Since J.R.R. Tolkien’s publication of The Lord of the Rings (1954), fantasy literature has to this date gained ever more public attention in order to become a vital part of global popular culture. The project assumes that this is primarily due to a second-order popularization of the European Middle Ages. Unlike approaches of medieval adaptation studies, it develops instruments to analyse the specific transformation process of premodern narrative schemes and figures in neomedieval fantasy worlds, casting light on the shifting relationship between epistemic and popular knowledge.