At Oxford’s 2026 Tolkien Lecture, Brandon Sanderson didn’t just talk theory. He named names, and one name in particular: J.K. Rowling.
Sanderson was making a point about sincerity, his argument that Tolkien’s willingness to write unabashedly serious fantasy, without ever winking at the reader, was one of the genre’s foundational innovations. Then he pivoted straight into an indictment of authors who benefit from the genre while publicly distancing themselves from it.
