(Heroic) Fantasy and the Middle Ages – Strange Bedfellows or an Ideal Cast?

The (popularly conceived) Middle Ages and (heroic) fantasy share a number of characteristics, such as settings in pre-technological and pre-bureaucratic worlds where men were not yet alienated from their fellow human beings and where things were more “authentic”. However, next to these “surface parallels”, we can identify a deeper underlying reason for the close affinity between the Middle Ages and (heroic) fantasy, which is due to the identification of medieval romance as the medieval literary genre per se, and the participation of (heroic) fantasy in this tradition.