Brandon Sanderson Explains Why He Doesn’t Write About Elves or Dwarves

With Brandon Sanderson now attracting more attention than ever beyond his loyal fan base – a headline-grabbing deal to adapt his work into films and series for Apple TV would have that effect – the author is now addressing a question he’s been asked frequently throughout his publishing career, which began in the early 2000s. The point is: why aren’t there elves and dwarves in his fantasy epics?

Sanderson took to his YouTube channel to explain in his latest “SanderFAQs” video series (hat tip: Polygon). Originally, when he began writing in his college and graduate school days, the fantasy genre was “deep in Tolkien’s shadow”, perhaps even more so than usual due to Peter Jackson’s hugely successful. lord of the rings Movies.

And as a result, Sanderson noted many other works that took inspiration from JRR Tolkien’s world-building. In fact, as he recalls in the video, he was inspired at the time to write a controversial essay “about how Tolkien ruined fantasy,” a piece he now calls “very clickbaity, before we understood ‘clickbait.'” (Later in the video, he admits that he now realizes he was also “a little snobby” trying to tell people what they should and shouldn’t enjoy.)

Sanderson says he has readjusted that approach and is even in the midst of revisiting Tolkien via an Andy Serkis-narrated audiobook. “But in the late ’90s, I thought, ‘Can’t we move away from this?'” he said. “fantasy should be the most imaginative genre. It’s the genre where you can do anything… and so I thought, OK, one of the characteristics I want to have in my writing is that it’s more human-centric than fantasy-creature-centric.”

And even beyond that, “If I’m going to create fantasy creatures, I want to try and invent my own. I want to do some new fantasy races that don’t feel like elves with another name or dwarves with another name.”

He Did Include dragons, he said, because “coming up with something that has the weight and awesomeness of a dragon that isn’t a dragon… is why I ultimately decided to bow out.”

At the end of the clip, he concludes by saying, “I don’t feel like we need to ‘kill elves’ anymore.” [referencing the name of his essay] Or anything like that. I feel like, write your book, read your book, read what you like, write what you like. And all these years later there’s still room to do new things with some of these ideas that Tolkien took up in the ’50s and ’60s.”

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