Romantasy's Roots Run Back to 12th-Century Fairy Romance

Romantasy, the genre powering today's bestseller lists, was already all the rage in the 12th century, according to a new essay published in The Guardian on 18 October.

The piece, which examines the medieval ancestors of the modern fairy romance, opens with a provocation: a popular genre, filled with beautiful, human-sized fairies having sex with humans, dismissed by serious commentators as escapist trash that leads readers astray. "Welcome to the 12th century, where fairy romance is all the rage," the author writes. "Sound familiar?"

The modern targets of that comparison are named. Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses and Callie Hart's Quicksilver anchor the current boom. Both fill shelves and bestseller lists, and their medieval counterparts traveled widely too. Plenty of those older stories were translated into numerous languages, spreading across continents.

What does the essay actually claim?

The core argument is genealogical rather than merely playful. Today's romantasy is, in the author's words, "not a new genre, but part of a centuries-old heritage". The line from medieval romance to Maas runs unbroken, and the continuities are specific:

• Human-sized, sexually active fairies who take human lovers, sometimes in scenes the author describes as "quite violent sex, but the people reading it seem to enjoy it"
• Golden, glittering palaces and wild adventure as standard furniture
• A persistent reputation for being badly written and unashamedly escapist
• Production and consumption dominated by women — which the author identifies as "most damningly of all" in the eyes of the genre's critics, then and now

The essay's sharpest point concerns reception rather than content. Serious commentators in both periods reach for the same verdict: at best trash, at worst an active force leading people astray. The moral panic, in other words, has a pedigree as long as the genre itself.

Why look back at all?

The author frames the medieval record as an explanation, not a curiosity. Readers only need to look at the medieval predecessors of the modern romantasy novel, the essay argues, to understand three things at once: why the genre is enjoyed by millions today, why fairy romance retains such power over readers after hundreds of years, and why there are still those who want to diminish and dismiss it.

That last clause carries the essay's sting. The disdain directed at romantasy in 2026 mirrors the disdain directed at fairy romance centuries ago, and both, the author suggests, track who is reading and writing the material — women.

What does this change for readers?

For publishers and critics, the essay offers a usable history: a genre routinely mocked as raunchy trash sits at the end of a continuous tradition stretching back roughly nine hundred years. For readers of Maas and Hart, it reframes their shelves not as a passing craze but as the latest chapter in one of literature's longest-running arguments about pleasure, escape and who gets to judge both.