Below appears the abstract I submitted to the Tales after Tolkien panel at the 2014 International Congress on Medieval Studies. I presented the paper, and it was well received.
Fantasy literature is perhaps the genre of fiction that most frequently and most prominently refigures the medieval. The main thrust of fantasy literature, that following in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien, tends to neglect or minimize one of the defining features of Western European medieval culture: religion. While priests and faiths are present in the inheritors of the Tolkienan tradition, and scholarly attention has been paid to the religious overtones embedded in a number of key fantasy works, centralized, international, and (nominally) monotheistic churches are largely absent. There are other organizations that take something resembling the cultural place of The Church in medieval Europe within various fantasy milieux, admittedly, such as Jordan’s Aes Sedai or Kerr’s dweomer-workers. Their treatment, however, and the absence of major international religious powers suggests that Tolkienan-tradition fantasy literature assumes an audience distrustful of major religious structures—an attitude not inconsistent with the literary audience of the Middle Ages so often invoked by fantasy literature.