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

With Brandon Sanderson now attracting even more attention beyond his loyal fan base than ever before—a headline-grabbing deal to adapt his works into films and series for Apple TV will have that effect—the author is now addressing a question he’s been asked often throughout his publishing career, which kicked off in the early 2000s. It’s this: why aren’t there elves and dwarves in his fantasy epics?

Sanderson took to his YouTube channel for his latest in his “SanderFAQ” video series (hat tip: Polygon) to explain. Basically, when he started writing during his college and graduate school days, the fantasy genre was “deep in Tolkien’s shadow,” probably even more than usual because of Peter Jackson’s hugely successful Lord of the Rings films.

And as a result, Sanderson noticed many other works that took inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien’s worldbuilding. 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 in the days before we understood ‘clickbait.’” (Later in the video, he admits he now realizes he was also being “a bit snobbish” trying to tell people what they should and shouldn’t enjoy.)

Sanderson says he’s readjusted that view and is even in the middle of a Tolkien revisit via the Andy Serkis-narrated audiobooks. “But in the late ’90s, I’m like, ‘Can’t we get 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, well, I want to have a hallmark of my writing be that it’s more human-focused than fantastical-creature-focused.”

And even beyond that, “If I’m going to be doing fantastical creatures, I want to try and come up with my own. I want to have some new fantasy races that don’t just feel like elves with another name or dwarves with another name.”

He did include dragons, he noted, because “coming up with something that has the weight and awesomeness of a dragon that isn’t a dragon is very difficult … so that’s the one I decided to bend on eventually.”

At the end of the clip, he concludes by saying, “I no longer feel like we need to ‘kill the elves’ [referencing the name of his essay] or anything like that. I feel like, write your book, read your book, read what you love, write what you love. And there is room to do new things even still all these years later with some of these ideas that Tolkien approached back in the ’50s and ’60s.”

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