Brandon Sanderson stood at Oxford’s Tolkien Lecture and did something most authors avoid: he tried to define fantasy. He did so very specifically, with rules, categories, and a direct line from Tolkien to every epic fantasy novel published since.
He starts with three requirements. First: “Fantasy, as I will define it, must be imagined as fiction, presented as fiction, and accepted as fiction.” Aslan isn’t Jesus Christ. Eru Ilúvatar isn’t Elohim. Second: “fantasy must be impossible.” He borrows from critic John Clute here, simplifying it to a clean split: “fantasy is about the impossible, while science fiction is about the plausible.” Third, fantasy has to look like fantasy: an aesthetic that leans into wonder and rules of reality bending or breaking, whether or not elves and castles show up.
With that framework built, Sanderson breaks pre-Tolkien fantasy into two dominant lanes. The portal fantasy: someone from the mundane world falls through a gateway into somewhere impossible, then usually comes home. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is his go-to example, with roots stretching back to George MacDonald’s 1858 Phantastes. Then there’s heroic fantasy: the Conan and King Solomon’s Mines lineage, larger-than-life heroes fighting through low-magic, often nihilistic worlds where “the hero is not guaranteed victory.”
Then Tolkien shows up and builds a third lane: epic fantasy. Sanderson credits him with five innovations.
Sincerity. Tolkien wrote a serious book in a genre nobody took seriously, and never winked at the reader while doing it. Sanderson contrasts this against modern franchise habits: “You can see the effects of this in my generation’s humor, commonly seen in recent Marvel or Star Wars films, where sincere moments are often undercut by a quick joke.”
Magic with dual functions. Sanderson, who coined the terms hard and soft magic systems, points out Tolkien used both at once. Gandalf’s soft, mysterious magic generates wonder. The Ring’s hard, defined mechanics generate tension through cost and consequence. “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.”
Mythological extrapolation. Tolkien didn’t just borrow elves and dwarves from folklore. He rebuilt them into something new. “Elves in Tolkien are not elves seen anywhere in mythology,” Sanderson says, adding that the entire concept of a dark lord as a direct antagonist appears to be a Tolkien invention.
Stakes. World-ending threats, balanced against intimate personal stories. Sanderson tells a story about his own mother, not a fantasy reader, getting hooked on the Lord of the Rings films because she needed to know “if little Smeagol will decide to be good or not.” His point: “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.”
Immersion. Maps drawn as in-world artifacts. A translation conceit: Tolkien framing his books as translated manuscripts, which Sanderson says he’s borrowed directly for his own Cosmere novels. “Sam’s name is not Sam... his name is Banazir,” Sanderson notes, explaining how Tolkien anglicized names to preserve tone rather than literal meaning.
Sanderson’s closing argument is the point of the lecture: these five things are learnable. They’re not decoration. They’re structure. Epic fantasy isn’t defined by elves and quests. It’s defined by sincerity, layered magic, mythic depth, dual-scale stakes, and immersive authenticity. Miss those five things while copying the trappings, and you get imitation instead of innovation.
What do you think: are these five ingredients still the backbone of epic fantasy today, or has the genre moved past Tolkien’s template?
Epic Fantasy hasn’t been this hard-hitting since Tolkien. In a world where humanity is akin to a Roman legion, a great darkness arises. Read A Throne Of Bones today.
