from the mythological forehead. It is rather his assemblage of these ideas into a cohesive subgenre that we celebrate.

[00:20:38]Innovation one sincerity.

[00:20:41]I have nothing against whimsical fantasy. I enjoy that style of story and even read even written a few myself.

[00:20:48]However, I feel the first thing Tolken did was present an unabashedly serious work in what was considered by many an unserious genre. I grew up as part of generation X. We are the generation in which nerds are often told we should be ashamed of what we love. While my wonderful parents were encouraging, media and society in general presented nerd culture as childish and cringeworthy.

[00:21:13]You can see the effects of this in My Generation's humor, commonly seen in recent Marvel um or Star Wars films, where sincere moments are often undercut by a quick joke. We Gen Xers have trouble admitting that we love what we love and often feel the need to hide or bury our sincere moments in media we create, as if to say, "Hey, you didn't really think I actually was serious, did you?"

[00:21:40]I find this it nothing less than incredible that Tolken didn't ever do this. Here was this distinguished professor, a veteran soldier, a scholar of the English language, and he unabashedly created the first epic fantasy story full of heart, warmth, heroism, and most of all, sincerity.

[00:22:01]There is levity in Lord of the Rings, certainly, but it is the levity of friends relaxing after a difficult phase of their journey. There isn't a single moment where Tolken winks at us and he never acted the least bit ashamed. In fact, he was a staunch defender of and advocate for these kinds of stories. In the early to mid 2000s, JK Rowling gave a series of interviews, including one with Time magazine and another with the Guardian where she consistently mentioned that she doesn't like the fantasy genre and doesn't read it.

[00:22:30]One gets the sense from her tone that she considers her work above or better than the genre to the point that she claims she didn't even realize that Harry Potter was a fantasy.

[00:22:40]The amazing Sir Terry Patchet has a wonderful counter to her in the form of a 2005 letter he wrote to the Sunday Times and I wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a read. Regardless, this attitude JK Rowling has is a common theme among some authors of our genre.

[00:22:55]They so desperately want the approval of traditionally serious genres that they feel the need to distance themselves from the rest of us. Never Tolken. His characters were authentic, his stories sincere, and his love of them genuine.

[00:23:09]The world could dismiss the rest of us, but not the stubborn Oxford professor who refused to back down or bow before popular academic trends. This is the first innovation that made the Lord of the Rings shine. Innovation two, magic.

[00:23:25]In onfairy stories, Tolken is insistent that magic must be taken seriously.

[00:23:31]While a story can be satirical, the magic must not be. I consider Tolken's use of magic as second big innovation.

[00:23:38]Fantasy magic systems are of personal and artistic interest to me. I am credited with popularizing the terms hard and soft magic. People often mistake me for preferring hard magic systems where the rules are concrete and the characters can therefore use their magical skills to problem solve.

[00:23:56]However, my actual preference is for stories that know how to best use their tools. Whether that tool be a hard magic system or a soft one or in the case of Lord of the Rings, both at once.

[00:24:08]When I initially started working on the speech, I began with this section. I half imagined that I'd be here today lecturing for an hour exclusively on Tolken's use of magic, though I eventually decided to expand the scope of the essay. This is the ember that started the fire. Middle Earth is old, older than men, older than elves. The songs that Alvatar sang are one part magic, one part art, one part dream.

[00:24:32]Rather than delve into the deepest parts of the legendarium, however, I want to look at the practical use of magic in Lord of the Rings. not how it works from a lore perspective, but rather how it works on a nuts andbolts narrative level. Magic in early heroic fantasy is largely something to fear, never to be used without danger. The palunteer comes to mind in Lord of the Rings. Magic in early portal fantasy was often something of fairy gifted by gods or fay, a magical weapon, a potion, or some other piece of lore. Note that Galadriel's gifts in Loth Laurian mimic this sort of story. While Tolken was obviously familiar with these uses of magic and incorporated them, he also did something new. He made some uses of magic approachable.

[00:25:15]Maybe not understandable, at least not by the hobbits, but neither is magic strictly fearsome. When crossing the ford, Gandalf and Elrand use magic to cause the swelling river to wash away the Nazgoul. When old man Willow uses somewhat classical fairy inspired glamour to lure the hobbits to sleep, Tom Bombadil proves his power over the fairy realm in releasing them. What is interesting to me in scenes like these is how amicable Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, and Eland are. Even in Arthurian lore, magic is usually presented as something dangerous. Merlin is mysterious and sometimes considered an unnatural associate for a good Christian king. He is often presented as half demon. And while he is a force for good, he is also enigmatic and arcane, sometimes written as a wild man from the dark parts of the forest, or in other words, from the fairy realm. In contrast, Gandalf is a relatable friend to the hobbits. While he is stern at times, it is a realistic human kind of grouchiness he displays.

[00:26:17]He gets annoyed, tired, confused, but is also valiant, devoted, and nurturing.

[00:26:23]Tolken doesn't seem to have started with Gandalf being a supernatural being, but as a person, relatable and understandable. Eventually, this evolved into him being Maya and therefore, like Merlin, a creation from beyond this realm. Yet, Gandalf remained strikingly human. In Lord of the Rings, Tolken imagined his angel not as some unknowable being, but as a person you'd enjoy sitting down with for a good smoke.

[00:26:47]This sets the stage for what would become a theme of later epic fantasies.

[00:26:51]Magic in the hands of the protagonists.

[00:26:53]Magic is a thing to learn about and master, a skill, an art, or even a science. In my lectures on the topic of magic, I make a point about the different effects a hard magic system and a soft magic system can have on a story. Hard magic, which the characters can use as a tool, acts as a reward for learning and practice. Its costs can be weighed and it allows for skill and bravery to be exercised. Soft magic, conversely, keeps these rules, if there are any, hidden from the reader and the characters, and in so doing creates mystery, wonder or terror. We can see Tolken using both ideas. On one hand, we have Gandalf, friendly, an ally, but a bit mysterious. When he uses magic, he references a spell or the like, but we never are given the rules or the method he employs. Gandalf is a soft magic system, though there are hints that if we dug fully into the legendarium, we would understand what he does. Indeed, I'll bet there are many here who could go into details for us at length.

[00:27:51]Tolken uses Gandalf and others like Tom Bombadil to full effect in creating the wonder that is the hallmark of a soft magic system. The hobbits and to an extent the rest of the mortal fellowship are shown through Gandalf how vast and deep the world is. Tolken was, as we all know, a Balewolf scholar. And there's no coincidence The Hobbit and Balewolf both include a scene involving a thief stealing a golden cup from a dragon's horde. Lord of the Rings is the whatif story of someone who isn't a traditional hero striking out into a world pulled from Anglo-Saxon myth. To this end, magic and the world at large need to make the hobbits feel metaphorically small, not just literally small. But then there's the ring which is put in the hands of the protagonist. This is Tolken's hard magic system. Everyone who has read the book can say exactly what the ring can do, at least in Froto's hands. It makes him invisible, but it corrupts him. Cost and benefit. Lord of the Rings gives a tool of the enemy's own devising to the smallest and most weak of the fellowship. With it, Froto escapes Boramir and Samur rescues his master from the orcs. It is a boon and a curse for we can see firsthand the quantifiable cost as it changes Frodo.

[00:29:07]The hard magic of the ring in contrast to the soft magic of Gandalf serves a different narrative function. When Gandalf uses his magic, we never know what the cost will be and we feel wonder and sometimes uncertainty when someone uses the ring. Conversely, we get to see them solve a problem. Yet, they have to weigh the danger of carrying that ring as well.

[00:29:29]I don't think epic fantasy would be what it is today without both the ring and the sense of wonder in Lord of the Rings. It gives us epic scope while also retaining a personal use of magic.

[00:29:41]Innovation three, mythological roots.

[00:29:45]Tolken's use of mythology has been analyzed by experts far more versed in this in his URA than I am. So I will touch upon it more lightly than we did the first two points. I believe one of the strongest innovations Tolken made was one of extrapolation.

[00:30:00]He didn't just tell stories using direct Anglo-Saxon mythological parallels. He crafted for his story unique races inspired by lore. Elves and Tolken are not elves seen anywhere in mythology.

[00:30:12]Certainly, there are hints of inspiration, but they are his own creation. Likewise, orcs, dwarves, and hobbits each challenge traditional fairy story conventions.

[00:30:22]Elves might be aloof in Tolken, but they aren't cruel. Dwarves do enjoy enjoy mining for gold, but they also have a full society and are great builders.

[00:30:30]Orcs might be fearsome creatures of the night, but they're also fearsome warriors. They are very much not the twisted trickster fay that goblins were in similar tales. Tolken didn't just mimic, he innovated. Though he began by trying to make his stories into legends that would fit with early medieval history, he eventually moved beyond this. Middle Earth isn't the generic medieval land that some later works sometimes used as as if their stories were set in a Renaissance fair melding cultures and time periods. I didn't realize this before starting work on this essay, but it seems the entire concept of a dark lord was invented by Tolken. While there are evil forces in books before, the idea of a demonic figure like Sauron as a direct antagonist to an adventure story seems holy Tolken's. Regardless, the point here is important. Middle Earth has a profoundly strong aesthetic built on a solid historical roots and used deliberately and consistently.

[00:31:24]Innovation four stakes.

[00:31:26]Tolken, like his colleague CS Lewis, was not afraid of putting worldending stakes into his stories. It was to become a key component to epic fantasy as Tolken created it. While not all stories in the subjre need to put the entire world in danger, this level of threat is commonly used as a way to distinguish epic fantasy from heroic fantasy, which tends to focus on more personal stakes like revenge. Lord of the Rings isn't just about the potential fall of a kingdom.

[00:31:54]It's about the potential fall of the world. The Sylmerelion details threats to existence itself. Lord of the Rings is also on a more abstract level a battle between philosophies. Which lord will you follow? the honor and virtue of Aragorn or the corruption and destruction of Sauron. For most people, it's a given, but Tolken again manages to make these stakes very relevant. This is where Gollum is key. My mother is an accountant. She's here today and she loves accountant sort of things.

[00:32:26]Fantasy books aren't her staple form of entertainment, but we, her children, dragged her to the Lord of the Rings films anyway.

[00:32:34]She really got into them to the point that she was eager to join us for the third film. It wasn't the battles that interested her, the political mockinations, or even the story of Froto in the ring. She said, and I remember it distinctly as the third movie was coming. She said, "I need to find out if little Smeaggel will decide to be good or not."

[00:32:57]Stakes aren't enough to make a story work. It needs to be stakes mixed with a personal relationship to the characters living them. A story is only as thrilling as our worry for the people who are in it. And magic is only as intriguing as our curiosity about how it affects people we love. Gollum is in this one of the most important people in the whole story because he let us see the conflict between honor and greed on an individual level. Will he become the person Frodo sees in him, or will he become the person the ring wants him to be? Likewise, the stakes of a world ending only work because we care and we cry and we hurt as Sam carries Frodo up the mountain. Epic fantasy then is a conundrum. It is a story where often the entire world is threatened, but we can't care about that as much as we care about a gardener who just wants to go home. As stated by folklorist Jack Zypes in fantasy, the little person is raised to the position of God. Innovation five, immersion.

[00:34:00]I've spent years searching for the first completely secondary world fantasy. For a while, I thought Lord Dunay uh Dunen, I always say that wrong. I thought Lord Duniny or George McDonald might have had it. But I, with thanks to others online who popularized it, now believe it to be Fantasmon, which I mentioned earlier.

[00:34:19]Still, having made a study of some of these early fantasies, I find them engaging and interesting, but not immersive. Fantasmon reads like something out of 101 Nights. It has fantastical lands and interesting names, but it doesn't seek to persuade us they're real. More, they are presented as whimsical locations, not quite like our own. Many of the pre-Talken secondary world fantasies read this way, like a stroll through a portal fantasy, merely without the portal. We can all agree that Middle Earth is different. It reads not as a whimsical adventure, but more as a serious historical record from a world that never actually existed.

[00:34:56]Part of this is the use of ephemera. The first thing we see when opening The Hobbit, for example, is a map, not just any map, the exact map used in the book by the characters. I got to see the actual handwritten drawn one uh at the Bodland. So, thank you to those who took me there.

[00:35:13]This is one of the quibbles I had with the genre in my early days of reading.

[00:35:17]Too many included a map just because it was expected with no reference to how or where this piece of arcana might have been used or obtained. It's obviously not strictly necessary to have the map be an inorld artifact. But why not do so and let it build immersion?

[00:35:32]Tolken was painstaking in his efforts to make his work exude authenticity there and back again. and the red book of the west march. The manuscripts by Bilbo and Frooto and Sam that Tolken purportedly translated and adapted give us a translation buffer that in fantasy we still use today. This Tolken translated an old manuscript idea isn't merely a fun affectation.

[00:35:57]It's necessary to give us a sense of plausibility for the text. Language is inherently anacronistic. Too many of our words are obtained from deeply earth-scentric sources.

[00:36:09]Immersion depends in part on us being willing to suspend our disbelief and dismiss our questions. Tolken's work in creating authenticity gives us that permission to accept the work for a time as real. To look briefly at how this functions, let's talk about why it helps so much to imagine the books in translation from some fantastical tongue.

[00:36:31]The issue manests itself obviously in poems, songs and puns. If a character cracks a joke in a fantasy book and that joke depends on word play, are we to imagine that word play worked in their language? If a poem is given, how can we maintain meter in English? The emergence sustaining answer is that these things were filtered through a master translator in Tolken who created similar constructs in English that would convey the same ideas that the characters were feeling. Sam's name is not Sam. If you didn't know, his name is Banazir. In Middle Earth, the name Banazir evokes a rustic homey feeling. In order to give us that same experience, Tolken adapted the name to something similar in English. You might say that we're overthinking this.

[00:37:20]If so, might I remind you that we regularly write thousandpage novels about wizards.

[00:37:26]Overthinking things is the job.

[00:37:29]Moreover, word choice feeling fantastical is an issue for some reason readers. They come to me and ask questions regularly. When I use the term hattick in Misborn was I am playing they have the same sports that we do.

[00:37:42]The word coach as in for carriage comes from the name of a Hungarian town. If I use that word in a fantasy world, does it imply the existence of Hungary?

[00:37:52]While some readers treat these as amusing gotchas, for others the questions are sincere because immersion is one of the key reasons people explore fantasy.

[00:38:00]It is a good unto itself immersion allowing us to visit another place and accept it is wholly authentic while we gain other emotions from that experience such as the sense of exploration and adventure. Our world is largely explored and space though exciting is beyond our reach. Yet humans want to trailblaze, set foot in a place that has never been before.

[00:38:22]They want to come to love characters and treat them as real. An immersion into a world helps that believability. People yearn for the sincerity that is our first point and Tolken reinforced it by being exhaustingly particular about his sense of realism. He was not the first to use ephera like his maps or frame stories of original texts. He was not the first to create a secondary world.

[00:38:42]However, he was the first to take it this seriously. And the reason we continue to love his creations today is because of that attention to detail. The Lord of the Rings wasn't just a fantastic book series. It was a revolutionary reimagining of what stories could be. Tolken created from a fusion of many previous stories something new. Pounded and forged like the rings themselves. Created from ideas made alloy. Given the artistry and care that only he could. Tolken gave us epic fantasy. And I worry at first we didn't quite understand how to use it.

[00:39:17]What not to learn from Tolken.

[00:39:22]Early in my career, I'd occasionally write an editorial on my blog relating to the fantasy genre. That was when I wrote the very first proto version of what would become this lecture today. At the very least, this lecture consumed the best viddles of that essay, though it left the bulk of the half form ideas to the vultures.

[00:39:41]My original essay had a title that drew a lot of attention, more than I'd expected, and was my first experience in creating clickbait.

[00:39:50]I called it how Tolken ruined fantasy.

[00:39:55]To explain, let me talk a little more about the history of of fantasy. If there's an area of the history of the genre where I'm approaching a scholarly scholarly level experience, it's those first bestseller years beginning with the 70s and ending in the late 90s.

[00:40:09]Let's call it the postto Tolken boom. It started it started the day when professor Tolken passed away. It ended with the publication of Harry Potter 1973 to 1997 roughly 25 years when epic fantasy emerged to become the dominant form of speculative fiction. This is when I discovered books, fell in love with reading and determined to become an author myself. During these years, science fiction took a backseat to fantasy for the first time in history.

[00:40:38]This correlates and likely in a meaningful way with the rise of the hardcover novel and the steady decline in sales of the pulp magazines. Science fiction has often been a stronger medium in the short form. But when it comes to the long form and the really long form fantasy with its rich mythologies, intriguing political conflicts and immersive worlds was king or emperor or dark lord, whichever you prefer.

[00:41:03]I remember well the period just after the post token boom. I tried to publish in the early 2000s, a difficult time to try to sell a fantasy epic. Many of our readers were jumping to YA fantasy, which had always existed, but had rarely been distinguished from what we now call middle-grade fantasy. Next, they jumped to urban fantasy as Twilight gave it a resurgence. The masters of epic fantasy, Martin, Jordan, and Hobb, still sold pretty well, but they had been established in the boom period, and all three had innovated away from the Tolken style quite quickly. Martin had gone grim dark, melding in heroic fantasy aesthetics like low magic, pessimism, and brutal deaths with epic fantasy worldbuilding. Jordan had turned away from the quest fantasy of his first three books, exploring deep political intrigue narratives and an enormous cast. Hobb had adopted a different tack from Martin, taking the personal single viewpoint aspect of heroic fantasy rather than the grim aesthetics and applying them to an expansive world with a hard magic system. In 2000, it would be a good decade before Game of Thrones premiere would skyrocket George to superstardom. And it had been half a decade more since he, Hob, and Jordan had established themselves. During this dry spell, epic fantasy struggled to find new voices for the first time in decades.

[00:42:20]books were being published but they weren't hitting the market as previous ones had. The fifth sorceress is the highest profile flop among these but there were numerous others. Steven Ericson is the biggest voice from this period but even he had difficulty in the market for his first few books. I think a lot of this was due to one fundamental problem that the genre had spent too long in Tolken's shadow and the publishers and new authors hadn't yet learned what Jordan Martin and Hobb had that we could only lean on Tolken for so long.

[00:42:48]My early essay, the one with the clickbait title, How Tolken Ruined Fantasy, in that my central thesis was this. Tolken was so far ahead of his time, so brilliant in his execution that nobody quite knew how to follow him up.

[00:43:02]Many followed his model too closely. I don't blame these authors. I think many of them are fantastic writers, and I'm glad they're part of our tradition.

[00:43:11]However, this continued too long, and the genre as a whole didn't learn the lessons of Tolken's five innovations.

[00:43:17]Most specifically, the point relating to immersion. Instead of drawing upon mythological roots to create a sincere and original work, publishing learned that a story with elves, dwarves, and a quest for a magical object was how you write epic fantasy. The problem with this only became manifest in the late 90s when readers started to experience a concerning affliction. Many of them talked to me about their experiences when I was first publishing. They'd say that they fell slowly out of love with fantasy because it was no longer giving them a sense of wonder it used to. In onfair stories, Tolken talks about three key emotions that come from reading the fantastical recovery, escape, and consolation. He talks at length in interesting ways about these ideas. And so, of course, I encourage you to read the essay itself. In short, one central theme to these three is that stories help us see the world a new to recover our view of reality and the inherent wonder in it. I agree with this idea and I believe one key evolution that fantasy made beyond fairy stories is that in fantasy, epic fantasy in particular, were able to engage the parts of the mind that love to explore something new.

[00:44:23]And I feel for a while in fantasy, people weren't getting that emotion because a lot of the worlds felt the same and therefore the story is repetitive.

[00:44:32]We as a genre got over this eventually.

[00:44:34]We learned there is more to learning from Tolken than merely imitating him. I hope we can continue to learn these lessons. Now, do not mark me as criticizing what anyone wants to write or read. This is a wide openen genre, the most open that any can be. There is plenty of room for books with classical Tolken inspired worlds. 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. Otherwise, our readers will look elsewhere.

[00:45:07]As we approach the end of my lecture, I want to move from Tolken himself to speak further about the genre he inspired. I remember a day early in my career where I was doing a signing at a Costco of all places. Yeah.

[00:45:21]Traditionally not a bookstore, but the publisher set up a signing there anyway, and I was happy to go wherever people wanted me. I signed a book for a young woman who was extremely excited. And as she moved off, her mother leaned in. She said to me something to the effect of, "No offense." Yeah, great start.

[00:45:40]But is there any way to get her to read something other than this fantasy crap?

[00:45:48]It is a sentiment I get now and then.

[00:45:50]I've been asked by befuddled journalists, by well-meaning spouses.

[00:45:54]I've got asked it in Dubai by an author of quote unquote serious works who, when I told him I considered fantasy a serious genre itself, laughed dismissively with the most night expression I've ever been given by a colleague. I get it from reviewers, interviews, and critics. Two simple words. Why fantasy?

[00:46:13]Why do people love this genre so much?

[00:46:15]Why does it get its hooks in us, inspire us, and stay with us? It's been a hundred years almost since Tolken wrote his famous line about a hobbit in a hole. Why are we still celebrating what he created with such lively enthusiasm?

[00:46:27]It seems at times, despite all the strides that we've made, the world in general is as dismissive of us as it was when Tolken took it upon himself to write on fairy stories in part to defend the genre. My first answer to this question is simple. Why art at all? Why starry night? Why claroon? Why can't a thing be beautiful? And that is the reason still I strive for something more though I know I cannot answer their question not fully because I can't speak for a genre or for art itself. In the end, all I can do is attempt to explain in the smallest part why I love fantasy. When I was young, I thought that any given item or person in my life must be defined specifically and quantifiably as to its nature. A fantasy book was one with dragons or wizards. A mystery book was one with a detective. And a serious book was one where everyone was sad.

[00:47:24]As a person ages, I like to think they understand that definitions like people are fuzzy things resisting attempts to lock them down. Words like swords get worn down over time. The edges resharpened until their shape sometimes only resembles the original forged creation. In this, I confess the futility of even this essay, which tries so hard to describe fantasy. I like my definitions. I find them useful. I suspect they too will erode, however, as despite my best efforts, they don't fully explain the why of fantasy. The truth is, everything has a little fantasy in it. Being inside another person's head thinking their thoughts is impossible. Like my definition, telepathy is fantasy. Yet that is what books do for us. They let us think the thoughts of other people even if they have been dead for thousands of years. Imagining a world is as different from the way it is now is after a fashion a fiction. We live in the real world as it exists no matter how much we dream of a different world.

[00:48:28]And yet we dream anyway because if the world is to change, if tomorrow is going to be a better version of today, that starts with imagination.

[00:48:38]In the books I read as a young man, same as the books I read today, I learn about the world. More importantly, I learn about people, how they feel, think, dream, and love. Fantasy isn't about the past, no more than science fiction is about the future. These books are about learning the minds and hearts of other people. Moreover, fantasy novels are about challenging and improving the reader's imagination.

[00:49:01]And so, these books provide two simple goods that we could desperately use more of today. Empathy and hope. Why fantasy?

[00:49:11]Because every good thing in the world starts as a fantasy at some point. Then we dream it into reality. Fantasy is the genre of the impossible, I still insist, but the people it inspires are exquisitly real. Thank you.

[00:49:32][applause] [applause] >> [applause] >> Thank you, Brandon, for taking us on such a wonderful adventure through the genre of fantasy and deep diving into Tolken. We now have about 15 minutes for questions. If you have a question, please raise your hand and our committee members will come to you with mics.

[00:50:12]Thank you.

[00:50:14]What do you think about the connection between reality and fantasy? And do you ever think there is too much fantasy that we will miss real things?

[00:50:22]>> Yeah, you know that I I I I don't I I hesitant to say too much because the art that a person is creating should be the art they want to create. But I do think if you stretch too far, you end up in full-on allegory like Flatland or something like this. Um, and what a a fantasy generally is trying to do is to use the familiar and the strange in a blend. What makes stories really generally work is that blend of familiar and strange. Like when you see, you know, descriptions of what's going on with the hobbits, you're like, I relate to that. It makes you able to relate to the individual when they go on this fantastical quest, you still need to care, right? And so usually you use things uh Tolken uses a lot of descriptions to say to help you imagine that this is a real place happening to real people. And I think that's really vital because if it's not real people, we will disassociate and not care. And then it becomes like strictly allegory and that there's places for stories like Flatland, but obviously Flatland, I don't know if you know what this is, but it's it's it's a story kind of positing uh what would happen if you lived in a two-dimensional world. And it's not really a fantasy. It's more a, hey, here's to help you understand a mathematical concept. Um, and it's quite good. You should read it. But Lord of the Rings is different. And I think those details, you know, George does this with food, right? We maybe a bit much. Robert Jordan would do it with clothing. Like you use these descriptions to be like, these are real people. This is what they care about.

[00:51:55]This is their society and culture. So that you care when you know the dark lord, right? The dark lord's like so abstract. Um, right? like um a a demonic figure and whatnot, but the real people are so important. So, yeah, I think you can go so far that you lose that connection to the characters, but the masters are really able to do it, even pushing it pretty far. Um, I'd say even some of like the new weird authors go very weird and you still care about the characters. So, >> can you talk about your relationship to Tolken as a working fantasy author and is he someone you aspire to live up to?

[00:52:31]>> What an excellent question. So, uh, if you find me online talking about Tolken, I didn't do it here because this is serious. This is Oxford, but I will often call him Grandpa Tolken. Um, and the reason I do that is actually quite deliberate. I, uh, read The Hobbit when I was a young man, uh, before I really discovered reading. It was one of the I can name like three books that I read as a kid. Uh, and I loved The Hobbit and then I tried Lord of the Rings and I was not a great reader. I was like nine or 10 and I bounced hard off Lord of the Rings. Um, right to the point that like I was scared of ever picking it up again. Um, and when I discovered fantasy, I discovered fantasy through the second generation of epic fantasy authors. Um, Dragon Spain by Barbara Hamley I often highlight but sort of Shanner I read that summer. uh your David Eddings's uh your you know like some people who were contemporaries of Tolken like Anne McAffrey but were kind of writing in this post Tolken era where they got really uh popular that was what I um grew up on right um Steven Donaldson right the um and Guy Gabriel K these people who were deeply inspired by Tolken uh Robert Jordan obviously and so I went back to Tolken in college and I'm like what how wow I I thought I would be bored I doesn't at all. Right. I'm like, "Oh, wow." Um, it's like when I first read Dracula, I honestly thought Dracula would be boring. Um, I don't know why I thought that, but I thought, "Oh, it's going to" And then it was really engaging. Uh, Tolken just grabbed me, but that was in my 20s, right? So I have a slightly different relationship with Tolken than I think a lot of other authors do because I grew up in this sort of reading all these Tolken inspired things and then I read the master himself and then I watched the genre struggle to get out from underneath his shadow. So where do I put my generation? Uh if you look at my generation the my generation is kind of the the people who published in the uh early 2000s mid you know 20 uh 20 as so it's me it's Pat Rothus it's uh NK JSON um it's that author group you see a lot of us responding against the Tolken inspired right we're like all right no quests you don't see a lot of quests in our stories right uh the quests have been done to death uh we can do epic fantasy and we're going to take the political intrigue aspect and we're going to go with that or the the the the you know gender roles aspect or what can we do in different uh inspirations we we tended to stay away from the classic medieval fantasies because we'd read so many of those. Uh, and so that's kind of how I see my relationship with it is this person who's like deeply respectful of Tolken, but trying to boil Tolken down to what did he do, not how do we imitate him, right? How do we use the actual methods he used to create better fantasy rather than just using what he made to create our fantasy? And that's been like a study my whole life is like, can I learn from Tolken, not just copy Tolken? I was wondering, do you have any books in the cosmir that aren't written in translation? And also, have you written anything that implies a certain language like Latin existed?

[00:55:42]>> So, I'll since we just went through that, I want to go through it. Uh, the cosmir, I want to have no connection in relationship to earth. So, I specifically don't put any of that in, but I will go back to a Greek or Latin root for a word when I want to imply they are using an ancient language as a root for something like this, right?

[00:56:01]Alammancy um I used alammancy very deliberately. It's become manscy's become a generic sort of thing for a magic system but I had foretelling future as part of it and so I wanted to evoke that feeling of hey there is a part of alammancy that can foretell the future um and I used that word very deliberately uh so that when people got and saw uh the future hopefully it wouldn't surprise people and whatnot but um I don't know if that counts is what you're asking. Um what was the first part of the question again? Some of the books, >> oh yeah, are any books not in translation? Mine are all in translation. I used the Tolken explanation. I heard it early in my career before I even published anything.

[00:56:41]And I said, that's the answer. That's the answer I was looking for because otherwise I got hung up on these things.

[00:56:48]I would create a pun and I'd be like, will this work in their language? Um, and it explains so many of my failings.

[00:56:55]Um, right? like uh the Way of Kings, the the the the first printing of it. I used way too many bird metaphors from the viewpoints of characters who really didn't have birds around. Um right, and I can say, well, that's Brandon translating poorly, something from their language, um and whatnot. Um maybe you would consider this a crutch. I try not to use it too much, but uh if you if you ask people other people if their books are in translation, often this kind of befuddles some authors. they don't understand even what you're asking.

[00:57:26]You're like, "It's a fiction book. Why?

[00:57:28]Just just deal with it." Um, but I like this sort of idea that it's being filtered through and it helps. For instance, I sometimes still write my characters names wrong. I spell them wrong because they're just words in my head, right? And we're translating them to English. We're using English letters for a language that doesn't have English letters. And so whether Dallinar's got an E or an A in it, uh, you know, Peter will fix it. But yeah, >> if you had to theorize, where do you think fantasy and the genre are going and where do you want it to go?

[00:58:02]>> This this one scares me. Uh this one scares me. Uh because I remember being in the audience uh at a world fantasy convention when someone asked this of an editor and the editor said, "Well, I know where it's not going to go. It's not going to go to vampires. Stop sending us vampire books. Too many vampire books." This was 2001 or 2002, right before Twilight. Um, we uh you can you can ask my editor, she's here. We in the industry are kind of famously bad at in general at picking the trends.

[00:58:34]Editors tend to be better than the authors are. Um, I don't think like we did. You guess romantic would be the next thing. No. If we had, we would have made them. Yeah. Right. Um and and so um I I should have Romantic is the one that I smack my head and I'm like dragons plus kissing of course Brandon. Um yeah. Uh but regardless where is it going? Um what we've seen recently is a lot of subg genre hybridizations. That's been the big thing uh for a little while now. Um and so you know we probably will see some more subj hybridizations would be my guess. Own voices have been very big in fantasy and have been uh have been great because like I talked about in the essay if all the fantasy worlds are from the same sort of perspective we lose that chance to explore and part of the reason we read is to explore people and things different from ourselves. So I I like seeing um a lot of the the India inspired fantasies. Um, I like seeing a lot of the African inspired fantasies and these sorts of things as opposed to the uh European and Asian ones which have been kind of the staple through the uh the 80s and 90s. Um, and so there's going to be much more of that I think particularly as some adaptations get off the ground. Um, so I think you're also going to see adaptation kind of follow what happened in fantasy the book uh world. So fantasy by the uh late 90s people were kind of tired of the standard quest fantasy um and things like that and they moved to YA and to uh urban fantasy which I talked about but that's when Lord of the Rings the films came out and we're about you know 20 25 years from that so we're kind of ready I think for the revolution the same thing where I hope you're going to be seeing like um you children of um of uh blood and bone is coming out. Is it Children of Smoke and Bone? Children, Blood and Bone. Um, what's that? Tommy Admy's series is getting adapted soon. Um, there's so many Blood and Smoke and Bones in titles. I'm sorry, Tommy. Uh, she's a friend and I just uh flubbed her uh name of her book series, but Tommy's books are getting adapted. Um, we hope to see those come out really well. And we are now seeing some of these romanty things get fasttracked. Who knows what that will do. Um, but yeah, genre hybridizations.

[01:01:05]Right now, the tags are so important, the Tumblr tags. I ignore them, but the people who are promoting them really love them. So, yeah. As an author who's expressed a deep interest in tracing the development of a society from the fantasy genre to the sci-fi genre, I'm curious what you think about capturing the moments of wonder as someone who works in both genres.

[01:01:25]>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, um, I do think, like I said in my essay, that that line between science fiction and fantasy is a very fuzzy one. Uh, and it's if you want to get people arguing, ask them if Star Wars is fantasy or science fiction. Um, that's a good way to, you know, to lob a hand grenade into the middle of a uh a fantasy discussion.

[01:01:45]Um, but I think that the genres do you seek a lot of times for the same emotions through opposite trappings, right? which is what makes them get shelved together. People are like, "These are opposite genres, but they're kind of often shooting for that same idea, right? What was Star Trek?" It's about exploring new worlds and going new places. Um, and that is what a lot of fantasy is doing as well. Uh, but the idea to keep in mind is these are tools.

[01:02:13]They're bulk tools for telling stories, trying to achieve certain ends, which are usually in writing, not always, but usually in fiction, emotional ends. what experience are we trying to give a reader? And so I do see them being uh useful tools. I like blending the lines between them. Um and I I love this idea of taking an epic fantasy world and going to the science fiction with it.

[01:02:38]But it's nothing new. That's essentially what the MCU ended up doing is take, you know, the the superhero superheroes are fantasies grounded fantasies at least settle set in our world and took them cosmic. Um and so yeah um why do we do this? Uh I think that it's just to give a larger and larger place uh to explore like even as uh as cool as I think Roshar and Scadriel are eventually we need to go beyond them I think in order to keep capturing that sense of wonder.

[01:03:10]>> You mentioned in your talk Tolken's innovation of immersion and I was curious as to what you think that has to do with the idea of escapism. Yes, he did. In fact, in uh the onfairy stories, he talks about escapism uh a little bit and things like that. Actually, it's Tolken, so he talks about it a lot. Um but yeah, what do I think about this? Um I will I will say that I really like how Tolken looked at it, which is that the the foray into fantasy is in part to escape this world, but also then to come back with a renewed appreciation of this world. Um, escapism by itself is a good being able to take a load off and go somewhere else is super valuable. And I think a fantastic story told well, that's at the core of what I'm trying to do is tell a fantastic story really well. That said, I do think that part of the reason we gravitate to some fantasy books instead of others, uh, and some stories instead of others, is that once we're done with that story, it lingers with us, right? Lord of the Rings lingers with you. Even though it's fantastic escapism, when you come back to this world, the story of again Sam carrying Froto up the mountain, right?

[01:04:25]Um, the moments in that story that are so bright and shining are so inspirational that I feel like I live a better life every day because I read that story. Do you know what I mean? And that is some kind of some of the power of of a great escapist work is the real great you'll go to it. You'll be able to set your burdens down, but then when you come back, the story helps you pick those burdens back up again. It's not just that you get relieved for a short time, right? We can find lots of ways to just forget about our problems. Um, but a good book makes you better at dealing with those problems. And one of the powers of fantasy is we can explore these ideas in a way that that takes some of the baggage from our real world explorations, our real world problems, gets at the core of those problems and deals with them in a way that in some ways less threatening because it doesn't have that baggage. And then you come out of it and maybe you have better coping mechanisms. maybe the things that you struggle with with are just a little lighter. Uh, and that's what I think the power of the best escapist stories are.

[01:05:32]>> Thank you for all of your questions.

[01:05:33]Thank you, Brandon. As a little token of our appreciation, >> a Pemrick mug and a Tolken tote bag for you.

[01:05:43]>> And the tote bag.

[01:05:44]>> Thank you so much. [applause] >> Thank you.

[01:05:47]>> Yes. We hope you enjoy.

[01:05:49]>> Now, do I go?

[01:05:50]>> You can go.

[01:05:51]>> Oh, yes. Okay. I am off away with me.

[01:05:55]>> Please join me in thanking Brandon for giving this year's Tolken lecture.

[01:06:03]>> [applause]