J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit books have had an oversized influence on subsequent fantasy media. That influence increased from the time the books were written, through the 1960’s and 1970’s, and became a constant presence in the early development of tabletop gaming and then digital games, movies, and toys. In a passage of her book Race and Popular Fantasy Literature, Helen Young notes:

The influence of Tolkien’s writing, particularly The Lord of the Rings, on Fantasy role-playing games is likewise immense. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s 1974 Dungeons & Dragons imitated Tolkien’s work so closely that it infringed copyright and elements had to be changed for later editions under threat of legal action.

(Young 2015)

There is a bottomless well of derivative knock-offs and uncritical lookalikes of Tolkien’s fantasy works. As a child, my mother read The Hobbit aloud to me, despite her acute dyslexia. As a result, the trappings of Tolkien’s fantasy world seemed part of the unquestioned foundation of imaginative play to me when I was a child. Dr. Rosemary Jackson’s book Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion explores the idea that fantasy is not just a genre of literature, but a distinct literary “mode” that serves a particular cultural function. According to Jackson, a literary mode is a way of organizing cultural and imaginative practices that shapes the way we think about and understand the world.

The current popularity of J.R.R.Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings indicates the strength of a romance tradition supporting a ruling ideology. Tolkien is nostalgic for a pre-Industrial, indeed a pre-Norman Conquest, feudal order. He makes a naive equation of industry with evil, referring with disgust to the ‘materialism of a Robot Age’ and looking backwards to a medieval paradise, his secondary worlds providing coherence and unity. An Oxford professor of philology, Tolkien allies morality and aesthetics: virtue lies with a beautiful Elvish Speech, evil with an ugly Black Speech. [...] For Tolkien, the only way is backwards: the chauvinistic, totalitarian effects of his vision are conveniently removed from present material conditions, by providing an ‘escape’ from them. He is repelled (like [Lewis] Carroll) by the physical and material.

(Jackson 2008)

Contemporary American fantasy media—Movies, television, games, often ape Tolkien directly rather than the Norse myths that his books drew inspiration from. This might serve as a starting point for understanding the preponderance of English accents in fantasy media like television, film and games. Even in worlds completely secondary to our own, the English accent somehow means fantasy for Americans. Popular explanations for this tend to suggest that the English accent seems exotic yet accessible to Americans (Wheeler), that it lends an air of sophistication to narratives that might otherwise be considered low-brow or juvenile. It may be a foregone conclusion that American fantasy media set in a medieval feudal society might be filled with English accents, but even representations of the Roman Empire (Such as HBO’s series Rome) are filled with English accents. 1 Englishness has somehow become a proxy for some sort of imagined classical past. Like many European-Americans, I find it difficult to trace my ancestry back much further than a handful of immigrant passages from Europe. That transition has symbolically become a horizon between a modern conception of time and some fantasy pre-history filled with knights and basilisks.

In Tolkien’s fantasy work The Lord of the Rings and its accompanying worldbuilding text The Silmarillion, genealogy is used to establish the lineage of important characters and to connect them to the larger narrative of Middle-earth. Genealogy is used to establish a sense of historical continuity and mythology that permeates that fantasy world. The genealogies are also used to establish a sense of hierarchy and power, as certain characters are shown to be descendants of legendary figures. Maps, language and genealogy give texture and an almost bureaucratic sort of believability to Tolkien’s fairy stories, while embedding his beliefs that character is inherited. In the Icelandic Sagas that Tolkien drew upon for his fantasy books, genealogies also play a central role in establishing the social and political hierarchies of the characters and their families. Many sagas begin with a detailed genealogy of the protagonist’s family, tracing their lineage back several generations and establishing their position in the larger community. These genealogies are often used to explain the motivations and actions of the characters, as well as to reinforce the idea of inherited honor and reputation.

Fantasy media is based on the manipulation of myths. It quietly alters some vaguely-remembered fairy tale to produce a substitute for concrete material origins for who European Americans really are, how they got here, and by what means they inherited the positions they now hold. Imperial feudalism and a preoccupation with kings and hierarchies are prominently embedded in fantasy worldbuilding. 2

  1. Since much contemporary prestige television has worked to give an air of class to violent and explicit genre fiction that might otherwise be considered exploitation media, Rome may be borrowing heavily from the BBC’s series I, Claudius—hence the presumed acceptability of English-accented Romans, even when produced by macho American filmmaker John Milius. ↩

  2. Zach Blas is an artist whose work often explores the intersections of technology, power, and the body. In his piece “Metric Mysticism,” Blas critiques the technology company Palantir (named after an all-seeing magical crystal ball from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) and its role in creating surveillance technologies for government agencies. Blas shows how data is recast as a transcendental truth accessed by corporate and state power by evoking fantasy names and tropes (Zach Blas Performance Lecture). ↩

  1. Young, Helen. 2015. Race and Popular Fantasy Literature. 0th ed. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315724843.
  2. Jackson, Dr Rosemary. 2008. Fantasy The Literature of Subversion. 1st ed. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.