Brandon Sanderson revisited his old blog post “How Tolkien Ruined Fantasy” at his 2026 Oxford Tolkien Lecture, explaining that his critique isn’t about Tolkien himself but about the wave of imitators who copied his aesthetics without understanding the architecture underneath — producing a generation of fantasy that looks like Tolkien but lacks what made his work endure. Catholic science fiction and fantasy author Jon Del Arroz responds to Sanderson’s Oxford thesis with the perspective of a working author who has read Tolkien through the lens of his Catholic faith — engaging both where Sanderson’s critique is sharp and where it misses what Tolkien was actually doing in the legendarium.
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