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I have exceptionally limited interest in reading anything branded as 'Romantasy' I've heard of but I am honestly kind of curious what's happening with the apparent hammering of 'fae' into a coherent and instantly understood sort of fantasy-creature-archtype (ala vampire, werewolf, etc) over there. Like I feel like the chain of transmission would be interesting to read about in a media history sense?

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I am very talking out of my ass here, just going with books I've read rather than any actual research, but my theory:

Fae Romantasy comes down to Sarah J. Maas. Maybe (probably) there was more of it going on before her, but she mainstreamed it and got to define the tropes. From that we get fae as sexy, powerful, sort of primal people referred to as males and females, who have soulmates, often look down on humans, use magic, and have an elaborate structure of monarchy and nobility. Sarah J Maas had a successful YA fantasy series that abruptly pivoted in book 3 to include fae, and then her next series was fae romantasy from the start, and also caused incredible discourse due to having explicit sex scenes in a book marketed as YA.

But where did she get this fae archetype from? My argument would be that prior to being romantasy characters, fae were urban fantasy characters. Jim Butcher gets mentioned here for possibly codifying the summer/winter court structure, and also just having a bunch of humanoid human-sized fae nobles in his Dresden Files books. But IMO the stronger connection would be Holly Black.

In 2018, post Sarah J Maas fae romantasy wave, Holly Black publishes a YA fae dark romance which has many many elements that seem recognizable to existing fae romantasy. A human girl raised in the fae realm, a fae prince who hates her even as he can't resist her, lots and lots of court politics and power dynamic swings. The difference here is that Holly Black has been writing these kinds of books since 2002 (which makes her earlier books old enough to have been influences on the beginnings of fae romantasy). She's maybe best known for her Spiderwick Chronicles series of children's books, which feature all kinds of creepy and gross fae creatures, which feels similar to older folklore. But at the same time she's also writing the Modern Tales of Faerie series, which are YA dark romances about humanish girls and the powerful (but vulnerable) fae boys they meet. Notable here is that the fae here are not monolithic in species: you've got humanish fae (iirc most main characters are in this category), sure, but also more classic creatures like trolls (I remember there being others but not the specifics).

Notable for these books is that they aren't secondary world fantasy: iirc the Modern Tales of Faerie books are set in New York. There's also a sensibility about them that I want to describe as punkish? The protagonists aren't relatable everywomen, or destined princesses: they're mostly homeless teenagers, squatting in subways and trying to survive on the edges between fae society and human society.

And so let's go one step further back. What influenced Holly Black? And here we have a definite answer, because she was co-editor of a Welcome to Bordertown, a 2011 remake/tribute to the Bordertown series, done as a collaboration between some of the original authors and younger authors, like Holly Black, who had grown up with them. The original Bordertown books were a 1980s series of anthologies, with each chapter a short story by a different author. They were set in Bordertown, a city founded on the edge of our modern world and a resurgent magical one, full of strange magic meeting modern technology, populated largely by outcasts and runaways. The summary I have pulled up describes Bordertown as "a place of half-lit neighborhoods of hidden magic, of flamboyant artists and pagan motorcycle gangs", which should give you an idea of the vibe.

This is very clearly the predecessor to Holly Black's Fae books. Only this is published in 1986, and so the magical world that Bordertown sits at the edge of is Elfland. And that's where I think the root is, taking folkloric elves, making them sexy feudal intrusions on the world, and then to avoid confusion with the better known elves of Tolkein, pivoting the name to fae. After all, older sources use the two interchangeably: if you look at variants of Tam Lin some of them have a Queen of Fairies, some an Elfin Queen.

A coda: I think Wen Spencer's 2003 book Tinker is illuminating here. It starts an unusual but modern young woman who meets a powerful, domineering elfin lord when he is uniquely vulnerable, then struggles between her attraction to him and the political and magical dangers he brings. The love interest here is very in line with romantasy fae males! But it's 2003, so he's still an elf, and the book is largely set in Pittsburgh.

miranda-basset

I love when people start doing this sort of thing for genre literature! I feel compelled to jump in here and add that while, yes, Holly Block is probably the most influential writer of fae romance novels of the past few decades, she really cannot be considered the initiator of this subgenre - fae romance was already an increasingly common and popular style of romance in the late 90s and early 00s. The earliest one that comes to mind for me is O.R. Melling's Chronicles of Fae series, starting with Hunter's Moon, which was published in 1993; this was back when romantic YA marketed explicitly to teen girls / young women was just beginning to become a popular category. I also have to note that Butcher is not the codifer of the Summer & Winter Court motif in modern fantasies about faeries - this is an older preexisting trope that shows up in Melling as well (the second book of her series is The Summer King, for example, published in 1999), and can probably be traced back to New Age & contemporary pagan / Wiccan ideas about older Celtic mythologies (which itself likely has at least some loose basis in historical ancient druidic religions etc, but I fear I don't have the necessary scholarly background to assess precisely how much.)

I find it interesting that you can really see the difference in reader expectations in a book like Hunter's Moon - Melling can't rely on people already being familiar with 'standard' fairy romance tropes, so she's doing a lot more work to create and build up the surrounding mythology than you see in current publications (and basing it off a great deal of actual historical mythological and folkloric sources) - and the result is a much more grounded and compelling setting, to my eyes. Though I'd have to reread the book to verify this, my memory of Melling's series was that it owed a pretty clear debt to earlier low fantasy YA-adjacent series like Susan Collins's The Dark is Rising (about Arthuriana myths recurring in a modern urban setting; first book published in 1965), and that the author had probably also at least read some of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series (a portal fantasy about a group of college students getting sent to a Tolkienesque, Arthuriana-inspired high fantasy world; first book published 1984). So I would link some of the earliest versions of this trope to the growing popularity of Arthuriana retellings in a low fantasy mode.

The explosion of fae romance within YA specifically is also fairly co-terminous with the explosion of YA itself, which took off around the 2000s in large part due to tailwinds from the Harry Potter (first book 1997) and Twilight (2005) booms. (I would probably trace romantasy as a direct descendent of YA more than of any other genre.) Note that Twilight was not just urban fantasy but specifically a YA paranormal romance, which was also becoming a huge category within the adult romance industry at around the same time. The early 2000s are when you get paranormal romance novel writers like Nalini Singh, Kelly Armstrong, Patricia Briggs (who could also be fairly called an urban fantasy writer with a large dose of romance), Laini Taylor, and Kresley Cole etc all taking off; most of the paranormal romances out there began with more traditional vampire & werewolf stuff, but a lot of them start getting very eclectic and 'anything goes' with their mythological references in much the same way Jim Butcher does. (Note that the first Harry Dresden book comes out in 2002, and the first Nightside book - a very similar noir urban fantasy - by Simon R Green in 2003; these authors are all influencing each other, yes, but also all responding to the same trends at more or less the same time.)

Before these authors, the first genuinely popular paranormal romance writers I know of are Tanya Huff's Victory Nelson series (1991), and Laurel K Hamilton with her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993). Hamilton was in turn extremely influenced by, who else, Anne Rice & her Interview with the Vampire, from all the way back in 1976. Huff herself is also writing in the shadow of Rice, but I think even more than Hamilton owes a debt to the low fantasy tradition of 'fantasy noir,' ie fantasy in the style of noir mysteries like Raymond Chandler's or Hammett's - you see this influence in 70s authors like Roger Zelazny, who was writing from the intersection of high fantasy & 'sword & sorcery' Conan the Barbarian style low fantasy, which is linked, fascinatingly, to the rise of the 'fantasy hero as hardboiled PI' trope. I've heard this can be traced to works like Leiber's The Swords of Lankmar (1968) and Cook's Garrett PI series (1987), neither of which I've read - but this is how you get Huff's hardboiled PI heroine investigating & romancing various handsome supernatural creatures in the 90s, which in turn is how characters like Butcher's Harry Dresden arrive on the scene. Anyway, Hamilton's subsequent Merry Gentry series is one of the first adult fae romances out there, & it started publishing in 2000.

Wen Spencer's 2003 Tinker seems like another key step in the development of the fae romance trend, I agree! I would suggest that Tinker in turn seems very influenced by Mercedes Lackey's SERRATed Edge series (first book published 1992), about magical Tolkien-esque elves living in modern society & engaging in hobbies like car racing, wooing mortal women, etc. (Older fantasy romance authors like Mercedes Lackey are underrated as influences in the current romantasy explosion, imo.) Charles de Lint also kicks off his Newford series with its first book, Dreams Underfoot, in 1993, which I would argue is probably one of the major influences on Butcher & other urban fantasy writers in terms of the sort of classic urban fantasy setting, ie a bunch of magical / fantastical beings from diverse & contradictory myths jostling uncomfortably together in a modern Western city. (Neil Gaiman also copies de Lint fairly shamelessly in American Gods and Neverwhere.) As far as I'm aware, de Lint is the one of the earliest authors to invent this kind of location as a permanent basis for an ongoing series. Holly Black's first book, the fae romance Tithe (2002) owes quite a bit to de Lint, and I think probably also made it to publication in part due to Hamilton's making the fae romance trend relevant via her own Merry Gentry series.

I wasn't aware of Terri Windling's 1986 Borderland series before, so I'm glad I've stumbled across it because of this post! A glance at the authors who wrote for this anthology is pretty interesting - Charles de Lint is published in it, as is Ellen Kushner and, later on, Patricia McKillip and Steven Brust, all of whom are major fantasy writers of the late 20th c. McKillip is a writer best known to me as one of the group of authors who first started to popularize the 'fairy tale retelling' as a distinct form of fantasy in the 80s and 90s, along with people like Gail Carson Levine (Ella Enchanted, 1997), Robin McKinley (Beauty: A Retelling, 1978), Patricia Wrede (Dealing with Dragons, 1990), Juliet Marillier (Daughter of the Forest, 1999), and Tanith Lee (Red as Blood, 1983).

So I would make the inference from this connection that the earliest forms of paranormal / urban fantasy are developing in relation to the popularization of the 'gritty' or 'dark' fairy tale retelling that starts to take off in this era (along with the similar but lighter 'fairy tale satire' which is more in line with what Wrede is doing, for instance; think also Shrek), and that this is directly related to the newfound popularity of writing about faeries who are tall, dangerous, inhumanly beautiful, immoral or amoral, & thus appealing love interests - as opposed to the kind of classic, bowdlerized Victorian / Disney version of fairies as small friendly cutesy creatuers with wands & flowers etc. (Terry Pratchet is doing something similar in his 1992 novel Lords and Ladies, where much of the humor derives from the contrast between the characters' expecations of elves and the unpleasant reality they encounter.) The same cultural push to create 'realistic' adult versions of children's fairy tales seems to be behind some of the earliest books about faeries in urban fantasy settings.

(I think it's also helpful to keep in mind that the elf vs faerie distinction is more or less a modern invention - these aren't really discrete categories in most of the historical mythologies they're derived from, and of course the modern concept of the 'fantasy elf' is pretty much entirely due to Tolkien, who was himself working from essentially the same body of myths that people later went back to in order to reinvent cutesy Victorian faeries as sexy fae lords. As you note above, older anglophone literature often uses 'elf' synonymously with faerie! Obviously this is a bit of a simplication & the divergences between Germanic versus Celtic folklore etc are real - but that's more a matter of interest to actual folklorists. The takeaway is, when Mercedes Lackey or Wen Spencer write about urban fantasy elves, they're often pulling from a similar mélange of source folklore as other contemporary authors writing about the fae. It's all more or less the same trope, imo.)

Anyway, then Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series publishes its first book in 2007, and this is, I would say, where the tropes of fae romance that are most popular today really become codified - this is an explicitly romantic YA urban fantasy series about high school girls falling in love with various faerie kings and lords, and the plot beats I think will be pretty recognizable to anyone reading contemporary books in this genre today. Holly Black's later The Wicked Prince series is definitely, to some degree, in conversation with Marr (who of course was in turn writing in conversation with Black's earlier Tithe when she created Wicked Lovely).

All of which is to say that I think it's correct to point to urban fantasy as an influence in the development of the 'fae lord' as a classic romantasy love interest today, but it isn't quite fair to call urban fantasy the 'source' of tropes about the fae - because urban fantsy itself developed in tandem with paranormal romance, which was in turn strongly influenced by straightforward fantasy authors like Patricia McKillip and Susan Collins. I would argue that the real innovation that Sarah J Maas made in turn was to take what was already, by 2015 (when A Crown of Thorns and Roses was published), the extremely well-known paranormal romance trope of the 'fae lord' love interest, and move him out of the urban fantasy setting back into a high fantasy world.

It's the combination of classic high fantasy stakes and setting (every major character is a king or a lord or a general or a royal advisor! their actions have consequences for thousands upon thousands of innocent nameless subjects! everyone bows & curtsies a lot! the continued existence of the world is always somehow in need of saving yet another time! etc) with the narrative tropes of paranormal romance, in particular (every aspect of the plot revolves around the heroine and her romantic choices & desirability! every man she meets is doomed to love her! every problem can only be solved via the correct utilization of her unique magical abilities, ancestral inheritance, piercing insight, or innate personal virtue! which i say with amusement & affection, not scorn), that makes 'romantasy' a distinct genre, imo. Romantasy is the importation of the paranormal romance plot into a high fantasy world. And that's essentially what Maas invented with her fae romance series.

So in summary, I would argue there are two threads here: one is the paranormal romance, which I trace back to originating authors like Hamilton and Huff, and which is strongly influenced by Anne Rice's take on vampires on the one hand, and by the low fantasy 'noir' trends popularized by writers like Glenn Cook and Roger Zelazny (Simon R Green is an early 90s trendsetter for this kind of thing, as well) on the other. Thus all roads lead back to Anne Rice (obviously) and also to Raymond Chandler (less obviously but more or less inevitably for any American author - and the British are not immune! look at Pratchett's Night Watch). I would classify this thread as the stylization and codification of horror, grit, cynicism, urban grime, etc in a fantastical / supernatural context - things that used to be regarded as frightening, inappropriate, ugly, unspeakable, or otherwise transgressive, like murder and corrupt cops (see: Chandler) or scary monsters from folklore committing thinly-veiled metaphors for sexual assault (see: Rice).

This becomes the standard spooky, gritty, cynical, hardboiled vibe for a lot of early books in the paranormal line. The prevalent attitude is basically 'you thought werewolves were a silly children's story? jokes on you! this werewolf is about to eat your face &/or attempt to sexually assault you' (and of course, in the explicitly romantic books especially, this is all highly eroticized). As happens with all tropes, the original transgressive sources of these vibes are eventually lost until only the vibes remain, and we end up with things like the trope of the paranormal PI main character with no clear explanation for why except that 'it's paranormal, of course you need a PI hero' or 'it's paranormal, of course you need a vampire love interest.' Faeries thus become incorporated here as another instance of the seemingly harmless child's story that are, in the story's mythbusting 'reality,' highly dangerous, scary, & socially liminal figures, & thus capable of filling essentially the same narrative role as the vampire or werewolf lover.

The other thread is the urban fantasy setting itself, which is what revitalizes the modern concept of the faerie as a potential style of love interest in the first place, and this I would trace to late 90s - early 00s YA like Melling's faerie series, which draws from Arthuriana and Celtic mythology - and again, dating to 1993, is the earliest publication of explicitly romantic fae novels that I know of (as in the romance is a large chunk of the main narrative, and not just a subplot). (The separate but related notion of dropping your characters into a hodgepodge of conflicting myths and enjoying the chaos as a storytelling method I think is also coming into popularity at the same time via authors like K.A. Applegate in her very underrated 1999 Everworld series, a truly and delightfully insane YA portal fantasy involving, yes, dangerous faeries.) Melling is writing in turn at the same moment that Charles de Lint's urban fantasies are coming out, and both authors are influenced by the popularization of the 'fractured fairy tale' retelling taken up by many major female fantasy authors of the late 20th c. - all of which blend together in a lot of interesting weird ways in the 90s and then play a major role in shaping the YA boom of the 2000s. The role of Arthuriana retellings in the works of writers like Susan Collins and Guy Gavriel Kay I think is also important (both of whom have also, amusingly, admitted to being directly influenced by Sir James Frazer's iconic 1890 work of late Victorian anthropology, The Golden Bough, thus confirming my personal conspiracy theories re: all modern literature. But that's beyond the scope!)

The style of love interest that emerges from this thread is, at least originally, somewhat more in line with much older legends about faeries taking mortals as lovers - that is, these are highly aestheticized and romanticized narratives (as opposed to the 'grit' of early paranormal) that nonetheless derive most of their tension and suspense from the impossibility of any mortal truly being able to trust or rely on a faerie, who are depicted as inherently capricious, inhuman, unfeeling, and unreliable lovers. (Think of the faeries playing games with the mortal characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream - not quite actively malicious, but certainly high-handed and careless enough to feel that way to their victims.)

In the hands of 2000s and 2010s writers like Holly Black, Julie Kagawa, and Melissa Marr (all of whom I would read as some of the direct antecedents to Maas, especially Marr) this narrative merges with the tropes of the paranormal romance to create a kind of gritty fairy tale romance, with fae love interests who take on the narrative role traditionally played by vampires in, for example, Twilight - powerful and compelling supernatural figures who, because of their fundamental nature, pose a danger to the female heroine they are inevitably in love with. (Vampires inherently want to drink your blood! Werewolves inherently want to eat you! Faeries inherently want to fuck with you just for the sake of it! Which makes a human woman attempting to romance any of them inherently fraught & dangerous, & therefore a structurally interesting premise for a romance novel. And, of course, the metaphors for the difficulty of regular human heterosexual romance abound.)

The appeal of the faerie lover specifically over the vampire or werewolf is, I think, that the faerie still retains some of the wondrous, fanastical, romantic glamor by which we tend to define high fantasies and classic fairy tales more generally - they can be magical, capital r Romantic figures in a way quite distinct from the gritty, noir-coded, 'realistic' supernatural appeal of the vampire as depicted in paranormal romance. So the resurgence in popularity of fae lord love intersts today over the vampires or werewolves of the previous decades we might put down to a broader cultural turn away from a kind of emphasis on realism, cynicism, low fantasy 'punk' aesthetics etc, and towards a desire for more idealistic or romantic (or, in the cynical view, more sanitized) narrative figures - which is also, perhaps, echoed in the current parallel surge of the popularity of romantasy over the older paranormal romance.

I think there's also something worth unpacking in the transition from the popularity of socially liminal paranormal love interests like vampires, werewolves, etc - all of whom, in urban fantasy / paranormal settings, tend to explicitly exist in various underworlds, demimondes, on the margins of real or normal society, & so on - to today's version of the romantasy fae lord, who has been transformed from his original urban fantasy character (where, again, he essentially fulfills the same narrative function as the vampire - mysterious, dangerous, liminal, beyond the bounds of the real) into sort of the opposite of a socially marginalized role. Instead of living in the fantasy demimonde & concealing his true nature as a faerie from society etc, the romantasy fae lord (who in most romantasy I've seen - ie the Maas version - is functionally just a pop version of a Tolkien elf; there's very little of actual faerie mythology remaining in these depictions) is fully socially integrated into his world, & inhabits a role of overt social & political power - he's literally a feudal lord. So what's being eroticized & romanticized is no longer transgression or 'the outsider' in any sense, but rather a much more traditional (some might argue regressive) figure of inherited, established (& necessarily masculine) authority. It's a really interesting shift, anyway!

*post script: I'll also add that the various permutations of 'soulmates' and 'mated lovers' & the relentless tendency to call people 'males' & 'females' etc in romantasy I believe comes almost entirely from Maas, who in turn is getting it pretty exclusively from older high fantasy paranormal mashups like Sherrilyn Kenyon's Hunter Legends series (1999) and Wilson's Lord of the Fading Lands series (2007). (So for example the Wilson series is, to the best of my memory, about an immortal shapeshifting dragon king & his romance with his reincarnated true love / fated soulmate, a human woman; I do acknowledge that I read it a very long time ago & so may be wildly misstating the plot - the jacket summary calls him a 'Fey King,' which I simply don't remember at all, but seems even more suggestive!) Anyway, these are all popular tropes in this kind of fantasy romance, & as far I'm aware don't really have much to do with the incorporation of faeries as love interests specifically - it's just a sort of intersection of Maas's particular writing habits & the paranormal romance tradition that shaped them.

*post post script: a little more browsing led me to Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, published 1987, which according to Wikipedia is in fact one of the earliest instances of urban fantasy & is also, serendipitously, a faerie romance. Cool! Anyway this seems relevant for those interested in the timeline; I haven't read it myself & thus can't especially comment on its role in the development of the genre, however, beyond noting the fact that it too seems to be taking much of its fantasy & fae references from pre-existing Celtic & British folklore.

mask131

I think that role-playing games might have to be thrown in there too. I mean, when it comes to the "punk, gritty urban fantasy" and the "modern fae" genre, and the choice of monsters for the "paranormal romance" traditional cast, I can't help but feel that the World of Darkness games had some impact at one point or another (Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Mage the Ascension, Changeling the Dreaming...

(The same way, while one can be dismissive of Gaiman's works due to being merely a "chain" in the process plus the recent scandal, it is inaccurate to say his writings did not play a big part in giving a new wave of fae-perception in the 90s and 2000s. His Sandman and Stardust did play an influence on later works, The Dresden Files for example as I vaguely recall Butcher credited Gaiman as an inspiration. Gaiman also pushed forward for the reconsideration of older works like Lud-in-the-Mist and kept name-dropping Briggs' Dictionary of Fairies as his main source. The Dictionary was well-known by the fae authors before Gaiman, it was part of the 60s-70s Folklore Revival that the older authors talked about above were part of, but there is definitively a new generation of people that got introduced to it by Gaiman)

I can't add anything more to the topic because I am lacking knowledge in this, but I do recall that the generation of authors spoken about, that were part of the "dark fairytale" retellings, and of what I would call the Folklore Revival following the Tolkien-mania, and also crucial to the foundations of the urban fantasy genre... I remember reading an article about them and about the specific group they formed, as in an actual literary team, hence their frequent collaborations and the overlap in their writings. But I do not recall it exactly - it might have rather been a retrospective group formed by literary critics rather than the authors themselves?

I will check the book I read it all about and return with more info

sarahreesbrennan

What a gorgeous tracking of genre evolution.

I especially loved the tribute to Terri Windling as an editor, bringing back Sylvia Townsend Warner to the people, as Judy Lyn del Rey republished The Princess Bride (which was previously a flop) to great success. Editors can reshape fantastical landscapes!

Diana Wynne Jones, Labyrinth and L.J. Smith (who did vampires but also an erlking) also spring to mind as shaping the current moment. It’s also interesting to think of how those shapes recur. I hadn’t thought of the outsider vampire lord becoming a fae lord in possession of feudal power, but that’s almost what happened to genre in a microcosm in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles where Lestat goes from presumed and presumptuous peasant infiltration, to in the second book the secret lord rock star hero, to in later books prince of all the vampires. George RR Martin has the Targaryen dragonlords, inspired by Moorcock’s Elric the last emperor and his vampiric sword. There’s so much about lineage here, which makes sense with the genre that comes from lais and legends.

I love to see Holly Black given her influential due! It’s also interesting that Holly Black’s Cruel Prince remains in a liminal space. The action takes place largely in the lands of faerie, but the heroine comes from and at one point is banished to the mortal world. It can be seen as a portal fantasy in the same way as Narnia or the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The sense of liminality does not disappear, and the provocative is not lost by being inscribed with mainstream power.

It makes me consider the other/outsider as a queer analogy and to wonder about what is lost there. Is to de-liminalise a space to de-queer it? I don’t know the answer - it’s a vexed question, as I also don’t want to demonise women’s power fantasies: that is too often done.

It makes me consider what I write: as an Irishwoman, my attitude to the fey can be summed up by Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies and Peadar O Guilin’s the Call: I cannot write them as sexy. But I am part of that tradition and with Long Live Evil I was considering how to make the modern development of epic fantasy, inflected by Malory and TH White and Martin and Moorcock and Robert E. Howard but also passing through the gates of YA and urban fantasy, punk again. It makes me wonder how Ilona Andrews, a veteran of urban fantasy, did it with their portal fantasy. It makes me think of the energy of isekai and light novels and lit rpgs and what is to come - what may be flattened or electrically charged. Or both.

And it reminded me we sing on the shoulders of giants: that creating art is a chain of influence, which is something I love to think on.

A young writer I know told me C.S. Pacat’s queer provocative fantasy of manners work was her favourite and most influential on her own writing. I asked had she read Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, because I knew it was a big influence for Cat. She hadn’t, but then she did, and she loved it and it made her think about her own work differently.

I had dinner with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman in Paris in June, and we talked about chains of influence. I was in the room where art happens. And it’s always a gift, but this reminded me what a privilege it is, and an inspiration.

In 2007 I read Emma Bull’s 1986 novel War for the Oaks, in which a lady’s in a rock band with a faerie aristocrat who uses glamour on her, protected from the faerie queen by a lower-ranking faerie who reminds our heroine extremely of the musician Prince. I loved it: it made me understand the American attitude to faeries. That moment in time is as far away from now as the publication of War for the Oaks was from then.

Holly Black recommended the book to me.

fuckyeahchinesefashion

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.

ariaste

OMG I got so excited about this because they used a really similar (though far less refined) version of this for contracts in the European medieval period!

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Delights me when human beings find similar ways to solve the same problem at two different ends of the world. <3

#alchemy

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