here's a popular genre, filled with beautiful, human-sized fairies having sex with humans (often quite violent sex, but the people reading it seem to enjoy it). Word is that it's badly written and unashamedly escapist – all golden, glittering palaces, wild adventure and, of course, gorgeous fairies. It's certainly popular – plenty of the stories have been translated into numerous languages, spreading across continents. Serious commentators are sure it spells bad news: at best, it's just a load of trash; at worst, it's actively leading people astray. Most damningly of all, women produce and consume it. Welcome to the 12th century, where fairy romance is all the rage. Sound familiar?
The romantasy that fills our shelves and bestseller lists – from Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses to Callie Hart's Quicksilver – is not a new genre, but part of a centuries-old heritage. You only need to look at the medieval predecessors of the modern romantasy novel to understand why it's enjoyed by millions and why, even after hundreds of years, fairy romance has such power over us – and why there are still those who want to diminish and dismiss it.
Medieval romances originated in the French courts of the late 1100s and were wildly popular, quickly spreading throughout Europe, not only from country to country, but also down the social scale, so that even farm workers and impoverished nuns knew the stories. They drew on tales of fairies in earlier myths, especially within Arthurian legends, and were adapted and expanded to be as thrilling as possible, providing people with the same escapism that romantasy does today. Read either the medieval or the modern tales and you'll find glitter and blood and adventure, not to mention crystal palaces, glorious and perilous enchanted realms, terrifyingly handsome fairy knights, and queens who live in unearthly splendour. As one author of a 13th-century romance pointed out, speaking about the real world brings "grief and torment" – so why not turn to fairies?
The wild sexual freedom of modern romantasy was there in medieval romance too, which overflowed with sexually active fairies, both male and female. There are detailed descriptions of fairy bodies, legs and breasts, and while the veil tends to be drawn over the act itself, both fairies and mortals are always "taking what they desire", "making merry together", "holding each other in their arms" and getting each other pregnant – even when either the mortal or fairy is married to someone else, or has only just met. And while there are fairy lovers who are kind, gentle and courteous, medieval audiences also thrilled to the idea of a brooding fairy shadow-daddy: the fairies often simmer with threat, never losing their darker edges even when the story ends with the lovers paired off happily. As with romantasy today, the medieval stories, by dint of being fictional, were a safe place to experiment with sex in a repressed society.
This was even more important as medieval romance, like modern romantasy, was often written by women (such as the 12th-century poet Marie de France), and had a large female audience (something even Chaucer commented on) – so these stories were often a place for women to explore their desires, free from the idea that they should be chaste and subservient. (For reasons too complex to get into it right now, it was generally accepted that fairy sex didn't quite count, so women who slept with fairies were still thought of as virgins.)
Romantasy still provides this space now: although women may be more sexually liberated than they were in the middle ages, we're often still uncomfortable with female desires. It's certainly not a coincidence that many romantasy books today are targeted at teenage girls, who may not be able to talk openly about sex, and are popular with women from more conservative backgrounds. And while the darker, more coercive side of fairy relationships (in both modernity and the middle ages) likely reflects the common fantasy of being overwhelmed, it also helps to alleviate any lingering guilt – after all, the less consensual the encounter, the less the mortal party can be blamed for it.
These stories include a freedom from gender roles as well: in modern romantasy, women are the heroes, the drivers of the plots (the heroine of Saara El-Arifi's Faebound is an elf military leader; in A Court of Thorns and Roses, a female hunter takes centre stage), while the male love interests, while apparently threatening, are normally intensely loving and vulnerable underneath. Medieval romances also flipped gender roles: you might think it's a genre of knights rescuing damsels in distress, but more often than not it's about powerful fairy queens rescuing distressed knights. Take the 12th-century narrative poem Lanval, for example, the story of a penniless and overlooked knight saved multiple times by his beloved fairy queen, that ends with her riding away to fairyland with him behind her on her horse.
While the appeal of all this to the female writers and readers is clear, men happily indulged in these fantasies, too. Lanval was written by a woman but later translated by a man. Even in recent years, it's been reported that 18% of romantasy readers in the US are men, who enjoy the tales of male characters who love openly and unashamedly, and the strong, powerful women who love them back.
Of course, medieval courts were as familiar with the criticisms of fairy romance as we are. Chaucer even wrote a romance parody – Sir Thopas – about a knight seeking an elf queen. Today, romantasy authors are accused of cheapening popular culture by journalists who often compose articles by flipping through the books looking for the naughty bits, just as Chaucer's parody featured dirty jokes about elf sex. As a genre, it's easy to mock, easy to dismiss the stories as "smut" and nothing more.
But this alone can't explain the ridicule – after all, there are plenty of modern fantasy books crammed with sex that get praised (take George RR Martin's A Game of Thrones, for example). Instead, the vitriol seems to stem from the fact that it's a genre enjoyed by women. In the 14th century we had Chaucer mockingly claiming that women held romances "in full great reverence" and clergymen complaining vociferously about the fact that women listen to romances "joyously and willingly"; today the genre is accused of making women stupid, with critics arguing that sexy queens shouldn't be discussed at literary festivals.
The irony is that fairy romance gave us plenty of great literature, some still well known today (Shakespeare's Titania and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream are straight out of romances, while Don Quixote is a romance parody, though heartbreakingly fairy-free); others have been largely forgotten (like one of my absolute favourites, the story of Guingamor). Fairy romance also gave us a huge number of long-forgotten fun romps (my secret heart belongs to the 13th-century Claris and Laris – more than 30,000 lines of pure fairy nonsense).
Medieval romance faded from fashion in the late 1500s, after four glorious, fairy-filled centuries, in part because fairies themselves were changing – becoming miniature, flittering things that were less appealing as lovers (unless you had some fairly niche tastes). But while it is depressing that criticism has not moved on since the middle ages, it's an utter joy to see female-centred fairy fantasies returning, hundreds of years after the first medieval romances were composed. So why not read some of the medieval romances, along with modern romantasy? You'd be participating in a centuries-old genre of freedom, imagination and joy, and I'm not sure you can ask for more than that.