The other day, my wife and I went to the movie theater for the 20th anniversary of Joe Wright’s film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Anyone who knows me—and my opinions on storytelling—likely knows that I consider Pride and Prejudice to be one of the best stories of all time.
And I don’t mean that in some pick-me, I’m trying to impress the ladies kind of way. I mean that narratively, thematically, and in terms of character construction, Austen’s work is simply astounding.
It’s a controversial take, I know, but I also consider Joe Wright’s version to be the best film adaptation to date.
We were sharing this opinion over dinner the other night with some friends, and it somehow led to a debate: was this adaptation of Pride and Prejudice as good as the Lord of the Rings film trilogy?
I argued it was a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison—but the discussion did raise a fascinating question: was Tolkien as prolific a writer as Austen?
Now there’s a debate worthy of entire semesters of university coursework—not to mention the occasional fervent Reddit thread. But one particular thread of that conversation has stayed with me. A friend asked whether Tolkien truly deserves the moniker “the father of fantasy.” In other words, were The Lord of the Rings books really so good that all modern fantasy has been echoing them ever since?
His argument was compelling. He pointed out that Tolkien’s storytelling style is almost antithetical to today’s fantasy trends. Tolkien seemed to abhor violence. Even his most intense action sequences are described from a noble, almost mythic distance—far removed from the visceral blood and bone we’ve come to expect. By contrast, modern fantasy often leans into graphic depictions of combat, with magic systems built for intimate, high-stakes brawls.
Tolkien’s magic system, too, is famously elusive—more whispered myth than defined mechanism. Today’s fantasy readers expect their magic systems to operate with rules so intricate they might as well be cribbed from a board game manual.
So, is Tolkien truly the father of fantasy as we know it?
I’m not sure. But I’d argue he did something for the genre no one had quite done before: he made fantasy accessible, and he did it through allegory and historical resonance.
Tolkien fought in World War I. The Fellowship of the Ring was published in 1954, when the memory of two world wars was still painfully fresh. War wasn’t just history—it was household lore. The mystery and mythology were not in the ancient past, but in the lives of parents and uncles who had returned from the front lines.
By rooting his fantasy in emotional truths and familiar trauma, Tolkien gave readers a way to confront recent horrors at a mythic remove. In many ways, The Lord of the Rings is a historical fantasy novel—not in the sense of direct allegory, but in the sense that it draws from a collective memory still raw with grief and valor.
It’s this grounding—this refusal to float entirely into escapism—that made Tolkien’s work so powerful. He offered readers not just a way out, but a way through. Much like how The Last of Us resonated so deeply after a global pandemic, The Lord of the Rings let readers process their own world through the lens of another.
